British Women Writers and Race, 1788-1818: Narrati of Modernity

British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818 Narrations of Modernity

Eamon Wright

British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

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British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818 Narrations of Modernity Eamon Wright

© Eamon Wright 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–4549–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Eamon, 1962– British women writers and race, 1788–1818 : narrations of modernity / Eamon Wright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4549–7 (cloth) 1. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain— History—19th century. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain— History—18th century. 5. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 6. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 7. Feminism and literature—Great Britain. 8. Literature and society—Great Britain. 9. Romanticism—Great Britain. 10. Narration (Rhetoric). I. Title. PR468.R3W75 2005 820.9′9287′09033—dc22 2004058677 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

The ferocity of the savage is of a distinct nature from that of the degenerate slaves of tyrants. – Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (1794)1 In proportion as the mind is informed, we are able to calculate the consequences of our actions: it is the infant and the savage who live for the moment; those whom instruction has taught to think, reflect upon the past and look forward to the future. – Jane Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy (1816)2 Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary discourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? – Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)3

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

xi

1 The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism Race and the late eighteenth century Feminism and the late eighteenth century Literature and social theory

1 2 10 13

2 Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race Empire and slavery Jane Austen and empire Poverty, welfare and crime Racialized compassion Sex, race and civilization

22 22 28 33 39 44

3 The French Revolution and British Raciology Political imagination and the French Revolution Patriotism Nationalism and war Raciology of belonging Representation Othering Civilization and slavery

50 51 54 60 64 67 71 77

4 Moral Economies of Nature, Religion and Science Nature, God and women Rationality and human nature Enlightenment, Romanticism and racial subjectivities Romantic genealogy of culture Islam Enlightenment and the raciology of civilization Christianity and slavery Catholicism and the other vii

84 85 89 94 99 101 105 107 110

viii Contents

Education and patriarchal relations Women and science Science and race

117 119 123

Notes and References

128

Bibliography

168

Index

190

Acknowledgements Books are not written in isolation, no matter how much a writer feels it is the case. Along the way, debts, many undeclared and unintentional, are collected. The writing of this book was no exception. Intellectual debt is to be acknowledged to all the teachers who have ever taught me: they whetted my appetite for study and they also gave me a thirst to learn. Of course, all errors of interpretation are mine, not theirs. I have written this book for my children, Emma and James; may that knowing glint in their eyes never lose its sparkle. My wife, Jennifer, has given me unconditional support during the long years of research and writing. My mother, Pat, has been a stalwart assistant, albeit by email! I am grateful for permission to reproduce extracts from the following copyright material: Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1989), reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan; William Blake, The Poems of William Blake, edited by W.B. Yeats (1905), pp. 50, 229; Fanny Burney, Selected Letters and Journals (1986), by permission of Oxford University Press; extract taken from ‘Hannah More’. © 1990, Jeremy and Margaret Collingwood, used with permission of Lion Hudson plc; Stella Cottrell, ‘The devil on two-sticks: franco-phobia in 1803’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Volume 1, History & Politics (1989), p. 260; Moira Ferguson (ed.), First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578–1799 (1985); Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1964), by permission of Oxford University Press; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1966), pp. 139, 140, 143, by permission of Routledge; Ann Coral Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), reprinted by permission of the Continuum International Publishing Group; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (1990), by permission of Manchester University Press; Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (1990), pp. 186, 189; Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984), by permission of Oxford University Press; Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1990), by permission of Oxford University Press; John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900, published by The Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; Alistair McGrath, The Re-Enchantment of Nature: Science, Religion and the Human Sense of Wonder (2002), ix

x Acknowledgements

reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited; Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (1969), by permission of Oxford University Press; Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View (1991), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders, but if any have inadvertently been omitted the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the earliest opportunity.

Introduction This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology. As its title suggests, it focuses on women’s literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but unlike the works of other authors who have focused on this period, and who tend to be historians of one kind or another, this work offers a sociological perspective drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. If a book has a purpose, then this book’s purpose is to trace the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of literary women of diverse philosophical and political affiliation. There are two interrelated aims running throughout this work: examining the reflective output of women writers of the late eighteenth century, and concomitantly establishing the connectivity between their works, wider society and ‘race’. Late eighteenth-century British women writers represent a language of mobilization: they mobilized a racial currency in their language. It is this that I focus upon. Additionally, it may be said, scholarship on late eighteenth-century writers is expanding and exploring new territories. The Romantic period, an era of tremendous cultural, political and economic upheaval and creativity, has been the subject of considerable revision in recent times: Romanticism is slowly being unpacked, exposing its relationship to colonialism, imperialism, slavery, political economy, war and other aspects of cultural and social interaction. The revision of the Romantic period, however, has not yet included a full monograph about the nature of ‘race’, and the relationship British women writers bore to it. ‘Race’ is invariably absent from studies about eighteenth-century writers, or oversimplified, and subsumed by ‘slavery’. A further review of the crisis of the period, therefore, necessitates not only an acknowledgement of traditional economic and political instabilities, but also sexual, colonial and racial narration as well. This book attempts that. Although it is recognized that the last word will not have been written here, and that further work would be required and desired, inferences may be appropriately drawn. From the close of the eighteenth century up to the end of the 1810s, Britain experienced unprecedented change, dislocation and crisis. The period, inscribed by industrialization and empire building, is extremely attractive to the historical eye.1 Industrial and cultural transformation, xi

xii Introduction

political and social unrest rooted in an emergent class structure, war, economic reconstruction, colonial expansion, scientific developments and struggles against slavery represent the foreground features for the investigation of crisis and social anxiety in British society.2 The ethical pretensions of late eighteenth-century British feminism need to be assessed against that background. British women writers argued against the slave trade, slavery and the ideologues that supported it. Its impact was far-reaching.3 But not only did women engage with the slave industry; they also offered an engagement with the political and social impact of poverty and welfare – what underscored this was the episteme of empire, and anxieties of racial Otherness. Late eighteenth-century British women writers who vocalized ‘compassion’, while clearly speaking with many voices in the era of change, expressed powerful motifs of a highly racialized discourse. The racial Other, a common characteristic of eighteenthcentury social and political commentary, was systematically incorporated into literature; British women writers were no exception but their take on this motif was. Whereas male writers tended to represent the Other as a means to display the modernity of their own culture, British women writers tended towards an additional and different mode of representation: typically destitute black characters were deployed to whom white heroes and heroines could show ‘compassion’. Women from across the political spectrum engaged in such race thought. There was another slant on this. What late eighteenth-century feminism engaged in was an attempt to imprint on the political agenda the construction of the modern European woman, doing so with emphatic reference to the multipolaric concept of the Other: the Other woman of the Islamic East, the Other woman of the racially enslaved world, and the Otherness of the French, Irish and Jews. Their method was simple and literary, but their methodology was sensationally political and ideological: in commenting upon the Other, they were saying something about themselves too. The structuring properties of their discourse were determined by the social tensions generated by the burgeoning British Empire and the impact of the French Revolution. Indeed, the empire imbued wealth, welfare and mentality with its social meaning: from anti-slavery to cocoa, the empire marked their works. As Britain expanded its colonial interests, and as the French Revolution threatened the wealth, welfare and survival of those material interests, British social philosophy became increasingly grounded in a racialized perception of itself and Others. The process of British modernity, in this book, is articulated through key terms and concepts, in particular ‘citizenship’, ‘patriotism’, ‘poverty’,

Introduction xiii

‘nation’, ‘civilization’ and ‘self’. British women writers, asserting their claim for womanhood, drew on the metaphors of commerce, slavery and poverty to expose oppression and inequalities, and they entered theological debate to establish women’s capacity for rationality and their empathy or not with other peoples. In short, they used racial thinking to explore patriotism, civilization and the workings of the mind. The point at the core of this book is that racial thinking, like women’s writing, has been undervalued or ignored in modern discussions of national and subjective evolution, and yet racial thinking, biological to scientific, has been crucial to the formation of both. The context for these discussions is familiar ground in political and social history: the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and wars with France. Less conspicuous in literary criticism, historiography and social theory is a sustained critique of ‘race’, slavery (of blacks or whites), sexuality and nationhood. A particular attribute of this book, therefore, is its distinct treatment of women’s writing, which has been thoroughly excavated for the discussion of women’s nature and relation to man, but very unevenly for what it can tell us about other social relationships, beliefs and histories, and the link between ethnicity and ethics. The two revolutions and Christianity signified notions of the Other, which in British women writers’ texts represents ethical and ethnic commentaries in the making of British modernity. British Women Writers and Race is neither a social history nor a work of literary theory, history or criticism. Others more versed in historiographical methodologies, or the subliminal technicalities of literary moments, may do that. What this book attempts to do is explore our understanding of how and in what ways ‘race’ was a significant factor in the making of not only the broad feminist church of the late eighteenth century, the workings of the idea of ‘race’ by British women writers, specifically in the genesis and trajectory of ‘women’ in social philosophy, but also how ‘race’ underpinned the development of modernity generally. The present study should be helpful to those exploring the emergence and development of British raciology; although the emphasis is on Britain its relevance extends further afield. I wish now to comment on the architecture of the book, the thematic nature of what follows in each chapter. Scene setting is covered in Chapter 1. It outlines the ideas and concepts, which are essential for subsequent discussions of ‘race’ and feminism in the late eighteenth century. Black and white relations alone did not signify ‘race’, for it also avers a mix of French, Irish and Jewish stereotypes, which British women writers championed, challenged and changed in their works.

xiv Introduction

The oppressions and opportunities of the colonial project, and the struggles with France to protect that empire building, embossed crisis in British society: British women writers across the political spectrum generated a discourse during that crisis in novels, poetry and tract, speaking to each other and to society at large. I have argued throughout this book that their interventions were an integral feature of British raciology. It is instructive to remember that British feminism, embracing a thesis of rationality, came to fruition in a wider context of crisis in a discussion about man and society. It is within that framework that British feminism, as an ideological constellation, assumed a particular form and undertook a specific role in the making of the modern British nation. Late eighteenth-century British feminism did not operate in an historical void. It emerged not in an abstract sense but in relation to specific social, political, economic and cultural forces within society. Women existed in a legally cribbed world, ring-fenced by extensive and intrusive societal norms and expectations. Literature was a principal vehicle through which they managed to escape from and intervene in the social and political life of their day. It is hardly surprising that some evoked a bygone age in which women were freer: yet what made her Romantic interjection resonant was the latent, yet provocative, racializing thought embedded in ideologies of the nation. Through ‘nation’ assertions of cultural value were made; through ‘culture’ assertions of nation were valorized. Chapter 2 focuses on the raciology of British economic, political and social development. It considers critical aspects of social anxiety as evidenced by the grand narrative of empire, including economic and political instabilities, colonialism, slavery and the racial narration of the British Diaspora. Fundamental to this undertaking is a set of interrelated questions: In what ways did ‘empire’ imprint, shape and determine the ideological nature and political flavour of the works of British women writers? In what ways did ‘empire’ produce, sustain and maintain a discourse of Otherness in their works? And, in what ways did ‘empire’ valorize ‘race’, which British women writers challenged, changed or championed in and through their writings? The racializing impact of the French Revolution on Britain is considered in Chapter 3. The Revolution produced, and the years that followed sustained, a social agenda of interrelated discourses that addressed personal, political and national identity. To unpack the nature of that social agenda we shall draw on and engage with a number of issues related to the extent to which the French Revolution and British politics,

Introduction xv

particularly in its radical incarnations, encircled the network of ideas and political content of the works of British women writers; produced, sustained and maintained an articulation of Otherness, that is a dissimulation of subjects; valorized ‘race thinking’, that is the social agenda celebrated self, society and civilization as socially determined and constructed products that imbibed ‘race’, signified by a range of stereotypes. Lastly, and leading on from that assertion of ‘race’, is an exploration of British raciology through notions of culture, nationalism and civilization. Chapter 4 addresses racialized media of ‘nature’, ‘religion’ and ‘science’. Disquisition took another form under the pen of women writers, who invoked a raciology of mind, particularly in their discussion of Enlightened and Romantic theses on ‘rationality’, ‘reason’ and ‘education’. What underpinned their discourse, and what was emphatically valorized in the process, was an ethnic metaphysics of thought. In that context, British women writers attempted to negotiate and purchase their understanding on two basic problems of the enlightened age: to interpret ‘reason’, and to argue for an improved ‘education’. Late eighteenthcentury social commentators who negotiated great civic questions all endeavoured, in one way or another, to grapple with those problems. This chapter, therefore, concentrates on a series of interrelated issues, which both foreground and relate to the raciology of reason, the extent to which Christianity was a civilizing force rooted in a Western raciology and the extent to which the situation of women in British civilization enabled them to confront, challenge and change late eighteenthcentury raciology in British social thought. Each chapter navigates the various ways in which ‘race’ may be said to have been valorized at the end of the eighteenth century, that is they negotiate the characteristics of late eighteenth-century British raciology. I should add that because this book offers a different perspective from historical or literary studies, it does not register many of their theoretical or empirical nuances. The reader seeking disquisitions on gendered writing will find little satisfaction here. Significant works from these fields are not subjected to critique. By default this book complements many others that address social, political and literary histories. By design, it will also challenge many. Literary history and criticism, particularly works about the Enlightenment and Romanticism, tend to proffer a racially silent vision of the world. Some treat ‘women’ very well, but not ‘race’. Most sustain a distance between ‘women’ and ‘race’ that might have been bridged. I have therefore tried to demonstrate the manner in which British women writers were at the centre of eighteenth-century racial discourses, and to offer a way for bridging such gaps.

xvi Introduction

‘Race’, which is a highly contested notion and for which no satisfactory definition exists, was an elastic idea in British women’s writings of the Romantic period. Having said that, I appreciate that to many I have deployed ‘race’ in a way that might appear lopsided and disjointed on occasion; however, on balance, what I argue appropriately reflects its complexity. In my opinion, latter-day theorists (from literary criticism or social theory) are too comfortable with the currency of ‘race’, and I think this book rightfully suggests a deeper questioning of such received wisdom. While ‘race’ has been written into modernity with almost invisible ink, it has actually underpinned the social, political, economic, sexual and mental authority of modern British development. In this book, I attempt to overwrite our understanding of modernity in a more legible text. I believe I have done justice to British women writers and raciology. I would like also to offer a commentary on methodology. So, on what method was this study of ‘race’ and ‘women’ based? My research was sociologically nomothetic: traits were extrapolated from discourses where those traits manifested systematically across documents and time. The data trawled was literary works. The analysis revealed ways in which late eighteenth-century British women embraced literature as a vehicle through which they comprehended the world, and how they intervened in the making of their society, speaking to each other as well as to society at large, through their reading public. What clearly emerged was a significant configuration: that is the centrality of ‘race’ as an operative mechanism of their articulation of self, society and civilization. That ‘fact’ was recovered by content analysis, a descriptive method of the sociology of knowledge, which is particularly well suited to ethnographic research because it focuses upon recorded, written artefacts (including oral traditions) of culture. Its aim is to provide systematic descriptions of written and recorded materials. Analysis of artefacts that ‘carry’ culture, such as literature, attempts to extract its reified content (such as ideals, values, goals, beliefs, etc.) by using qualitative content analysis. It thereby addresses the monuments and documents, in other words the iconography, of culture. The cultural iconography of the late eighteenth century are, like other cultural phenomena from other periods, not free from social imprints; they embody values which are socially reified. Simply put, this is zeitgeist. The products, literature, art and music, and the connotations ascribed to them, are value-laden. Qualitative content analysis reveals the value structure of cultural phenomena (in this case late eighteenth-century works by British women writers) and contextualizes it. This method permits us to under-

Introduction xvii

stand and explain documentation, in other words to read it and interpret it sociologically. This study embraces that method in an unashamedly political manner in the macro sense that commentators such as Frederic Jameson argue it is to be embraced.4 This necessarily immerses discussion in fairly turgid ideologies, which evoke sets of questions and issues that explore what Jameson terms the political unconscious: the mechanics and technicalities of ideological interconnectedness. Such questioning ‘indexes’ the context; this provides the signifiers of a text, which presents structure in terms of time and space.5 This is, moreover, important not only for the story but also for the discourse;6 although it takes us away from sociology proper, and encroaches more and more upon literary criticism, it is through such a sociology of literature that both ‘race’ and ‘women’ may be realized as ethical discursive themes. To achieve this I have drawn from a range of literary and social theories and schools of criticism. This has arisen for a number of reasons, and although rewarding in itself, forms part of the methodological problem. Historical sociology is eminently placed to register mainstream literature. However, the theoretical underpinnings of the sociology of literature are unfortunately enmeshed in polar opposites, the mediating agencies of high or low culture. Typically, this is posed as a concern on the nature of ‘literature’, that is the truly artistic work or the merely popular, and de facto lessvalued text. I would argue as far as the sociology of literature is concerned that this does not have to be the case. For literature is actually an important key to the door of the past, and should be treated as an accessible resource and route to it. In many ways this highlights the subjective and highly problematic nature of academic traditions, and underscores a potential for change. It is that potential that I have my eye on. For in order to gain access to the literary world of women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it has been necessary to shift focus away from more traditional sources of sociology, and inevitably draw from a range of literary and historical canons. Some very exciting intellectual contributions are being made in the unpacking of Romanticism. Let me add, literary studies especially under its feminist incarnations has a rich and respectable tradition of scholarship, which lends itself to interdisciplinary analyses. British Women Writers and Race contributes to that tradition.

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1 The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism

This book simultaneously contemplates and critiques the raciology of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers. In so doing it will unpack the ethical and ethnic moral-economy of the Romantic period.1 The primary subject of the work is the relationship between Enlightened Feminism, as feminism of the period has been called, and ideas of ‘race’ in the early Romantic period in Britain during the critical years of crisis and change, 1788–1818.2 The Romantic period was one of creative vibrancy, coupled with an attendant crisis and change of great velocity; the quantity and quality of literary intervention by women on the nature of the crisis facing the British polity – that is the pressures on the British nation, British civilization and British social, political and economic welfare – in an age of slavery, lends itself agreeably to an examination of the British feminist project of the late eighteenth century. What this book attempts to do is examine the manner in which both what British women writers said and how they said it, in poetry, novels, letters, memoirs, diaries and treatises were, at some point and in various ways, racially charged. This book is therefore a critique of British ethnic metaphysics. Women wrote in a variety of styles, both similar and different to male writing of the period: their works were often anonymized, circumscribed by eighteenth-century patriarchal relations as they waged ideological battles on the nature of women, and the social, political and economic world.3 They wrote on a wide range of topics from vagrancy to vegetarianism, from science to the supernatural. Consequently, as Elizabeth Fay notes, ‘. . . this is the earliest period recognizable to the modern reader in its attitudes, interests, and tastes.’4 What is also striking about 1

2 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

late eighteenth-century British women writers is the extent to which they intertextually linked their works. Not only did they often share the names of characters among themselves, and cite each other’s works, they also engaged with prominent texts of the time. In that way they managed to explicitly foreground political doctrines. Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke, was typically targeted; Desmond, by Charlotte Smith, is illustrative of such intertextuality – both these texts are epistolary representations of what the French Revolution stood for. As far as historical sociology is concerned, and for that matter general discourses of history, most of the women in this book will be outside the common stock of familiar names. Perhaps only two will be well known, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. For literary history the authors – such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Yearsley, among others – will be more familiar, and this is particularly so for some feminist literary historians. To recover the feminist and racialized gloss of these writers, who are a select if eclectic cohort of well-educated and politically diverse women, and to expose and explore the social, political and intertextual links with male contemporaries, requires a narration that is a concinnity of literature, history and sociology, standing at the rich intersection of all three. This book opens in the year that the broad campaign against slavery moved to the centre stage of British politics.5 Two women published seminal anti-slavery literature in 1788: the conservative Hannah More wrote ‘Slavery’, and her protégé Ann Yearsley wrote ‘The Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’. The present study concludes in 1818, the year that saw Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein parallel the political imagination of a nation beset with social and racial anxieties,6 kindled and sustained by the French Revolution and over twenty years of war.7

Race and the late eighteenth century What follows throughout this book depends on an understanding of ‘race’. I wish here to foreground a dialogue on ‘race’ in an attempt to provide an evaluative gloss for subsequent discussion. This will be especially significant for what ‘race’ may be said to mean in terms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is often the case that commentators begin by stressing that definitions of ‘race’ are inherently problematic. I concur. ‘Race’ is problematic, and

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 3

neat definitions of ‘race’ indubitably oversimplify its meaning and significance. No matter how convenient it might be to actually do so, I shall resist the temptation to define what ‘race’ is. For late eighteenthcentury British women writers, ‘race’ was not reduced to polaric simplicities such as black and white; in their texts it was signified by ethical commentaries on black, French, Irish and Jewish ethnicity. The other side of this coin is ‘self’. A social history of the idea of ‘race’ takes us on an intellectual journey that begins, in the first instance, in biology. The many uses to which ‘race’ has been called to testify include: ‘lineage’, that is a line of descent such as offspring; ‘species’, as in type such as apple; general classification as in the human race; and as a particular subgroup such as the British race.8 Observations of ‘this type’ or ‘that classification’ have been drawn from the contours of history and, critically, have informed the substantive meaning and idea of ‘race’. The division of humans into races is a fiction and has no validity in biological fact. As Bryan Sykes has concluded from his overwhelming exploration of mitochondrial DNA, it is nonsense to speak of racial classification as grounded in biology.9 Clearly, in the modern era, what has been identified as relevant in the construction of ‘what we believe a “race” is’ has been determined by a transition from eighteenth-century racial thinking, through the scientific racism of the nineteenth century to the fetishism of ‘race’ embedded in nazism and fascism, and beyond. Each represents a stage of the modern project.10 This, we may note, stresses a broad periodization in the idea and making of ‘race’ that we would be well advised to adhere to, and in which the historical process is indispensable. It is important to be quite unambiguous about this. It was in the late eighteenth century that the word ‘race’ and ideas of racial thinking became general currency in circles of social and political commentary, in terms that valorized human difference.11 Raymond Williams reminds us of the influence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach on what is now called physical anthropology: it was the work of Blumenbach, on the physical diversity of the human species, which helped to consolidate the use of the word on this basis. According to Ivan Hannaford, Blumenbach was the major theorist of variety, who fine-tuned physical anthropology valorizing anatomy, climate and skin colour.12 Blumenbach was popularized in Britain by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the key architects of British Romanticism. Plainly, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a formative period for the development of ‘race’, and its later veneer.

4 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

So, what commentators have termed ‘race’ in its various sophisticated glosses is, relatively speaking, a very modern annotation on human relations.13 ‘Race’ has become, as the editors of Race & Social Difference argued in the early 1970s, highly charged both emotionally and politically.14 In the name of ‘race’, they point out, millions of people have been killed, or denied basic human rights. But let us not just state the obvious. While for many the concept of ‘race’ is the ultimate truth, as Benjamin Disraeli would have had us believe, it remains an elitist and, in many ways, contradictory concept.15 Taking our cue from Michael Banton, this is hardly surprising: for many centuries, racial theories in Western thought have been a muddle of confused linguistic usage, drawing upon cultural, physical and social anthropology.16 David Goldberg, however, goes further than Banton with a convincing contention that ‘race’ has been an organizing principle of western thought.17 ‘Race’, he writes, is ‘one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity.’18 ’Race’ has been and remains a term that is packed with various meanings, and shall be employed in this work in various ways. Core, interrelated terms such as ‘race’ and ‘ethnic’ (and their etymological derivatives) are critical to the present study. Exactly how the terms are used will be clear from the text but it is appropriate that their variety be clarified. At root they register a raciology, that is they inscribe humanity with ‘race thought’, a language and an articulation of ‘race’. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ denote markers where, in a multiplicity of ways, ‘race’ is socially ascribed. Raciology captures that variety of meaning of ‘race’. Additionally, what has been a perennial theme is the notion that ‘race’ means something that classifies people. It identifies them, sets them apart and stigmatizes them. In structural terms it has become an appellation, a category, which supplies varied ontological implications that exercise what Peter Berger sombrely terms ‘bad faith’.19 In this sense ‘race’ projects subtle but clear messages that signify control and manipulation of power: it is a politics of population. Power, a common denominator in society, structures people, that is unites or separates them; power is the means by which people are included or excluded. ‘Race’ is a marker of inclusion and exclusion, which is not only about assumptions, discrimination and prejudice but also, significantly, about affluence, poverty and privilege. What is disclosed by ‘race’, therefore, is social justification. ‘Race’ is an ideology: it projects ideas and meanings of racial differences, faithfully or fictitiously, and ascribes value to them. The systemic nature of ‘race’ transforms

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 5

it from a descriptive quality into a normative force, that is into racism. Clearly, this takes ‘race’ away from biology, for racism is a learned ideological force predicated on systems of power, in other words social not biological relations. It may be elementary but it is so often still necessary to reiterate that racism is about politics. As Nash points out, racism as an ideology competes in the political arena such that invoking ‘race’ is a call to action of some sort embodying a political and social programme.20 And, we may add, pogrom. The vocabulary of the late eighteenth century certainly mixed and matched its use and meaning of the word ‘race’. That is why context is so very important, as in who is saying what about whom, and when. This is a cultural cartography of ‘race’ in which folk are mapped in terms of national contexts; in other words our bodies are placed in wider meanings of being human than simply the ability to walk, talk and breathe. Such ‘mapping’, extraneous to our immediate sphere of control, is a spatial axis of social formations and is itself a ‘structure’ in and through which we have to negotiate our day-to-day lives. It is, therefore, a modus operandi of identity: a modality of existence, our temporal, spatial and corporeal self and Other.21 Articulations of ‘race’ certainly have that buoyancy. It is precisely with all of this in mind that ‘race’, in the works by late eighteenth-century British women writers, was articulated. The ideological presentation of ‘race’, the highly charged set of assumptions, myths and prejudices, around which self and Other are constructed, is a backbone on which the flesh of the period was wrapped. So the sense in which a newly formulated awareness of Britishness, clearly valorized by Maria Edgeworth for example and vehemently vocalized during the twenty or so years of war with France, and the extent to which such an assertion of ‘race’ mapped out and crystallized perceptions of the world, is what shall be referred to by denoting ‘race’. Yet, curiously, Britain was and remains a composite, a hybrid, of what commonly is thought, and argued, to make a ‘race’.22 In one respect this highlights the problematic very well, for ‘race’ is not a depository that is a static social entity. It is a perpetual product of history; it is a cultural process of interaction through time and space. ‘Race’, raciology, racial discourse or racialization, needs, therefore, to be understood as an historically determined social product, a curious mix of culture, privilege and power; ‘race’ is a social process that is continually produced and reproduced. That is the very stuff of which national and self-identity is made and relates therefore to the intricate means whereby social and not biological relations circumscribe the politics of ‘race’.23

6 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

The word ‘ethnic’ is similarly a muddled term. As Raymond Williams has noted, it has actually been in the English language longer than the word ‘race’ but only recently superseded it in general usage.24 What has typically denoted inclusion of ethnic membership has been the sharing of common objective features of social relations such as food, music, religion and language. It is therefore through culture, that is how we relate to each other, that connections between ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ materialize, and are negotiated, sustained and maintained; however, despite sharing many of the common objective features within a given community, or ‘ethnie’ as Anthony Smith terms it,25 some folk are excluded from full and sustained membership of that community, that ethnie, on the grounds of ‘race’. In Britain, a key exclusion from the ethnie has been black people who by virtue of their blackness, in political terms their ‘race’, have typically been excluded from full membership of being a part of Britishness. In the present work, ‘ethnie’ is therefore deployed to signify an ideology of ‘race’, an ideology that is all too often absent from ‘ethnicity’. The ideology of Britishness is very much rooted, particularly in the outlook of the Romantics, in the ethnic constellation of the AngloSaxons (with contributions from the Celts). It is overwhelmingly seen, in popular terms, as a politically ‘white’ preserve, and serves to justify the ancient presence and sovereignty of the ‘race’ with its spatial monopoly of the land with a concomitant essence of truth and purity.26 That racialized framework provides the political context in which Anthony Smith notes that the ‘. . . Loyal Associations, founded by Arthur Young in 1792, traced the origins of English liberties and parliamentary evolution through the Glorious Revolution, the growth of Parliament, back to the “free” institutions of Angles and Saxons . . .’27 Late eighteenthcentury British radicals generally valorized such a Romantic conception of history. It is ironic, moreover, to note that that particular historiographical understanding – of Britishness – persists despite the fact that black people were in Britain before the English were. Blacks were of course part of the Roman army; the Saxons arrived and settled in Britain much later.28 The notion of racial sovereignty embedded in the world of Anglo-Saxonism, moreover, bears a particular set of ontological meanings that are socially produced, negotiated and maintained in terms of ethnic power. This is the ideological arena of myth-making and it is precisely in this sense that we may refer to ethnic metaphysics. This aspect of raciology denotes an assertion of racial well-being which is a folk history, that is it is ultimately fictional, though its resonance is not. Ethnic metaphysics is an interpenetration of culture and history, which

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 7

serves to establish and reinforce the creation, interpretation and memorization of the past to promote an ideal of ‘self’, ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ in the present.29 Presentness, which is a characteristic of the mental furniture of modernity, is axiomatic: it is a geomythic feature of the modern mind. British women writers of the late eighteenth century, such as Mary Hays, certainly articulated this. At this juncture, in the ethnic metaphysics of social relations, we can note the perennial presence of the ‘other’.30 This places our discussion firmly in the epistemological playground of ethnography. Writing from the perspective of the West looking out, the commentary by John and Jean Comaroff is edifying. They persuasively suggest that ethnography, of which notions of the Other are an integral feature, is beset with inherent epistemological problems. Ethnography is at once informative and ethnocentric.31 It certainly has a tendency to efface value within difference, with a predisposition to making an object of the Other; ethnography is itself, therefore, an instrument of othering. The Other, as a trope of the modern psyche, bears a reductive currency of cultural exchange which, commonly termed ‘alterity’, stands as a narrative of the ethnie. The Other is a conduit through which difference is explicable, for the Other legitimizes the conceptual referencing of ‘race’ in the first analysis as a logical mechanism by which to divide humanity in the last analysis. ‘It was self-identity,’ write Sardar, Nandy and Davies, ‘that generated the essential points of comparison. The points of comparison generate real boundaries, points at which variety becomes something Other, not Us.’32 The division of course is one of separation, distancing and power. This may be based upon fear, or an inverted inferiority complex, but is nonetheless an effective mechanism by which to exclude and oppress, and simultaneously massage the sense of togetherness of the ethnie. In this respect, we can see that the ‘other’ serves as an a priori spatial principle of the social relations of being.33 Othering situates ethnography as thoroughly Western.34 What is manifest, across all the themes of this work, is that late eighteenth-century British women writers embraced racialized spatiality, an othering, at the core of their ontology. The method they used was agential, that is working with one idea in order to underscore another.35 We may view this as highly political and our reading rightly political of ostensibly un-political works.36 This deserves further exposition: it evokes a set of methodological questions and issues that fundamentally explore what Frederic Jameson has termed the political unconscious, that is the mechanics and technicalities of ideological interconnectedness. This present study attempts to expose the racial thinking that lay

8 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

behind British women writers’ ideological interconnected discourses on British womanhood, in which Otherness can be seen to have authorized not only the multiplicity of ways in which they explored the concept of difference, but also their own purchase on society. The Other can be seen as instrumental for the discourse of alterity as articulated by late eighteenth-century British women writers in and through their texts. Such analysis further illuminates what is meant by raciology. This demands an intellectual history that is twofold. Not only does it require an exploration of the composition of the social philosophy of the time, it also necessitates an exploration of the structure of thought of late eighteenth-century British women writers who explored an understanding of ‘self’, ‘society’ and ‘civilization’. In such a critique, what is manifestly significant is the Europeanness of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the two great philosophical and literary arcs of the modern period, which promoted ‘race’ in particular ways and which affected the nature of social relations around perceived historical truths. Scholarship on the Enlightenment and Romanticism is vast, and of variable quality. There are differing accounts of the temporal span of the Enlightenment, and its qualitative impact. Many commentators suggest that it correlates with the emergence of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ as serious contenders for the hearts and minds of the population of Europe at the expense of the hegemonic influence of the Christian Church. Such an historical sweep is by no means definitive; there are no cast-iron historical boundaries, instead it is demarcated by certain beliefs and ways of thinking.37 The fundamental shift in social relations signified by a rise in a secular, technical and scientific ethos marked a radical questioning of tradition and religious authority. Such a philosophical map guided Europeans as they negotiated and comprehended the world. So, in the sense in which it related the European collective consciousness to both itself and in the process to the rest of the world, the Enlightenment was a form of ontology, an ethnic metaphysics in which Self and Other formed an integral part of the philosophical thinking of Enlightened equations on Man and Society. It represents a unified consciousness.38 This needs to be broken down. This may best be captured with reference to the mathematical spirit embedded in rationality and reason. In the seventeenth century, mathematics was deemed to be a philosophy that housed both and additionally held the truths of God’s work.39 Attempts across Europe to universalize mathematical reasoning for all other sciences and knowledge pivoted on the belief that mathematics was the philosophy and methodology, the language of method, of all knowledge and reason.

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 9

An offspring of this inductive reasoning led to the mechanical science of associationist psychology and so in a fundamental way the Enlightenment strove to ascertain a science of human nature, as it was perceived to be from the vantage of the European mind.40 So, the methodological structures of Enlightened philosophy are important features in an assessment of the ethnic metaphysics of Enlightened feminist discourse in Britain. Such discussion runs throughout this book and should be seen as an important dimension of racialized discourses on the human subject. Romanticism was not something that suddenly emerged out of, or against, the rationality of the Enlightenment. In many respects its life span is similar to the Enlightenment. Indeed, some of the key proponents of Enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau are also part of the Romantic ‘camp’. Similarly, like the Enlightenment, no neat definition exists for it; and scholarship shifts in its critique of the Romantic temporal span as well as qualitative significance. It is most often cast not so much as anti-Enlightenment, but as a Movement, with its own trajectory.41 Romanticism is a composite philosophy, bringing together a number of strands of social theory (on geography and climate, history, and blood and culture) and weaving them to form a critique on the genealogy of self, society and civilization. Unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism expressed a dynamic passion for history; Romantics saw the past as replete with value that the present had lost, but not irretrievably.42 Consequently, the politics of radical patriotism constructed towards the end of the eighteenth century included assertions of the true essence of the British ‘race’: recovery from, and re-memorization of, the past.43 In this context, the French Revolution was an ideological spur to social betterment; a national(ist) identity couched within an ethnic realization, for to be British was signified by a pledge of allegiance to the reified idea of nation, not necessarily the State.44 British feminism at the end of the eighteenth century certainly echoes those sentiments and my discussion of Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen, for instance, is framed with this in mind. The writers on whom I focus embraced Romantic ideologies in a variety of ways around the modern concepts of ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘body’, or to put it in another way in terms of the temporality, spatiality and corporeality of existence. The eighteenth century generally held a fascination for the Classical Age. The Enlightenment, for example, advocated a desire for order and stability and admired the ancient culture of Rome which, it was alleged, symbolized those virtues. By the end of the century, however, and in

10 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

the wake of the Industrial Revolution begun in Britain, the paradigm and the serenity of order was punctured. A sense of energy, change and progress became the key to all things good, great and worthy. On the Continent, Winckelmann argued that only by imitating the ancient Greeks could these ‘new’ social values be achieved. Romanticism answered this calling, drawing extensively upon the Hellenistic legacy of culture with a refined sense of art, beauty, skill and belief systems. Ancient Greece was seen as an ideal type in the pursuit of aesthetic and cultural excellence. Hellenomania became deeply entrenched across Western Europe. Essentially, however, the new age values of Romantic Hellenism were founded upon an ethnic realization in that ancient Greece was considered the sole begetter of Western civilization. Quite apart from monocausal problems of historical analysis, that Romantic standpoint is part of a much larger problematic. It represents an argument designed to isolate, disparage and demote the relevance and importance of ancient Egyptian, that is African, culture and civilization in relation to Europe.45 Romanticism thereby speaks as a genealogy of the West, wherein a rich matrix of mood, sentiment and emotion are iconographed as culturally aesthetic sources for collective self-reflection in the face of the past. It is, therefore, a politics and ideology of the European ‘self’, and by association the Other. That, I argue, is a racialized discourse of the human subject. I am of course concerned with the extent to which ‘women’ fit that paradigm of European intellectual hegemony. But clearly, the women who are the focus of this study were an important aspect of that philosophical landscape, albeit as almost totally unrecognized participants.46 What is striking, however, is that the parameters within which late eighteenth-century women writers operated were already shaped by an ethnic metaphysics. So, the philosophical tools by which British women writers of the late eighteenth century appreciated ‘self’ and western society were deeply imbibed features of British raciology.

Feminism and the late eighteenth century Let us now reflect on ‘feminism’. What feminism is, when it emerged and what it might mean are general features of this work, but it is appropriate here to clarify such questions. Feminism is a relatively new concept, not more than a hundred years old.47 It is a modern phenomenon, which is ultimately guided by an impulse to enlighten.48 In deploying the term feminism, which like other forms of thought is a very broad church, I have in mind a women–society dialectic: common

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to all of its theoretical forms is a deep-seated critique of the impact of women in society, and of society on women. As with ‘race’, we can see that for our understanding of feminism, again the contextual social relations of culture are fundamental. British feminism of the late eighteenth century did not occur in a social, political and economic vacuum; the works of late eighteenth-century British women writers occurred in a context. Context is, therefore, highly significant. For this work, context is one of cultural shifts and change and, essentially, the state of cultural flux during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was determined by the rapidly increasing British Empire, and the French Revolution. Both valorized the ‘other’. Feminism has, over many years, developed a critique that attempts to tease out from common sense the nature and meaning of women and society. A mélange of ‘self’ and ‘society’ characterizes the work of British women writers of the late eighteenth century: this merits the appellation of feminism. The political veneer of individual accomplishments is really a red herring, for as Janet Todd has argued in The Sign of Angelica, the fact of intervention in the literary marketplace marks out the published women of the late eighteenth century as very political no matter what the content of their intervention actually was.49 It is, furthermore, in this context that the observation made by Vivien Jones bears a profound resonance. She has argued that although the term was unavailable in the eighteenth century, latter-day theorists should not hesitate in acknowledging the feminism of eighteenth-century writers, even where eighteenth-century vocabulary might suggest otherwise. For Jones, in essence, this signifies a trans-historical aspiration to establish links with women and their works.50 So, while the use of the word may be young its meaning is not; it is more than a new word. We navigate the intellectual waters paddled by British women writers of the late eighteenth century with Todd and Jones in mind. Late eighteenth-century British feminism was holistic in structure, attempting to fuse analyses of what may be described as ‘personalized experiential’ and an inquisition of the social structure within which that experiential was located. This form of social theory, better known as critique, enabled British women writers of the late eighteenth century to expose and explore a shopping-list of concerns. Consequently, in their texts we find thoroughgoing critiques of, for example, the ‘mind’, ‘rationality’, ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’. Clearly, this facilitated women’s intervention in the debates about human nature, which was a common feature of the eighteenth-century intellectual landscape. Significantly, such critiques were typically, but not exclusively, investigated in

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relation to ‘education’, ‘marriage’, ‘money’ and the ‘law’. These critiques were, therefore, the intellectual vehicles through which women grappled with notions of British womanhood. That is, through these agential investigations they attempted to define and redefine the ontological framework of ‘woman’ as a distinct category in social philosophy. Most variants of feminism tend to agree that Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the eighteenth century first raised political expressions that asked questions about women in society.51 Feminist academia, however, is by no means united on such an assessment. This makes the historical process critically important for an understanding of the word ‘feminism’, especially in terms of the historical situations to which the word may be applied and the insights, that is resonance, which it may still have for these latter days. I feel less than comfortable with historical absolutes. Nonetheless, the ‘debate’ is important if only because it highlights the differences within and between academic disciplines such as literary history, history and historical sociology. Clearly, as historical scholarship develops, that is as historians carry their definitions and interpretations back in time, re-evaluations emerge. Feminist history can expect, therefore, to trace its roots deeper and deeper into history with an ever-expanding historiography to match: for instance, Janet Todd identifies feminists to have existed from 1660 onwards; Moira Ferguson earlier still. This is of course very truncated but my point is ascertainable. This poses an important methodological point. The use women made of literature, given that their presence in the literary market was highly political, was highly ideological too, for it was the means by which they voiced their ontology. Through the genres of literature, notably poetry, and the novel, which was a form women colonized for over fifty years,52 women found the most accessible media through which they could obviate legal, political, economic, psychological and sexual strictures imposed upon them by society; a society which systematically closed off avenues of social, political and aesthetic representation to them. And in that framework we ought not to lose sight of the infrastructural sympathy of dissenting, radical publishers such as Joseph Johnson, without whose effort and industry many ‘other’ voices from the eighteenth century, such as women and radicals, would have remained forever silent.53 It is important to see that their use of literature, as a vehicle through which they managed to articulate their understanding of the world, was at one and the same time how they commented upon the social and political history of their day, speaking to each other as well as to society at large. For Ellen Moers, literature is an indispensable

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resource in women-centred theory.54 In eighteenth-century British women writers we find a literary consciousness of ‘self’ and ‘other’, which we can take as a unique hallmark of modernity.55

Literature and social theory It is inevitable that, by placing literature firmly in the fold of historical sociology, raw nerves in the sociology of knowledge, of which the sociology of literature is an important aspect, are touched.56 There are many interlocking issues, residual methodological problems and tensions that this exposes and which must be navigated. It is, however, clearly the case that both literary studies (in its guise as history, theory or criticism) and historical sociology share a lot of common ground, not least in the theoretical core of cultural studies.57 In this context, let us consider the sociological critique of literature by the eighteenth-century radical Catherine Macaulay, who is often daubed the first English woman historian. Letter 15 of her ‘Letters on Education’ focused on novels. In her disquisition on the various merits of a select group of writers, which included inter alia Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney, Macaulay observed that to confine literary occupation entirely to novels, and the lighter parts of the belle lettre, is a perversion of reason and common sense, which distinguishes the present age from every other which has succeeded the revival of letters, and cannot fail of having a powerful influence over the manners of society.58 This is a clear recognition of the key power of language and the written word as a force for socialization and change. She ascribed to literary practice a crucial role in the social process of ideology. It is still, unfortunately, the case that the theoretical underpinnings of the sociology of literature are enmeshed in alleged polar opposites, that is the mediating agencies of high or low culture, the ‘lighter parts of the belle lettre’ as Macaulay termed it.59 Typically, this is posited as a concern on the nature of ‘literature’, that is the truly artistic work or the merely popular, and de facto less-valued text. While the class division signified by this is acute, an important caveat may be advanced. The extent to which literature is actually or relatively autonomous from the mode of production or is vested with particular class interests, as critics such as Frederic Jameson suggest, is of little or no significance.60 This is not to say that literature, or my concern with it, operates in a vacuum,

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for as Andrew Milner points out, the writing and reading of literature is not socially amorphous.61 Indeed, the approach I have taken is, methodologically, a recognition that writers, from across the class spectrum, engaged with, and with great acumen, the composition of the social and political complexities of their time.62 Many late eighteenth-century writers themselves referred to the cultural value of novels per se: some argued they were pernicious, others emphatically the opposite. The conservative Hannah More, who also wrote novels and short stories, castigated them. ‘Novels, which used chiefly to be dangerous in one respect,’ she wrote, ‘are now become mischievous in a thousand.’63 The equally-as-conservative Fanny Burney was an advocate in their favour. ‘What is the species of writing’, she rhetorically asked of novels, ‘that offers fairer opportunities for conveying useful precepts?’64 It should be readily acknowledged that many of the works by late eighteenthcentury women writers were both popular, as in widely read by their social-class peers, and artistic; in any case, a definition of ‘literature’ that imposes elitist cultural criteria is arbitrary and barren. As far as the present work is concerned, historical sociology is in a unique position to embrace mainstream literature. Sociology proper, for instance, already embraces the second-cousin literature found in Marx. The separation of literature from sociology is unhelpful, though their respective theoretical and methodological concerns ought not to be seen as merged in the way Jameson suggests. I would argue as far as literature is concerned that this does not have to be the case. For literature is actually an important key to the door of the past and should be treated as an accessible resource and route to it. This is a strong criticism of received wisdom of modern critical and social theory and although it in fact highlights the subjective and highly problematic nature of academic traditions, it also underscores a potential for change. It is that potential that has been grasped here. For in order to gain access to the literary world of women of the period between 1788 and 1818, it has been necessary to shift focus away from more traditional sources of sociology and inevitably draw from a range of historical and literary canons. Consider this: not only is literary undertaking a process of social activity but sociological theory is inherently a literary exercise.65 The theoretical contention in this present study is that British women writers, whose very presence in the literary marketplace was political, contributed to the production and promotion of ‘race thought’ during the period in question, from the late 1780s to the late 1810s. It is to be recognized that both the ‘feminism’ and the dynamics of ‘race’ have

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 15

been relatively unexplored in the period, are largely absent from social theory and historiography and are, therefore, ripe for analysis. While that generic absence is undoubtedly the case, it must also be acknowledged that although existing scholarship is patchy in its treatment of either ‘race’ or ‘feminism’ and definitely a concatenation of both, this present study inevitably plots sympathies and silences found in existing scholarship and fruitfully draws from them. On the one hand the present work will offer a great deal which is important for the history of British feminism and feminist thought in the modern age. Certainly it does not detract from the importance of feminist narrative. On the other hand, an exploration of racial categories, which, it seems to me, have been a central though largely unacknowledged ingredient of British modernity, occasions a different set of questions. Indeed, racial categorization has been a critical marker in the making of British feminism and feminist historiography. This work explores, therefore, the interface between the making of that feminist history and the racial categories that can be seen to have underpinned it. That is the locus of tension in this book. For it is certainly the case that examining British feminism in relation to racial categorization raises significant questions about the articulation of emancipation of British modernity in general and the mission of feminism in particular. There is no proposal here to jettison the insights and the value of such labour, socialist and feminist histories; rather, the intention is to add to, not detract from, those projects. It is hoped, therefore, that a reading of this book with that in mind will further enrich those histories, contributing to the social dialogue upon which they rest. Additionally and equally as significant and problematic are issues about backdating ideas, such as ‘race’ and ‘feminism’, between generations. The implications are conspicuous. There are two sets of related questions upon which to focus. On the one hand are the theoretical glosses which attempt to define and promote ‘race’ and ‘feminism’ in the period. On the other hand are the methodological assertions that pronounce judgement on the connectives that are deemed important. Both are linked in the attempt, valorized by literary history and historical sociology, to transpose ‘race’ and ‘feminism’ back in time. More importantly, as far as this book is concerned, both literary history and historical sociology conflate and contest what ‘race’ and ‘feminism’ allegedly stand for. As mentioned above, strictly speaking, ‘race’ is a very modern annotation; so too is ‘feminism’. Both, nevertheless, are always effortlessly and unproblematically imposed on the past. It is, however, necessary to take into account the historical specificity of the context, period

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and mindset under discussion. This present study of the works of British women writers attempts to do just that. This enables us to confront and consider many debates and perspectives in social theory. It is my assertion that to fully comprehend the meaning of both ‘race’ and ‘feminism’, it is necessary to have an understanding of the circumambient narrative in and through which they exist as discourses. It is the confluence of time and space that gives ‘race’ and ‘feminism’ depth, texture and meaning, and it is modernity that provides depth, texture and meaning to time and space. Such a concatenation is critical for the politics of population theoretically explored in the chapters that follow. The concept of modernity, therefore, provides an epistemological framework by which it is possible to treat both the discourses of ‘race’ and ‘feminism’ as modes of ethical critique, in the way that Frederic Jameson deploys ethics, which deeply embroils both as narrations of Otherness. By locating this work in the context of British modernity, and by drawing upon it as an operational discourse of the West, the substantive nature of what is discussed assumes a greater cogency. Modernity is the maker of odd bedfellows. The Enlightenment and Romanticism, intimately a part of the historical period in question, both are modern data. Modernity is also the bed upon which ‘race thought’ and ‘feminism’ sleep and wake. The common denominator, which binds these seemingly disparate social forces together, is a primary concern with a shared sense of ‘self’ and ‘others’ with the oppressions and opportunities in being modern. Being modern suggests an acute recognition of temporality and such recognition occurred first, according to most social theorists, in the Europe of the sixteenth century.66 Such an emphasis placed upon sequence came to vociferously structure the interplay between folk of different nations and ‘races’ after 1492, as the bellicose notion of progress, one of the central hierarchical idioms of the modern age, led to the squashing of people found in the New World who were deemed to be not only ‘behind’ but also ‘below’ the West.67 It is the nexus between ‘feminism’ and ‘race’, within this general milieu, that remains the overall theoretical focus of this work, and for that we need to appreciate the nature of discourse. This places us at the hub of discourse theory. Roger Fowler sets the scene rather well. Discourse deploys a role to literature, such that texts intercede between people at the level of ideology and consciousness. This, he concludes, raises texts from object to process.68 This can be set in a more distinctive framework that draws attention to what Stuart Hall has described as ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’. Basically, all messages

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carry both an explicit and an implicit script that is understandable by ‘maps of meaning’ ascribed to them by the discourse.69 Furthermore, as Terry Eagleton has stressed, ‘. . . “ideology” can be taken to indicate no more than this connection – the link or nexus between discourse and power’.70 It is important to recognize, therefore, that what British women writers at the end of the eighteenth century wrote and what they said to each other as well as to their reading public were not only products of labour exchanged in the literary marketplace, they were also products that reflect an ontological perspective, the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of their lot, to put it in non-sociological vernacular. That is precisely the ‘nexus’ to which Terry Eagleton refers.71 Discourse necessarily involves writers and readers. It is inherently social. My theoretical paradigm retains that emphasis through a matrix of two component parts. First, a focus upon the construction of subjects through discourses and the linking of discursive themes, such as ‘race’, ‘woman’ and ‘nation’; and secondly, a focus upon articulation by agents, that is an intervention in the public sphere, vicariously through literature. The present study explores that interface, such that the process of interpretation, which places ‘race’ at the centre of the model, enables a charting of shifts and contradictions in the moral economy of representation, a process whereby ‘self’ and ‘other’ are socially constructed. In so far as this study is dialogic there are two related aspects. On the one hand is an exploration of the links between discursive themes of modernity, for which ‘feminism’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ stand out prominently. Each of these can of course be seen as metanarratives that determine, shape and control the activity of individuals, but the essential direction of their deployment is one in which they are seen as social constructs, as embodiments of power. Hence they relate to the interpenetration of ideology, in other words they stand between people and action. Consequently, they represent the axis along which agency runs. This is an important area of modern social theory that actually needs to recognize the spatiality in, through and upon which it rests. Indeed, that is how ‘feminism’ and ‘race’ have been written into the body of this work. The second aspect of this work is an analysis of the articulation of agents, a strategy of the qualitative school of sociology. Activity, consciousness and its determinants are key ideas in the play of meanings attributable to what is done, by whom and why. That smacks hard against the much-received wisdom in social theory that has wrestled with these values of social action for many years. Not least here we find

18 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

the stimulating, very suggestive, though totalizing products of cultural critique by Foucault. Like Foucault, I wish to unearth the hidden.72 It is evident that a politics of language is axiomatic. Language is an important tool of communication by which self, society and civilization are articulated. As Ernest Gellner has noted, language is an ‘astonishing rich system of socially instilled markers, capable of helping to keep members of a community within their cultural bounds or at least indicating what the bounds are . . .’73 This is not to suggest that language is the fence around a cultural zoo, though it may have that potential, rather ‘language’ also presents the anima, the unconscious, either by design or by default. Language is a commerce of communication. Edward Said presents a similar thesis. He points out that language is a system that deploys codes through a myriad range of mechanisms of inference, expression and trade.74 Terry Eagleton has, on this basis, argued that we need to more fully comprehend the power of language. ‘Discourses, sign systems, and signifying practices of all kinds . . .’, he writes, ‘produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely related to the maintenance or transformation of existing systems of power. They are therefore closely related to what it means to be a person . . .’75 In this context, feminist literary criticism has made significant contributions. Miriam Brody has argued that women writers of the Enlightenment engaged a rhetoric that was male-centred. Women writers faced two taboos: writing was deemed inappropriate, and especially so in order to preach to men! Authorship was vested as a male preserve, so women authors took up not only a quill but also a mantle of maleness.76 This is the bread and butter of modernity. A working definition of what modernity can be said to be would mostly erase much of its conceptual complexity and probably serve only to be trite and, therefore, of little use. The term, which is an abstract and highly charged composite of Western thought, is constantly being fashioned and re-fashioned. Principally, however, what commentators discuss, under the aegis of modernity, is how ‘time’ and ‘consciousness’ are networked to give greater credence to human agency in the making of self, community, society and civilization. There is a large body of thought and much contention within the debate. One aspect of this debate is ‘space’. In concert with Edward Soja, for example, I would argue that ‘space’ is axiomatic for social theory on two levels, that of the ontological and that of praxis. Space, while ever present, has been de-prioritized at the expense of ‘time’. That is, an historical imagination, which has marinated sociological theory too,

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 19

has been prized over a geographical imagination, when what are needed are both.77 The geographical imagination is very broad, arguably amorphous. It has nonetheless played a key, but largely unrecognized, role in defining the modern. Essentially, for modernity there is awareness that a region, which is physically distant from the political, religious and cultural centre, would also be socially distant. The centre–periphery equation is an equation of power. Shaping and bridging this equation is a structural reality of social control and citizenship: a politics of population. This is a spatiality of the movement of bodies. In a significant and highly dramatic way of course, slavery bears this imprint. Similarly, though less dramatic, women at the end of the eighteenth century were politically on the periphery of this space in that they had minimal rights as citizens and little or no access to the formal processes of the legalistic, political and authoritarian centre. This is where we encounter what Foucault stressed were the spatial distributions in which people find themselves.78 There are two additional reasons why ‘space’ needs to be re-prioritized, especially in terms of my work. The first pertains to Romanticism and its appreciation of landscape. Those who write of the ideological ascendancy of Romanticism on this very basis still fail to acknowledge fully that it is ‘spatiality’ that provides the vigour of the deep-rooted materialist and metaphysical interplay between nations and ‘races’. Secondly, there is a poetics of ‘race’ and place in the sociological theory of modernity, chronically expressed in both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, such that in ‘space’ races (are said to) occur.79 The alleged connections here between racial identity and homeland are fundamental, but not monolithic. The nature and effect of Diaspora must not be written out of the equation. The Black Diaspora is specifically a phenomenon of modernity, of the proto-capitalist epoch; black chattel slavery, which provoked a shattering of historical ties to places, has many theoretical links with the Jewish Diaspora, which predates modernity but which equally is victim to the ravages of latter-day modernity.80 The importance I attach to ‘time’ and ‘space’ should be abundantly clear. The essential and salient features with which I am, therefore, concerned under the aegis of modernity are how the specificities of ‘time’ and ‘space’ mediate ideological awareness. We can ask, what ideological deposits reside in the consciousness reflected in the writings of British women of the Romantic period? It is legitimate also that we ask what these women understood self, community, society and civilization to be. As we shall see, Mary Hays for instance spoke directly to this. In

20 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

doing so she exemplified a core feature of what Anthony Giddens has turgidly suggested is a key to understanding how folk understand themselves in a social or public context: reflexivity.81 At the centre of the social consciousness of modernity, it must be acknowledged that there is a normative and reflexive content. As Habermas has argued, society becomes self-aware with an understanding of its own; the Enlightenment encoded this into its agendas.82 Moreover, taking our cue from Paul Gilroy, we may accept the proposition that there is an underlying reality here: black modernity, which to a large extent dislocates fundamental faith in modernity as a metanarrative of progress. What is more, none of this makes any real sense unless we have an understanding of the geopolitical unit we know as Europe and the West. We need to recognize that embedded deep within the discourses of modernity are assumptions, goals and values as to whose community, which society and the nature of civilization itself, and that importantly these are issues of racialized spatiality. The importance I attach to these questions cannot be overstated. To this end, and I do not wish to appear trite in suggesting it, the essential underlying ingredients of modernity are temporality, spatiality and corporeality of western culture. Each of these is configured around the oppression and opportunities of being modern.83 The modern forms of social interaction that signify this bear a complex set of historical relations to tradition; something that many commentators are at pains to stress.84 There is of course a flip side to this, which is also racially charged. In the very assertion that ‘we’ are modern ‘we’ address not only ourselves, ‘we’ are also saying that ‘you’ are not. For social theory the quandary here, that is the cul-de-sac of articulating difference, is the normative assumption of progress as an engine of Western modernity. Such a quandary will manifest throughout this study of British women writers. It is not my intention, however, to provide an extensive critique of modernity per se, but rather to indicate the nature of its meaning as British women writers in a situation of crisis and change two centuries ago advocated their understanding of it. In summary, it may be noted that the years from 1788 to 1818 experienced unprecedented social dislocation and political unrest. During the period of the waning of the Enlightenment and emanation of Romanticism, British society was gripped by dissolution, dissatisfaction and disaffection, in various ways and to varying degrees, with the economic and political complexity of the British ancien regime. There was an economic, political and social reformation of British modernity. In that context there is a rich array of methodological questions to

The Romantic Period, Race and Enlightened Feminism 21

address and affirm. It seems to me that a less impoverished account of the historical and political environment is critical for what ‘feminism’ can be said to be, and importantly our understanding of the valorization of race thought. What must not be lost here is that late eighteenthcentury politics in Britain was saturated with the French Revolution and this impacted on the feminist project including the literary means by which it was expressed.85 That period, therefore, is a particularly apposite historical point at which to begin a study of ‘feminism’ and ‘race’ precisely because it was an era of crisis. That is, it was a period of transition, uncertainty and change. Unquestionably a very wide range of ideas, aspirations and political intercourse was on the agenda. Such a social, political and economic context is presented in this work as the backcloth to the tessellation of constituent parts that comprise British feminism. This book suggests that ‘race’ was central to that tapestry.

2 Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race

Late eighteenth-century British women writers lived and wrote in a context. What follows in this chapter is an examination of the politics of population within that contextual landscape. The nature of that landscape was British capitalism, skewed by colonialism and international trade from its inception, and which had deeply marked Britain.1 It created an eddy across all features of national, social, political and economic life. The ‘population’, variously delineated in subsequent textual moments, is located inside questions of poverty, welfare and citizenship; these are narratives which provide the contextual interaction of moral panic and ethnic survival. Crisis and social anxiety in late eighteenth-century Britain were inextricably linked in the valorization of British raciology. The centrality of ‘race’ is most obvious in slavery; slavery and the slave trade were endemic to that early phase of modern British social, political and economic development. But ‘race’ is not reducible to slavery alone; other ways in which ‘race’ imprinted early modern Britain are also explored in this chapter.

Empire and slavery Historians from across the political spectrum have long been attracted to the tumultuous ethical climate of the late eighteenth century. As the crisis-torn decade of the 1790s unfolded, British feminism of the late Enlightenment explored broad issues of representation (social, political and aesthetic) in the midst of social anxieties surging in the British society brewing in the wake of the Revolution in France. Those anxieties were grounded not only upon internal political difficulties but also upon external colonial exigencies that Britain experienced as a nation in full colonial overdrive. 22

Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race 23

Modern social, political and economic policies developed in Britain at one and the same time as the number of colonial possessions increased. By the end of the 1780s, new ventures were opened up in Africa and Australia, with the founding of the Sierra Leone project in 1787 and a convict colony in New South Wales in 1788.2 Cape Colony in South Africa was wrestled from the Dutch in 1806 and became British in 1814;3 Mauritius in 1810;4 the Gambia in 1816.5 Taking was an integral part of colonial expansion. The India Act of 1784 was designed to oversee appropriation of land and riches by the East India Company.6 The Company seized Penang in 1786, establishing a base for its operations in the East, and on the Indian subcontinent it subjugated Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, which facilitated forays to the west and the south. Ceylon, as it was then called, was captured by the Company from the Dutch in 1796, and was made into the first Crown Colony after it was detached from its control in 1802.7 In the West Indies, British Guiana, together with Trinidad, was obtained from Spain in 1797, and Tobago and St Lucia were taken from the French during the war in 1803.8 Much of the programmatic utility that lay behind British global expansion is to be found in the connections between wealth, poverty, crime and the burgeoning of empire.9 It has been argued that both Sierra Leone, in Africa, and Botany Bay, in Australia, came about for humanitarian reasons.10 Certainly, Sierra Leone evolved in part due to concern about freed slaves.11 Botany Bay was linked to prison reform; gaols in England were very overcrowded. The other colonial factor of course, which moreover provides context for both projects, was the loss of British America after the War of Independence. Consequently, political options about what to do with those persons who would have previously been shipped off to America were stymied. New horizons, new possibilities had to be found. New colonies proffered an answer. As James Walvin has noted, the British became very experienced at shunting slaves, criminals and other unfree labour all over the world as they tackled demographic problems at home and abroad.12 Demographic problems and concerns were often couched in portentous terms relating to capital. In a letter to Lord Harrowby, dated 29 September 1804, William Wilberforce, a close friend of Hannah More, pointed out that as we ‘invest British capital in any country, we must be desirous, coeteris paribus of keeping it . . .’13 William Cowper, a close friend of Charlotte Smith, advocated a paternalistic colonialism, in that Africa would be safer if ‘fenced by British laws . . .’14 Thomas Paine, in an article called ‘African slavery in America’, rhetorically pondered the extent to which Britain bore a duty to enlighten slaves, and the people in Africa.15

24 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

Anna Seward recognized the links between slavery and British capital. In a letter to Joshua Wedgwood, dated 18 February 1788, she wrote that acquaintances had schooled her to the effect ‘that the purchase, employment, and strict discipline of the negroes were absolutely necessary to maintain our empire, and our commerce, in the Indies’.16 However, she declared that she had ‘hopes that the floodgates of this cruelty may be let down without ruin to our national interests’.17 The contemporary view was that overseas possessions, both old and new, were very important for the continuation of national survival. The importance they posed for British well-being was widely recognized and broadly accepted. The significance of the colonial relationship between Britain and the rest of the world was a topical feature, and was firmly registered in the works of British women writers. In her epic poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, the liberal Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld commented upon London: ‘Whose merchants (such the state which commerce brings) / Sent forth their mandates to dependent kings; / Streets, where the turban’d Moslem, bearded Jew, / And woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu . . .’18 Although the text attacked commerce and empire, her terms were racially stereotypical.19 Slavery, the single most obvious signifier of the colonial project, moved to the centre of British politics between 1788 and 1792; so too did the issue of ‘race’.20 It is important, however, to note that much latter-day historiography has been deeply entangled, aimlessly, in the extent to which ‘slavery’ correlates with ‘race’.21 Such entanglement more often than not centres on the impact and status of the notorious History of Jamaica by Edward Long, or The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, by Bryan Edwards MP. Long tapped into highly racialized polygenist theories, and was of course not alone in promulgating racist notions of difference.22 In an obvious and manifestly pernicious way, categories of ‘race’ fit uncomfortably with notions of equality articulated in Enlightenment thought. The English maltreated the Irish, Scots and the Welsh, and rabidly disliked the French but the ‘racial’ grounds for doing so were relatively different in each case, and certainly different in comparison to the treatment of black people. The treatment of blacks by whites in the age of black chattel slavery, from the late fifteenth century onwards, occurred against a background of white racialized unity.23 The ethics of slavery uniquely embossed ethnicity: the emotional, intellectual and physical properties ascribed to slaves were inescapably racialized. Arguing that Long is an isolated case misses the point, for as the 1972 Symposium on Racism in the Eighteenth Century pointed out, ‘[s]lavery was scarcely a racial issue in

Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race 25

the eighteenth-century West Indies; it was a racial fact . . .’24 ‘Race’ and slavery were not hidden in the eighteenth-century intellectual landscape; British women writers were cognisant of that fact. In poetry, novels, letters and tracts they were not silent on black people in Britain or British interest in black people. This cut across political position or perspective: conservative or radical, race thought imprinted their compositions. The political economy of slavery profoundly disturbed Hannah More and the circle in which she moved, which included William Wilberforce and Ann Yearsley. In her poem ‘Slavery’, published in 1788, More roundly condemned the economic motives which guided the trade. ‘And thou, White Savage! whether lust of gold / Or lust of conquest rule thee uncontrolled!’25 she wrote in a tone of anger. While the paradigmatic world of representation in the poetic text contains a debate on African intellectual and emotional structures shaped by an evangelical vision, as Moira Ferguson has observed, the paradigm is also heavily charged with Eurocentric commercialism. It is marked with beliefs and values about the economic relationship Britain, and wider Western Europe, had with Africa. ‘Does thirst of empire, does desire of fame, / (For these are specious crimes) our rage inflame? / No: sordid lust of gold their fate controls, / The basest appetite of basest souls . . .’ she rhetorically stated, then, and significantly, she added ‘Gold, better gained by what their ripening sky, / Their fertile fields, their arts, and mines supply’.26 Moira Ferguson has argued that Hannah More, far from adopting a position which sought to marginalize the economics of the European–African relationship, actually wished to reconstitute it, that is retain the link but on different terms, which excluded slavery from the equation.27 An economic relationship was in More’s eyes inescapable. Yet while slavery was clearly condemned as an illness of the body politic, modern economic exploitation, on the other hand, was a healthy alternative, if not a remedy. It has been argued that Hannah More sits uncomfortably within the feminist canon.28 As a right-of-centre, evangelical moralist it is easy, in the light of how feminist history has been written in recent times, to see why that is so. Her sensitivity to slavery, and the invidious exploitation and degradation upon which it was based, fuelled her concern for ethical behaviour on a broader canvas too. The radical edge to her work has been historiographically blunted, yet her political eye saw parallels between the West Indian slavery of our ‘black brethren’ and the slavery which involved the ‘wives, daughters, aunts, nieces, cousins, and grandmothers even of these very zealous African abolitionists themselves . . .’29 Clearly, at that level of connectivity, she argued, there was a sexual dimension to power and social relations. In essence, that stands as a

26 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

radical, feminist critique of maleness and the political economy upon which it was based. ‘The White Slave Trade’ is concluded with a capitalized signatory statement, AN ENEMY TO ALL SLAVERY. Though sympathy against the ‘white slave trade’ came from different quarters, it mostly was not as mindful of the sexual hierarchy as was More, who did not stop at black chattel slavery in her critique of social, political and economic structures, and exploitation. Also published in 1788 was an anti-slavery poem entitled ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’,30 which was written by Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman-poet from Bristol, whose patron was Hannah More. Yearsley similarly condemned the trade, its wealth and those who profited from it. She addressed her poem to Bristol, the British seaport which was heavily embroiled in the slave industry. She similarly baulked at the self-proclaimed Christianity of slavers; if they claimed the mantle then they should behave accordingly. More and Yearsley were clearly not alone in this. Charlotte Richardson, for instance, wrote a timely poem entitled ‘The Negro, Sept. 1806’, in which she also condemned those slavers who professed Christianity: ‘Blush, ye Britons! blush for shame, / Let compunction seize your mind; / Dare ye boast the Christian name, / While ye prey on human kind?’31 The British slave trade ended in 1807, but slavery did not. Whereas More and Richardson, advocated a humanist discourse to prick the Christian conscience of those wedded to the slave industry, Yearsley was much broader in her attack. Moira Ferguson argues that behind Yearsley’s representation of resistance and rebellion was her own sense of working-class oppression: Yearsley, therefore, identified with the poem’s protagonist, Luco.32 Her sense of anger was unmistakable, and focused, fuelled by a political economy: deriding the self-proclaimed Christians, she referred to them as the sons of commerce, which opened up another vein of attack. Yearsley acknowledged that commercialism did some good in meeting the needs of the nation; perhaps she had in mind cocoa, coffee, sugar, textiles and so on. But the political arm of the mercantile class had umbilical partners, the parliamentarian lawmakers and overseers of justice. The link she made, moreover, was that what united commerce and law was murder, the metaphorical slaying of family ties, such as between Luco and his beloved ones, and the physical ending of life that slavery wrought. Yearsley was obviously angst-ridden by the criminal nature of British capital, trade and the political organs in its orbit. Moreover, Yearsley’s articulation was peppered with a gendered language: sons / commerce / Albion, fathers / country, nature / her. So, what she succeeded in doing, and what Hannah More consciously avoided,

Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race 27

was underscoring the complexity of the relationship between what are often thought of as discrete social phenomena, ‘sex’, ‘race’ and ‘class’. Late eighteenth-century commercialism united all three in ways that emphatically valorized difference. In her second vindication, Mary Wollstonecraft, the political opposite of Hannah More, tapped into what was for her a denegation of human rights. Yet her explicit articulation of black chattel slavery was also double-edged. ‘Is sugar’, she asked, always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man? Is not this directly to deny woman reason? for a gift is a mockery, if it be unfit for use . . .33 In this way, Wollstonecraft networked her ideas uniting ‘race’ and mercantile capitalism in her critique. Indeed, this stands as a classic illustration of the workings of agential reasoning, in that she did so not for the purpose of exposing that relationship but simply to advocate another problematic. For Wollstonecraft mobilized the imagery of slavery, a popular and readily hijacked metaphor in late eighteenth-century radical circles, as the basis for advancing her argument about the subjection of women. Wollstonecraft linked two forms of oppression to male-centredness, identifying the notion of servitude on two levels of consciousness. First, what may be observed in a traditional sense of sweetening the desires of a man, that is by feminine comfort and sexuality; Wollstonecraft was herself no stranger to sex or to actively seeking it, much to the horror of mainstream femininity and mainstream views on femininity.34 Secondly, the phrase ‘sweeten the cup of man’ referred also to the world of plantation sugar, devised, maintained and sustained by the same ideology of maleness, which in the eyes of Wollstonecraft subjugated women. Moreover, invoking sugar monoculture in this oblique way would have rung loudly in 1792, showing an acute awareness of contemporary ‘race politics’ and anti-slavery agitation in the wake of the San Domingo slave rebellion.35 But Wollstonecraft carried her reference no further. Rather she asserted her argument about women by echoing an older feminist stance on reason and the condition of womanhood under the weight of patriarchal relations. So her articulation cannot be taken as a direct attack on the institution of slavery, or the economic role of slavery in British commercial interests. While we can accept that Wollstonecraft’s

28 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

fundamental stand on black chattel slavery was that it was, as both Moira Ferguson and Virginia Sapiro have separately argued, an unnatural distinction,36 it may also be noted that Wollstonecraft was not shy in using the imagery of slavery as a rhetoric to fulfil an underlying critique of gender relations. Her reference stands, therefore, as a narration in which it was normatively advantageous to deploy it as a metaphor of the oppression of women. In this it must be stressed that she was not alone.

Jane Austen and empire At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was still in the process of developing as an essential part of a global economy. Internationalism has been a constant feature of the British capitalist enterprise. The eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution had unleashed a new class of power, and Jane Austen, who represents not only the apogee of our period but also personifies what many take to be an archetypal Englishness, was deeply embroiled in it. Her works, as Mary Evans has argued, positively endorse trade and professional activity in general.37 It is of course well known that Austen’s brother, Henry, allegedly her favourite, was a London banker and army agent. That connection was not untypical: trading relations were to be protected even at the risk of one’s life. It is reasonable to suggest that Jane Austen subscribed to that philosophy for which Sir Thomas Bertram’s excursion to his troubled Antiguan Estates in Mansfield Park, arguably her most political novel, stands as testimony.38 Importantly, moreover, trade and the property relations in its orbit signify a well-balanced union between worldly and ethical richness. The social temperament of the novels of Jane Austen is rooted in that relationship. Austen’s horizon was not as restricted as typically it is thought to have been. Edward Said places Austen in a social matrix of geography and location, in which space is brought to the fore, rather than temporality, a more delimiting factor. Let us consider what this might involve. Her extended and immediate family’s experiences meant that Austen, as Elizabeth Fay has observed, was aware of the wider world: about pre-revolutionary France from her cousin Eliza who was married to a French officer; on India where Eliza’s mother lived for thirteen years, and from Warren Hastings, who was a friend of her father’s; on the West Indies generally and Antigua specifically where her father was a plantation trustee;39 and two of her brothers, we should recall, were in the Royal Navy, one who ‘served in the East Indies, under Nelson, in the battle of St Domingo, and in the War of 1812; the other took British troops to

Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race 29

Egypt, suppressed the slave trade in the West Indies, and served in Burma’.40 Fay concludes that although Austen never travelled widely herself, she ‘could exhibit a knowledge of the world in her novels that extended beyond the seeming limitations her life imposed on her’.41 Austen took her readership from home to horizon with consummate ease. Her characterization, in Mansfield Park, for example, symbolizes heimat, with an almost hallowed attachment to land; critically, the material interests of those who command the home are spiritually never far away: Bertram travels abroad on business, temporarily leaving his estate, but the separation is emblematic.42 In the last analysis, empire, a mix of commercial and national interests, was not so far away. Austen brought it home. While we may readily admit that trade per se is not commensurate with the processes of industrialization, in the light of Eric Williams’ thesis on capitalism and slavery, it must nevertheless also be acknowledged that global trading, an endemic feature of British capitalism, facilitated that process. British global economic development at the close of the eighteenth century, and despite the cessation of formal British slave trading in 1807, furnished wealth and welfare in society at large with a mentality to match it. It is interesting to note that Edmund Burke signified colonial consumer goods in his assertion of the contractual nature of society. ‘Society is indeed a contract’, he wrote, ‘. . . but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco . . .’43 So, direct social benefits of trade, such as cocoa and coffee, similarly outline an important assemblage of values in Austen’s works by which we may appraise that mentality of wealth and welfare. It is evident that Austen clearly recognized as much as well. Even a rudimentary glance at eighteenth-century British economic history would pick up noticeable changes in trading activity, such as import– export profiles. Foreign trade changed dramatically: between 1700 and 1800, there was a shift of emphasis in Britain’s overseas trading accounts, from Europe to the East and the West Indies. Concomitantly, there was a change in consumption of foodstuffs such as cakes, cocoa, and tea and coffee sweetened with sugar. It is in that context that Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe (to name but three) were concerned enough and so each took the time to tell us that cocoa was consumed with pleasure.44 By design or default the dining table presented the glory of empire. More generally, of course, the wealth that it symbolizes, we have to recognize here (to paraphrase an Eric Williams quotation), can be said to have soaked every table in England in blood.45 Mary Wollstonecraft,

30 British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818

we may recall, alluded to the same. In this context, however, we may consider a variety of goods and foodstuff. Each elucidates the extent to which the home front came to depend on a racialized consumerism, such as coffee, sugar and rum. Colonial consumer goods, writes Linda Colley, became ‘sufficiently widespread to bring the spoils of empire to the level of every village shop, and the attractions of empire to the minds of many more Britons than ever before . . .’46 The marketplace was a key vehicle through which the wealth of empire cemented British social relations. The development of British capitalism was a spatially structured, global phenomenon. Embedded in British capital relations were cargoes of (mostly black) people transported to the New World to labour on sugar, tobacco, cotton and cocoa for the Old World. Black chattel slavery was an integral feature of wealth both as a source and as resource of its creation.47 As Mary Davis notes, slavery bridged British merchant and industrial capital.48 So, to fully understand ‘empire’ and ‘trade’ it is necessary to acknowledge the movement of things, services and people upon which ‘empire’ and ‘trade’ were dependent; in other words, exactly how Britain related to other nations, and other people. A spatiality of folk and places underpins this. Yet, the extent to which British economic development resonates a sense of things, services and tribalism remains largely unappreciated. Consequently, there is a concomitant failure to see British capitalism as instrumental in the construction of a racial geography.49 In a direct way, however, the wealth and fortune of the characters in Austen’s novels pivoted around a racialized spatiality. Admiral Croft and Captain Wentworth in ‘Persuasion’, for example, are Royal Navy seafaring money chasers, plundering spoils from both the East and the West Indies. Wentworth capitalized on his professional standing and managed to pocket not less than twenty thousand pounds of booty obtained during the war against France.50 Arising from action in San Domingo, he was promoted to commander.51 San Domingo, a site of conflict between the French and British during the 1790s, was an extremely profitable sugar producer. It was also the site of the greatest slave rebellion in history, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. The self-freed blacks successfully repelled French, Spanish and British military intervention.52 So, Austen’s tribute to Wentworth speaks volumes: a confluence of social standing, wealth and power are joined together in Wentworth, valorizing the racial geography of British commercial and imperialist interests. Lurking in the background here is the tragedy of slavery. Slavery, and the lucrative world it provided not only for Austen’s characters but also for Austen’s own family as well, is never far away in

Politics of Population: Empire, Slavery and Race 31

the catalogue of her novels. It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that her texts offer a highly political elucidation of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social, economic and international relations. At a time when women, across the political spectrum, were campaigning for an end to the institution of slavery, Austen not only refers to the slave trade a number of times, she also builds its social relations into her work, arching its contextual momentum to textual characterization: and the marketization of humans as commodities of exchange-value is never challenged. Instead, we find that such authorial references are used as a means by which other varieties of social indignation are to be measured, as the following passage, from Emma which was published in 1816, that is after the slave trade (not slavery) had been abolished in the British empire, clearly suggests: ‘There are places in towns, offices, where inquiry would soon produce for the sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect!’ ‘Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.’ ‘I did not mean – I was not thinking of the slave-trade’, replied Jane; ‘governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view . . .’53 Austen illustrates the plight of the governess, the indignation to which she refers is social standing and not the horror of slavery; but this takes another turn. She adds, ‘. . . as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.’54 In Mansfield Park, Austen takes this a little further. The patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram, who owned property in Antigua, is an absentee landlord.55 His property furnishes more than anecdotal wealth in the story line for it also indexes social standing, representing his class position. The West Indian estates are mentioned about a dozen times. For a good portion of the text Bertram is also an absentee character, travelling to his Antiguan estates at great personal risk, we are told, to oversee the resolution of troubles there.56 Upon his return, Fanny declared that she loved ‘to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour altogether.’ Then the point is tellingly revealed when the question, which immediately follows, is asked, ‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade?’57 Austen’s authorial voice, however, falls silent; we are not told what Bertram said to his niece. What is, therefore, of critical significance here is that slavery is elevated to a condition of exciting imagination only. So, not only the slave trade but also the institution of

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slavery, we may conclude, formed part of the moral underside of Austen’s writings and, to reiterate, remain unchallenged. This is not really surprising when we recall that the Austen family had real-life connections with West Indian society and plantation slavery. What Jane Austen projects, in this context, is a map of British consciousness that was global, self-interested and racially charged. More generally, British worldwide commercial trading interests gave Austen, and others, the landscape about which she (and they) eulogized so effectively, drawing on her travels across parts of southern England. Topography was a significant feature of Romanticism, and Austen clearly embraced it. Her eulogies on the countryside provide emotive frameworks for her characters to negotiate ‘darkness and shade, and natural beauty . . .’58 Austen strove to humanize the landscape about which she wrote. She invested it with a sense of humanity, crafted in no uncertain terms with qualities that have been asserted as an archetypal Englishness. She repeatedly promoted the romantic ideal of English landscape and human harmony. ‘I call it’, she wrote in ‘Sense and Sensibility’ in 1811, ‘a very fine country – the hills are steep, the woods full of timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug – with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It answers my idea of a fine country because it unites beauty with utility . . .’59 This is very evocative language, which suggests an unrestricted union between pleasure and nature. Pleasure perhaps, but not natural, for the landscape about which Austen eulogized has been carefully manicured for centuries.60 The Englishness of the English landscape owes much to the fruit of trade and colonial expansion, having been thoroughly fashioned by importation and horticultural design. The patriarch Edward Gibbon, for instance, acknowledged that ‘almost all the flowers, the herbs, and the fruits that grow in our European gardens are of foreign extraction’.61 We can note that the cedar, chestnut, larch, laurel, pear and sycamore trees, for instance, have all been brought to and cultivated in England.62 They are not, therefore, a natural component of English forestry. Allusions to their naturalness are ultimately, therefore, part of an illusion; it is myth making. Austen not only embraced the English landscape in that highly idealized way, she also ascribed value to it and promoted its emotional utility. Encomium is not by itself pernicious. However, what must remain germane is context. Barrie Trinder argues that by 1790, the Industrial Revolution had transformed the British landscape: railways, turnpikes, canals, mills, blast furnaces and steam engine houses were all present.63 Evidence from Austen’s texts suggests that we would be right to conclude

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that the occasionally mobile Jane Austen acknowledged such changes. As the processes of industrialization quickened in pace and scope, she clearly lamented the demise of ‘. . . larch and laurel, and beech cut down . . .’64 Nonetheless, Austen persisted with her craft, remaking the image of the English landscape. ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind’, she wrote, adding, ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive . . .’65 Determinedly, she constructed an idyll, in the face of the manufactured landscape. ‘English landscapes’, writes Lowenthal, ‘are compages of datable acts . . . infused with memorable human processes, desires, decisions, tastes . . .’66 Landscape, therefore, is the product not of nature, but of social relations. The stimulating observations of Gillian Rose are very instructive in this context. She has argued that perspective is a way of seeing and, importantly, it is culturally and historically determined.67 Social relations are embroiled in such specificity. By extending our gaze back in time to the late eighteenth century, to its socio-political and horticultural landscape, we may choose to see what Jane Austen chose to portray. Or, our perspective may be different. While we may accept that British forestry was resplendent with the oak, we may also note that the oak, as Mitchell argues, was the foundation for British merchant and military might.68 Oak was a material basis for British global supremacy. It was also a symbol of splendour and iconographed as a great protector, as Edmund Burke emotionally suggested in his idyllic representation, of rural England underneath the spread of the oak.69 Mitchell imputes less praise in those connections than Austen no doubt would have, given that the life and financial well-being of her brothers, Royal Navy officers, depended upon it. Colley draws attention to a wider web of vested interests, though her point is less wooden than that of Mitchell. She focuses on trade, economy and military capability, not the craft on which these rested.70

Poverty, welfare and crime Late eighteenth-century politics of poverty, circumscribed by laws of settlement and vagrancy, and the mechanics of poor relief, was heavily embroiled in techniques of compulsion associated with the emergence and professionalizing of governmental control.71 So, as Dorothy George drew attention, albeit unwittingly, to the exclusion of foreigners from poor relief, the nature of the definition of ‘who one was’ determined the prescription of what one was entitled to, and therefore what was

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likely to happen to one.72 George seemingly recognized as much without framing it as such. Her discussion of London immigrants and emigrants (Irish, Jews and Negroes) was constructed solely around poverty and the poor law, her overall thesis being that the settlement laws, vagrancy laws and poor relief structured economic dependency. Crucially, two themes run through such a discussion: charitable relief and population control. Both were techniques of treatment, in that late eighteenth-century British poor laws defined segments of the population and prescribed what was to happen to them. Clearly, these modes of governmental control circumscribed how folk lived, and how they should live. The so-called ‘foreigners’ in London, George points out, and in her work ‘foreigners’ remains an unchallenged social category, were not allowed poor relief from the parishes in which they settled.73 While such a technique of treatment undoubtedly also ensured that there was always a potential body of men, women and children as a source of very cheap labour, it was, moreover, a de facto casting out from the body politic of Irish navvies, allegedly nefarious Jews and deserted or runaway West Indian black slaves. George’s conclusion is hard to resist. The movement of people to and from London, she argues, was determined by the coercion of relief laws in the face of debt and hunger.74 The racialized gloss of her commentary is arresting. For our purposes, the poor, poverty and, broader still, the politics of welfare underlying social inequality are the very stuff of the racialization of social difference.75 The politics of the poor is, therefore, an appropriate vehicle through which to discuss raciology of late eighteenth-century British society for the basic reason that ‘inequality’ and ideas of ‘race’ and ‘racial difference’ have a common intellectual and cultural heritage.76 Malik contends that it was through the naturalization of inequality that social difference, particularly racial, was constructed. Through this lens we see that ‘difference’, ‘inequality’ and ‘race’ were integral features in the making of the working classes. The fracture here, indeed fault line, of modernity under the auspices of Enlightenment, is to be found in the ideological use of ‘nature’ as the explicator of perennial difference. The highly provocative text by Malik, however, which makes explicit connections between the tensions found within Enlightenment thought around the thesis of equality and the racialization of poverty and the poor, strangely fails to mention the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Though it may be argued that those very connectives account for the persistent attraction and solidity of the Malthusian thesis. The ideological undercurrent here, in which difference is produced, maintained, sustained and valorized, is socially malevolent. It is clearly

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more than, say, being hungry. Being hungry is being hungry: being poor, or a pauper, is a social definition of that condition. The subject is accordingly objectified and weeded, physically or mentally, from the rest of the population. This highlights the role of social class, and the governmental power relations in its orbit. The separation of the poor, physically or mentally, from the rest of the social fabric attempts to cleanse and decontaminate whatever and whomsoever they come into contact with. The racial connectivity here cannot be ignored. The point may be emphasized with reference to the Sierra Leone project.77 For this we also need to bring on board a discussion of crime and criminalization, noting that ‘poverty’, ‘crime’ and ‘empire’ are rarely mapped together in British social and economic history.78 In his discussion of ‘race’ and modernity, Ali Rattansi outlines the modern condition, under the umbrella of the Foucauldian management of populations. Rattansi deploys the metaphor of the modern gardening state, the ‘weeding’, ‘cleansing’ and ‘decontamination’ of people, which are heavily racialized operatives of state power.79 The extent to which a political economy of eighteenth-century poverty is also a racialized discourse, even by default, may be teased out of existing critiques, in the wake of Rattansi, under the rubric ‘politics of population’. Betty Fladeland touches upon this. This is emphatically the case with the Sierra Leone project, which she discusses at length.80 Black people, whom conventional histories typically fail to place in late eighteenth-century London, and Dorothy George was therefore seminal in this respect, were also part of the so-called criminal element subject to control and ‘gardening’; they were pruned away. Their social status was being poor. So, if the Sierra Leone project symbolized anything it was a potent reminder of the repatriation of poverty-stricken blacks. It is possible to suspend judgement on the motives of those who organized the scheme, and for now note that in a very obvious sense the net result was one of decontamination; the streets of London were racially cleansed. An underlying motif here is the criminalization of vagrancy and pauperism, and so Sierra Leone symbolizes criminality and empire. The late eighteenth-century colonizing impulse pervaded the social policies of the holders of British power; distance was the answer to the ‘black problem’. This discussion is not complete without reference to citizenship. The citizen is a legal concept related to state allegiance and protection; the nature of citizenship, that is the condition of citizenry, clearly determines the pattern of life that governs daily existence. Yet the nature of citizenship is dominated by ‘rights’; these signify the entitlements to be enjoyed in

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everyday life. Here we find an array of official and unofficial, declared and undeclared ‘privileges’. This shifts the focus of being a citizen away from theoretical ties to the state, and highlights the social bonding and commonality of ties replete in community and ultimately within the ethnie. In the late eighteenth century, ‘rights’ was a word of tremendous political and ideological currency, which in Wollstonecraft addressed that silent world of citizenship.81 Adherence to a sovereign state presupposes membership of the citizenry. In eighteenth-century England, black people were always assumed not to be members of the ‘club’, but rather as possessions of it. Blacks (and women) confronted the structure, nature and membership of the judiciary and polity as outsiders. The mechanistic, yet powerful, reactions of the judiciary, who defined those before them as deviant, passed judgements not as a corrective means of enhancing citizenship but as alternatives to it. That this is also a highly racialized relationship, as indeed Malik has argued, can be seen in the relationship between the poor and power.82 Paupers, the poor and povertystricken members of society generally were defined as a race apart.83 Indeed, according to Malik, understanding how European elites considered themselves superior to non-Europeans depends upon an understanding of how they defined and practised inferiority at home.84 That level of connectivity is very persuasive. Cleansing dovetailed with the idea and practice of empire as the answer to perceived social pathologies: foreign places substantially augmented the range of political possibilities. In a broader framework still, the social tensions emphatically revealed as the Industrial Revolution dislocated more and more traditional social relations, ‘cleansing’ was more than a simple knee-jerk reaction to a grand problematic. It is an endemic feature of capitalist modernity. The Transportation Act of 1719 had empowered Justices of the Peace to serve the voracious need for unfree labour in New World plantations. It spoke volumes also about how the poor, weak and most vulnerable sections of society could be defined as not in possession of citizenship, and shunted around the globe. It has been noted, by Christopher Hill, that this even included those actually acquitted but who nonetheless could not persuade courts they would behave.85 It is tempting to say that the need of empire was all. In this context, economic hardship (scarce employment, depressed wages, fluctuating prices) was suffered as a fact of life for the majority of the people.86 Not even knowing when a loaf of bread would be theirs circumscribed daily existence, mapping out the lives of the destitute and poor, year in year out. The cost of living involved, moreover, not only currency, which eluded many, but also risk, in that the penalty for

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an economic crime such as stealing bread was often hanging, or a sentence of transportation, usually for a fixed term but effectively for life, to a penal colony in Maryland in North America prior to Independence, and Australia thereafter. The link with empire was indispensable. According to Douglas Hay, nearly half of the death sentences passed during the eighteenth century were commuted to transportation or imprisonment.87 Fladeland has drawn obvious conclusions from this state of affairs: rather than protecting the poor, the law was a mechanism for removing them from the country,88 though Fladeland fails to develop this as a critique of racialized modernity. It can be suggested, therefore, that in the minds of those who oversaw British colonial expansion was an understanding of the utility of empire as a depository of undesirables. Empire established and sanctified a racialized geography of British interests. The raciology of British geography, furthermore, had boundaries, which had to be learned and respected. It imprinted and valorized cultural respectability. It is not incidental, therefore, that the inability to piece together maps of Europe, the fact that she did not know the rivers of Russia, or that she had not ever heard of Asia Minor was a source of ridicule for Fanny Price in Mansfield Park.89 Modern Britons were expected to know the map of international power. Betty Fladeland, and it must be stressed that she is not alone, fails to place the Sierra Leone project in a context of such imperial interests. Unsurprisingly, therefore, she does not view the project directly in terms of ‘gardening’. One thing she does identify, however, in the milieu of personal politics is the insensitivity of Granville Sharp, a patriarch of the project. When he encountered a lack of enthusiasm by blacks at being repatriated to Africa, she points out, he promptly distributed leaflets advising that charity be withheld from them. It hardly requires a quantum leap of imagination to understand that blacks were hesitant in accepting an invitation to go to West Africa because West Africa was still a primary slaving region. Fladeland, however, sees this as a simple flaw in Sharp’s character, casting him as impatient.90 Fladeland also points out that Sharp campaigned not only for an end to black chattel slavery but also in support of the labouring poor: conditions suffered by British labourers, he concluded, were better than those suffered by American slaves.91 Eighteenth-century discussion of oppression set the tone for subsequent critiques to follow, an invidious and highly racialized tenet which would feed into later generations of league tables of the oppressed and downtrodden. As far as Sierra Leone is concerned, I suggest that there were two factors that governed the genesis and development of the project. On the one

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hand, it cannot be separated from the wider colonial setting of late eighteenth-century British expansionism. Weeding out a section of the population, ostensibly on the grounds of compassion, the alleged driving force behind the project, served a dual purpose. What we find here is a flip side to compassion, an underside of undeclared and unintentional consequences. Certainly, the project satisfied what Foucault described as a ‘biopower’, that is a cleansing of the nation.92 Besides, if compassion is to bear fruit, if it is to mean something, the Sierra Leone project would have had to have been circumscribed by better treatment of the settlers in Sierra Leone than was actually the case. An unsigned petition records the sense of desperation felt by resettled blacks. ‘We at least feel ourselves so oppressed that we are forced to trouble your Honrs that your eyes as well as ours may be open . . .’93 They felt duped. ‘The promises made us by your Agents in Novia Scotia were very good and far better than we ever had before from White People . . .’94 They pleaded their case in the hope ‘that God will incline your hearts to us & make us Comfortable’.95 Moira Ferguson concludes that, given the way that black people were treated on the settlement itself, repatriation merely supplied cheap labour; it liberated no one.96 Olaudah Equiano, the freed black intellectual who was recruited to assist the project, declared in his autobiography (which was reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft) that copious mismanagement of the project had ensured its failure.97 Dorothy George, however, struck another chord underlying the sexual economy of criminalized social relations. She wrote that of the four hundred and forty one who first went to Sierra Leone about sixty whites, chiefly London prostitutes, were sent with them, removal to the colonies being a favourite project of the age . . . This first settlement (1787) at Sierra Leone was an ill-fated one, the climate was not all that had been supposed, and the emigrants were not of the stuff to make pioneers . . .98 Pioneer stuff or not, the method was used again; Rees records the exploits of criminalized women who were despatched from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales, to provide sexual services to incarcerated men folk.99 But the point George relates about prostitutes is very revealing. It conflates ‘crime’, ‘sex’ and ‘race’ in a way she probably did not intend. The casting out from the body politic of prostitutes (ignoring Biblical overtones here) associated a political economy of womanhood with the racial Other. The criminalized sexual economy of social relations, moreover, also hinged on an ideology of the polygamist, as Nussbaum

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has pointed out. Married white slavers who kept black women mistresses toyed with polygamist relations, which consequently pitted white and black women against each other.100 The symbolic figure of the prostitute in this economy underscores the buying and selling of people (flesh, as Jane Austen would say) which was an endemic feature of late eighteenthcentury British commercialism. I wish to conclude this section with reference to one last point. The other important factor that needs to be recognized when assessing the Sierra Leone project is that it too cannot be divorced from the specific decline in economic welfare which gripped Britain during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The poor laws, which circumscribed the welfare of those in need, came under a greater burden. But there is more to this than often is acknowledged. For it can be noted that poverty and the growing numbers of paupers, and the destitute, and what was perceived to be in the latter years of the eighteenth century a spiralling, nearly uncontrollable burden on the local rates for poor relief, signalled a moral panic about people. People, that is, from various backgrounds such as country and town, Irish and English, or black and white, that were more forcefully and more frequently brought together. The anxieties to which this gave rise, moreover, are embedded in what Malik notes as the racialization of social divisions.101 In the context of the burdensome trend on the system of poor relief, felt by the middle of the 1790s to be so great that remedial action was deemed to be imperative, black people were an easy target, or as Dorothy George put it: ‘. . . “blacks” continued to be conspicuous among London beggars’.102 The treatment that the black poor in London experienced was a mix of philanthropic concern, vocalized in tract, poetry and novels, and, as with the Sierra Leone project, an element of compulsion. Both, however, were deeply racialized notions.

Racialized compassion So, what did British women writers have to say about black paupers? The answer to this may be found in a discussion of ‘compassion’, which was a heightened social discourse in the later eighteenth century. Hannah More, for instance, wryly noted that compassion was ‘erected into the throne of justice’.103 It remains a truism of much social theory, however, as Gertrude Himmelfarb notes, that the way in which the poor are treated is the touchstone of a civilization.104 It is first and foremost a politics of ethics; an assessment of how people relate to each other, how they mix and survive, and importantly the nature and structure of their relationships. This strikes at the heart of citizenship.

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Historiographical writings about poverty and welfare overwhelmingly concentrate upon the mechanics of welfare provision. But there is more to the equation than this. A discussion of poverty and welfare must allow that it is also about human choices and ethics. In much of the discourse of British women writers of the late eighteenth century the experiences of their subjects were elevated to great prominence and this was emphatically the case through the media of compassion. Recovering the spatial and cultural mixing of folk through an examination of poverty in this period provides an effective hermeneutic template through which it is possible to explore the choices exercised confronting the issue of welfare. Through the media of compassion, British women writers proffered a unique slant on the racial metaphysics of that set of social ingredients. Many contemporary observers charted economic hardships, including women such as Mary Robinson, Amelia Alderson (later Opie) and Jane Taylor. All three women were from middle-class backgrounds and while Alderson and Taylor never experienced privation, Robinson did. Robinson’s social criticism was effectual. Casting her net wide, she brought together, in her poem ‘January, 1795’, an apt juxtaposition of ‘Lords in ermine, beggars freezing / Tilted gluttons dainties carving, / Genius in a garret starving’.105 It is a panoramic critique of the times, with pointed reference to royal weddings, impoverished authors and dying soldiers. Alderson, in ‘Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795’, similarly honed in on a socially realistic catalogue through a gendered construction of war and poverty. ‘War’, she wrote, ‘who bids trembling Europe gasp, / With wild convulsions in his bloody grasp.’106 ‘Lo! Famine spreads her banners wide . . .’, she wrote with great concern.107 Speenhamland conducted its experiment in 1795: both Robinson and Alderson were clearly mindful of the gravity of the situation. Taylor, meanwhile, in a poem entitled ‘Poverty’, carried further the rustic interest Wordsworth glowingly eulogized in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. She wrote of a family who ‘. . . dwelt / in a hovel dismal and rude / And though gnawing hunger they felt / They had not a morsel of food . . .’108 Such depiction provides an ambience of the realpolitik, a context of not only metaphysical but also materialist experiences of the folk (white, British and poor) of the late eighteenth century. Yet Taylor is also significant in that she underscores what may be termed a voyeurism of difference. In ‘A Town’, for instance, a poem about Britain’s industrial heartland published in 1816, she clearly captured the sense of activity and commerce, ‘. . . listen to the ceaseless din / Of hammer, saw, and crane; / And traffic passing out and in, / From alley, street, and lane . . .’109 But she was keen also to articulate

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the ‘...varied forms of woe,/What hope and fear are found;/What passions rise, what scandals grow, / Within this narrow bound . . .’110 The spatial allusion to alleys, streets, lanes and narrow bound not only signifies the organizational separateness of town life and country life, but also represents a social difference in their respective civil societies. The raciology of this is underscored with her othering of the labourers, ‘As evening stretches o’er . . .’, she wrote, ‘Plebeian tribes from toil set free / Pour forth from every door . . .’111 The plebeian population were, therefore, a people apart from her world and those who moved in it. That sense of difference anchored a raciological core to British women writers’ annotation on compassion. Eliza Kirkham Mathews chose to use ‘race’, attributed by colour, to delineate her politics of compassion. Her poem, ‘The Indian’, from 1802, makes a point of highlighting the plight of poor and destitute Indians in Britain. As Rozina Visram has noted, many Indians, whom Visram calls ‘chattels of empire’, were brought to Britain as servants, and were later discharged and left, penniless, to fend for themselves. This was a common occurrence for such non-citizens.112 They fell outside the scope of institutionalized assistance in the form of poor law relief. Clearly, Mathews chose to record what was evidently happening with alarming frequency. Mathews did not turn her back on the issue. Despite the fact that Indian men were in the same predicament, Mathews engenders her record, which is about a woman. The Indian woman was friendless, and begging in a foreign country.113 Mathews invited the reader to acknowledge, understand and sympathize with the plight of the woman. The solicitude that underlay Mathews experience was such that she was moved enough to compose her short poem on the plight of Indians. But more than that, Mathews was also angered enough to expose and condemn the voyeuristic vision of those who simply stared as the Indian begged: ‘Alas! her native tongue is known to few / Her manners and her garb excite surprise; / The vulgar stare to see her bid adieu; / Her tattered garments fix their curious eyes.’114 The visuality of ‘race’ was arresting. Mathews’ level of compassion was not an isolated and unique phenomenon. Dorothy George, writing in the early twentieth century, noted the same. She contends that foreigners were not maltreated in London.115 Such treatment had racialized boundaries, which George felt compelled to observe. ‘Negroes in London were immigrants of a class apart, and their position must have been strangely friendless and anomalous . . .’116 George thereby proffered her own level of understanding and sympathy. Yet in commenting upon the pauperized, criminalized (as runaways) chattel status of black people, George

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referenced a syncopated idiom, referring to them as poor creatures,117 noting also that ‘[g]eneral sympathy was with the Negroes’.118 Such sympathy fed into popular anti-slavery agitation.119 British women writers of the late eighteenth century systematically presented black characters in their works. This included a figurative ingredient which compassion, deployed by central characters towards the helpless and poverty stricken, manifested. For the first thirty or so pages in The Wanderer, the last novel by the politically conservative Fanny Burney, the central female character, fleeing oppression in France, was blackened and to all intents and purposes was a black woman.120 It is very probable that there is an intertextual connection between The Wanderer, and the poem ‘September 1, 1802’ by William Wordsworth. The prefatory statement written by Wordsworth to his poem reads: ‘Among the capricious acts of tyranny that disgraced those times, was the chasing of all negroes from France, by decree of the government: we had a fellow-passenger who was one of the expelled.’121 Burney’s black character was helpless and managed to elicit assistance from the white characters who befriended her in her hour of need. This exposed racial tensions and prejudices among the white English characters. Fanny Burney negotiated this with great awareness. The heroine, as a black woman, is referred to as ‘a black insect buzzing about’.122 Harleigh, the central male character, offered assistance declaring to his co-travellers that he felt compelled to help her.123 The fact that the heroine turned out to be white was irrelevant in terms of the sympathy her blackness invoked in other central characters and those of the reader. Later in the story a household matriarch threatened a black character, a slave, with being ‘shipped back to the West Indies’.124 Burney clearly took the side of the heroine, by now a white woman called Juliet, whose face we are told was painted with disgust, at this ‘inhumanity’.125 Burney alluded to entrenched racialized prejudice in British society. Such prejudice signalized a growing sense of racial hierarchy. This was partly confronted by the radical Amelia Opie in her novel Adeline Mowbray, which was loosely based on the lifestyle of Wollstonecraft. In a key scene the heroine of the story was further endeared to the hero, Glenmurray, by virtue of the compassion she displayed to a destitute black woman named Savanna. We are told that Adeline had often given a halfpenny to Savanna’s son, Tawney Boy, when she was out walking. On one such occasion, Adeline witnessed a disturbance during which a creditor hurled a racist insult declaring Savanna to be ‘that ugly black toad’.126 Opie then explicated upon difference. On the one hand, we are

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informed that Adeline ‘till then had not recollected that she was a mulatto; and this speech, reflecting so brutally on her colour . . .’,127 had jolted her perception. On this basis, ‘race’ and skin colour were not a basis upon which to discriminate; life had one membership card only and that was the human race. This was fully in keeping with some radical postulations of the day. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, argued against unnatural distinctions predicated upon ‘race’.128 On the other hand, it is pointed out that colour was ‘a circumstance which made her an object of greater interest to Adeline . . .’129 In modern parlance this is mixed ideology. First, difference was presented as a mode of fascination, as an oddity. Secondly, it could even indicate different and equal: though clearly not in material and financial terms, for what leads to this in the first place was, of course, destitution. We are then told that Adeline paid a debt of three guineas to the creditor. This was the last sum of money Adeline herself possessed. Glenmurray who learned of this ‘noble’ act of charity, in this instance circumscribed by gender and ‘race’, became all the more enamoured with Adeline because of it.130 Anderson and Zinsser note that many women were expected to engage in charitable acts; some, like Hannah More, made a career out of it.131 Class framed virtue. It is interesting to note that despite Opie basing her story loosely on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft herself argued that such charity was the ‘most specious system of slavery . . .’132 Compassion towards the black poor was a common feature of literary works by British women. In Letter VII, in the epistolic novel Secresy, by Eliza Fenwick, another radical friend of Wollstonecraft, we are told the story of a destitute Indian woman. She had travelled to England in search of her son whom Sir Thomas Barlowe had taken to England, as ‘a young Creole secretary’.133 The woman fell on hard times and ‘languished in the extreme of misery and disease’, her ‘money all spent, her clothes almost all sold . . . she begged her way, half naked, to Sir Thomas Barlowe’s seat . . .’134 When she collapsed due to anguish and fatigue, the hero of the story, Mr Murden, attempted to offer assistance ‘. . . coming up to the Indian – yes Sibella, this seducer perhaps, this very elegant, fashionable, handsome, and admired Murden immediately lifted in his arms the poor miserable despised object, from whose touch others had revolted, carried her into an apartment . . .’135 There is, moreover, another side to this coin of compassion, which is a currency of condemnation. Fenwick had the writer of the Letter, Caroline Ashburn, move tentatively towards breaking the patriarchal framework that circumscribed her life. When it was revealed that the Indian woman was dead we are told that Ashburn ‘hoped and expected to have been informed by what means

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my father amassed his fortune: for, the suspicions which I find generally attached to East Indian riches sit heavy on my mind . . .’136 It is perhaps fitting testimony to Fenwick’s political awareness that she was able to write into her story a critique of the moral, ethical and racialized nature of British society, and significantly the political economy upon which it was based. Fenwick was alert to the human costs involved in the transportation of people from India to England. The class and racial terms of that set of international and financial relationships was registered as ‘vicious’.137 Empire, we may conclude, was also a source of disquiet.

Sex, race and civilization The ‘history from below’ school of historiography, especially in its feminist incarnations, has systematically demonstrated that the times and temper of a period may be charted with reference to an illustration of life chances, labouring life and indeed the class struggles by which it is often symbolized. Texts on late eighteenth-century political, social and economic history are, indeed, peppered with this in one way or another. However, to chart events like a catalogue is a simple and dry presentation of data. It is so often a meagre method by which to interrogate what it is that we think was the mental and material existence of folk in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are many other interlocking aspects to this discussion, and I wish to turn to those that bear most directly on the immediate topic of concern. The contours of feminist histories proffer many twists and turns, continuities and disruptions. In what was a path-breaking new wave feminist text of the early 1970s, Sheila Rowbotham addressed the processes of British industrialization as one of both opportunity and oppression. Rowbotham, whose agenda in Hidden From History was an assessment of oppression of women and, importantly, their resistance, also addressed the work of Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population. However, she reduced the ideological impact of the Essay, which sits uncomfortably in socialist and feminist canonical writings, to an assessment of the effect of birth control on the early socialist movement.138 Socialists remained unreceptive to the idea of contraception due to the Malthusian pall. Undeniably, their primary belief focused on the distribution of wealth, not the number to whom it had to be distributed. In any case, there is a richness of discussion to be found in the highly racialized nature of self, society and civilization that the Essay, by Malthus, represents. It is, therefore, worth exploring the Malthusian critique in some detail as it

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actually brings to the fore issues at the heart of the problem of population, sex and ‘race’. Malthusian macropolitics of population, within which microstate welfare tackled poverty, put forward a debate, which addressed the nature and organizing principles of British civilization. It reflected and advanced deep-rooted anxieties about the population that beset the imagination of social philosophers in the crisis-torn decade of the 1790s. Clearly, by the end of the eighteenth century, the size of the population and the impact this was allegedly having on the nature and structure of British civilization, that is the political, economic and essentially the moral and physical fibre of the labouring men, women and children of the nation, was a matter of tremendous anxiety.139 In this vein, it was contended that poor laws contributed to that crisis in that they unwittingly enabled families, as the primary subject of sustenance, to grow beyond their immediate capability to sustain themselves, and just as importantly poor relief sapped their ability to be productive and morally robust.140 It was from within this perspective that Malthus wrote, and perhaps we should read, his now-infamous book.141 The Essay is a consolidation, a particular summary, of late eighteenthcentury views on poor law, containing a tightly networked set of conservative values and beliefs which address the social structure and relations of power, privilege, affluence, wealth and the welfare of citizens and Others. The crux of the problem, Malthus argued, was the extent to which British civilization could demographically expand without precipitating a social and economic disaster; a disaster he calculated would certainly occur, if the contemporary rate of population expansion continued, in twenty-five years.142 Malthus was alarmed that space and time were running out and confidently predicted the threat of starvation.143 If we look carefully at his thesis, it is evident that ‘space’ is a key to understanding his thinking. Space in a very obvious and simplistic sense provides soil, and soil may be tilled, and farmed and people may be fed from it. The problem was that, in the eyes of Malthus, too many people were expecting to be fed. But the Essay also contains remedies: like others before him, Malthus looked to colonies. One mode of alleviating his concern lay in empire: ‘The situation of new colonies’, he wrote, ‘. . . is a bloom of youth that no efforts can arrest’.144 Clearly, Britain is geographically a medium-sized island with obvious finite space for its population. This seems to have been instrumental in his thinking. And, indeed, others too were swayed by such thinking and reached similar conclusions.145 What, therefore, lay beneath the Essay, was a moral panic about the demographic survival of the English ‘race’.

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So, in the process of elucidating upon sexual morals, Malthus also prescribed social behaviour for the survival of the English nation. The racial overtones of his narration are very clear: there are numerous references to the ‘savages’ of North America, peppered throughout the text; Malthus also singles out for special mention the Chinese. Malthus not only comments upon the eating habits of the Chinese whom he chides, in a normative remark, as ‘glad to get any putrid offals that European labourers would rather starve than eat’, but also ventures to make a connection between the cultural practice in which the ‘law in China which permits parents to expose their children . . .’ and the inevitability of famine. Similarly, his condemnation of India: ‘It is probable that the very frugal manner in which the Gentoos are in the habit of living contributes in some degree to the famines of Indostan.’146 In his critique of citizens and Others, Malthus promoted an anthropology of sex and comparative social systems in his argument. He identified sexual pleasures as inherently problematic for the nation as a whole; the sense of blame attributable to female sexuality is intense. ‘Urged by the passion of love’, Malthus argued, ‘men have been driven into acts highly prejudicial to the general interests of society, but probably they would have found no difficulty in resisting the temptation, had it appeared in the form of a woman with no other attractions whatever but her sex . . .’147 Malthus related sexuality to the structure of society, and broader still to the notion of building civilization: ‘Young scions’, he wrote, ‘were pushed out from the parent stock . . .’148 In this way, Malthus crafted a highly gendered world of male activity and female passivity. Female sexuality and feminine sensuality were objectified and cast as a natural anchor around which male reason pivoted as a ‘proper corrective and guide’.149 Malthus presented a gendered world with great solidity; his syntax pairing rich with maleness and poverty with the feminine.150 William Hazlitt condemned Malthus’ sexual premise: commenting on the human desire for food and sex, which Malthus had cast as the engine behind human choices, he argued that ‘there is no analogy, no parity in the two cases . . . No man can live for any length of time without food; many persons live all their lives without gratifying the other sense.’151 The mathematical arguments proposed by Malthus, he declared, may resonate in men, but would not in women, who are governed more by feelings than reason.152 Hazlitt clearly contributed to, and sustained, the ideology of separate mental and emotional spheres for men and women; the former elevated and guided by reason, the latter by feelings and nature. The demographic disaster Malthus perceived to be in the making was to a large extent directly linked to female ‘attractions’.

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His argument was reductive; Hazlitt argued that the theory was ‘warped, disjointed, and sophistical . . .’153 The Essay, ostensibly about the British poor and British poor laws, fostered a normative critique in which the racial Other was heavily represented. It has been frequently remarked that when an Indian family has taken up its abode near any European settlement and adopted a more easy and civilized mode of life, that one woman has reared five, or six, or more children though in the savage state it rarely happens that above one or two grow up to maturity.154 Malthus draws together a thesis on inequality and a thesis on ‘race’. ‘The North American Indians, considered as a people’, he wrote, ‘cannot justly be called free and equal. In all the accounts we have of them, and indeed, of most other savage nations, the women are represented as much more completely in a state of slavery to the men than the poor are to the rich in civilized countries.’155 Hazlitt pointed out that Malthus’ premise is that ‘evil increases with the progress of improvement and civilization’.156 Moreover, if Malthus is suggesting that there needs to be a check on such developments, Hazlitt argued, then the suggestion was mistaken: if Malthus was saying that it ‘would be better to return to a state of barbarism,’ rather than tackling or recommending ‘any alterations in existing institutions’, then his comments, allegedly rooted in the laws of nature and glossed by a so-called ordination from God, were merely ‘illiberal, and not philosophical’.157 Hazlitt poignantly noted that ‘the division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement . . .’158 He exposed the class-based nature of the world which Malthus wanted to hang on to, in the following semiotic vision: ‘a labouring man is not allowed to knock down a hare or a partridge that spoils his garden; a country-squire keeps a pack of hounds; a lady of quality rides out with a footman behind her on two sleek, well-fed horses’.159 The Essay, which was itself a response to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, provoked further responses; Hazlitt’s was but one.160 It was to that canvas that Jane Marcet added her voice: she wrote her ‘Conversations on Political Economy’, which appeared in 1816. Writing on the condition of the poor, Marcet groomed her tutees in the Malthusian politics of population. Her discourse covers a range of issues: investment, resource allocation, enclosure, emigration, colonization, knowledge and education.161 The whole debate was, however, deeply

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imbibed by the modernity of class, sex, ‘race’ and nation, which is exactly where Malthus started. Malthus embraced Enlightenment postulations on development which saw environmental factors as the driving force behind human cultures, which concomitantly rested on the assumption that human nature was the net result of a barrage of extraneous stimuli. In a crude, but nonetheless accurate, sense while he viewed the stimuli–response of sexual behaviour in precisely that way, he also added environment and climate to the equation. His view was thereby a racialized understanding of the relationship between nature and civilization. ‘The temperate zones of the earth’, he explained, ‘seem to be most favourable to the mental and corporal energies of man, but all cannot be temperate zones . . .’162 This mechanistic view of social and political development was predicated upon a rigid relationship between sex and activity, between nature and history. In the last analysis, this was dependent upon the connectivity embedded in a racialized geography. Indeed, I wish to conclude this discussion of politics of population with a remark on social theory that needs to be more fully acknowledged. The interplay, movement and mingling of people is a recognizable spatiality. In the context of late eighteenthcentury British society, poverty and welfare was a spatial, overarching macro-rhythm to which people moved. Compassion, which affected that rhythm, and which was advocated by white British women writers towards destitute black people, needs to be read in that light. As capitalist industrialized commercialism fanned out from England, the genesis and consolidation of the modern class structure, and the myriad factions of social relations in its orbit, fostered techniques of treatment that rooted in its wake. The economic picture of Britain from the late 1780s through to the late 1810s was a compound of potential for growth but also very real depression in which economic dependency, local, national and international, consecrated the mixing of folk. That should not be ignored. British women writers of the time did not ignore it. Jane Taylor, who in 1806 wrote ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’, sums up the sense of (middle-class) social angst replete in witnessing the poor, in that social structure. ‘. . . O then, let the wealthy and gay / But see such a hovel as this, / That in a poor cottage of clay / They may know what true misery is, / And what I may have to bestow / I never will squander away, / While many poor people I know / Around me are wretched as they.’163 Her sister, Ann Taylor, offered a gloss on raciological difference in which the racialized world of comfort, work and suffering was captured in her poem ‘A Child’s Hymn of Praise’ written in 1810: ‘I thank the

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goodness and the grace / Which on my birth have smil’d, / And made me, in these christian days, / A happy English child. / . . . I was not born a little slave, / To labour in the sun, / And wish I were but in the grave, / And all my labour done . . .’164 Judith Rowbotham has argued that Taylor was intent on making links between ‘a patriotic Christian sentiment’ and ‘wider English interest overseas’.165 British women writers of the late eighteenth century were very astute to the political machinations of the set of social and personal experiences shaped by economic and racial relations at local, national and international levels. One of the most striking features of Britain’s struggle with these issues was the Malthusian pall; women writers, however, brought a humanistic gloss to the debate, which went beyond the narrow strictures Malthus proposed. Britain had embarked on a process of capitalist modernization in which the accumulated spoils from empire were manifestly obvious. Pre-eminent here was an inscription of slavery and the Other it violently and pathetically represented. This was registered by British women writers with great acumen.

3 The French Revolution and British Raciology

The French Revolution of 1789 is central to the study of British women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At its most exalted level, the French Revolution posed questions about the nature and trajectory of European civilization. This chapter, therefore, explores the ways in which British women writers of the late eighteenth century engaged in literary pursuits during what Marilyn Butler has termed the revolution controversy, which clearly gripped not only Britain but the whole of Europe as well.1 The Revolution focused political attention on who true patriots allegedly were, not only within France but also in Britain and other European countries.2 It was a powerful common enumerator of contemporary views on social philosophy in which discourses of alterity were articulated. British interests in the Revolution in the same way revolved around war, nationalism and ethnic bonding. This conflated nation, state and democracy as a triumvirate of ethical salvation: British perceptions of ethnic survival, therefore, were framed by a cultural mindset conspicuously invested by ‘race’. What brought this to the fore was the 1792 declaration by the French of their support for those patriots who needed assistance to reclaim their rightful place as custodians of the nation. That catapulted the British polity into a cycle of national and racial despair in which alterity was felt to be, and articulated to be, a tangible reality; the Revolution represented a form of demonology. Late eighteenth-century British politics can, therefore, rightly be understood as highly racialized. But it is equally important to recognize that such a discourse of alterity was also an ideological site of struggle. Though they have rarely been acknowledged as important commentators, women writers offered critical observations concerning the deep 50

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social anxieties that racked late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British society. It is possible, therefore, to see how what they said about the ‘new woman’ that they wanted to be underscored tensions within the social fabric. The evaluative gloss offered by the women who engaged in the dialogue on the qualities of reason, rationality, education and human nature, which were substantive issues in their literature, occurred during a time of tremendous ideological dislocation, in that contemporary social philosophy was circumscribed by the dramatic events in France. As from 1793 this extended to African and West Indian theatres of operation; this valorized a nationalist raciological discourse which was shaped by a colonizing impulse, and the notion of civilization, the pervading vantage point of which was that of the white, western vision. So, reading what these women wrote, from across the whole of the political spectrum, against the background of Revolution in France and radical activity in Britain is exciting and revealing. Ideologies of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ figured heavily in their ideas and their works. This chapter negotiates how and in what ways that was the case.

Political imagination and the French Revolution The events of 1789 were the outcome of a long conflict between social and political forces whose vision was the antithesis of those allied to the landed interests of the absolutist and in essence corrupt monarchy: the Revolution in France struck at the heart of social and political representation under the ancien regime.3 The intensification of radical politics in Britain in the wake of the Revolution and the aspirations, altercations and anxieties to which that gave rise provide an excitingly rich intellectual environment for an analysis of the works of British women writers. The Revolution galvanized the political imagination in Britain just as it did across the rest of Europe. It precipitated global war in the process. It was a major point of reference in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political, social and cultural thought.4 It sent a shiver of panic across Europe. ‘Never’, wrote Charlotte Smith in Desmond, ‘were the eyes of the European nations fixed on a more interesting spectacle’.5 The machinations of French politics touched raw political nerves in Britain.6 Older radical groups, originally established to commemorate the Glorious Revolution of 1688, together with later reform societies, whose political existence was rooted in social and religious dissent, sprang into action. They acknowledged if not the desirability of what the French nation was attempting to do in detail then

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its importance for political and democratic struggle, particularly for national self-determination. Against this background rests the political currency of citizenship. In and through the concept of citizenship reside notions of belonging, to nation states vicariously through a sense of nationalism and patriotism, and also, and in many ways more significantly, an acceptance of the idea of human rights. French Revolutionary politics attempted to valorize the making of national autonomy, that is the right of self-determination based on ethnic realization: a sense of community and praxis.7 The ethical framework of this signifies a discourse of ‘race’, that is how different ethnic groups actually, or should, behave towards each other. The San Dominguan Revolution heightened that raciology. Commenting on how news about San Domingo was received in Britain, Moira Ferguson notes that the successful struggle for freedom brought another twist to the way the French Revolution was understood, raising further the sense of alarm it portended.8 People claiming their freedom from subjugation threatened investments with copycat insurrections by other Caribbean Africans and domestic working classes.9 This intensified as from 1793 when wars began against Revolutionary France. Nonetheless, this spoke volumes to British radicals.10 British radicals, such as Charlotte Smith, spoke volumes in return. Smith, commenting on the French, noted wryly that European states in general will not suffer them to throw off corruption, but unite to perpetuate to them what they either do submit to, or are willing to submit to themselves – I rather fear that liberty, having been driven away to the new world, will establish there her glorious empire – and to Europe, sunk in luxury and effeminacy – enervated and degenerate Europe, will return no more.11 Smith’s statement was heavily gendered. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political commentary, the meaning of radicalism is overwhelmingly associated with a nonestablishment politics, primarily with a socialist veneer. The conventional presentation of British radicalism, in texts of political and intellectual history, has tended to be male-centred. This is not surprising as most of the historical commentaries that focus upon radicalism have been written from within the same perspective as broader host histories of labour and socialist male-dominated historiography. Hence radicalism has tended to be linked with folk heroes such as Thomas Paine, Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, John Thelwell, William Blake, Robert Owen and William Cobbett, each of whom it must be said did not necessarily

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sympathize with the perspective of each other. This is not to say that women were always absent from the works by these men, far from it: commentators have drawn attention to the salient presence of women in the organizations associated with radicalism; Owenite politics is a classic example.12 But the feminist politics of Owenite socialism, which was rooted in the Rights of Woman question, stands as a prime example of marginalization. Although many women engaged with Owenism because it offered a political vision which included sexual equality, its feminist radicalism has often been lost; sidelined as ‘theoretical’, ‘diversionary’ and ‘utopian’, as indeed Barbara Taylor has argued in her inquisition of socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century.13 Broader still, radicalism tends to be equated with the numerous Corresponding Societies that existed to campaign for various political and social reforms.14 That the radical project of the late eighteenth century was a discourse embroiled in and animated by notions of the Other may be appreciated on two fronts. First, British slavery, and the mastery of non-white peoples of the world, provided an ethnic and ethical yardstick by which radicals assessed the political landscape. Clearly, the imperious regulation and rhythm of the modernity of colonization and empire and the early phases of the capitalist market established a hazard for the nations and peoples that Britain seized. In that geopolitical framework the ambitions of the British nation state and economy were thus realized. However, the structure and nature of that version and vision of British civilization, clearly predicated upon race relations symbolized by slavery, came under a radical microscope, intensely so in the wake of the Revolution.15 Secondly, the structuring properties of ‘civilization’, as a key concept for the latter part of the eighteenth century in which British radicals anchored their political imagination, reified a racialized difference: British ideologies of civilization, which nationalist traditions and assertions enjoined, jealously clung to the notion ‘us’ and ‘them’.16 In the 1790s, the ideological lines of attrition were clearly demarcated. On the one hand there was the advocacy of Thomas Paine who, as an exiled radical, symbolized the New World order first in America and subsequently in France as well. The wake of the Revolution in France had left the political waters in Britain certainly choppy; in the eyes of Paine they were lively and flowing with promise. He went so far as to declare that the ‘present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world’.17 On the other hand, there was the advocacy of Edmund Burke. Burke represents the interests of tradition in Britain, that is the ancien regime, insular and pure. The conservative counter-reaction,

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of which Burke was the most articulate spokesperson, was initially a mix of puzzlement, and indifference, then one of horror and fear, circumscribed by a populist Francophobia that aimed to stamp out contamination by foreign ideology.18 By the mid-1790s, the fear of domestic uprisings led to a governmental response which was ruthlessly threatening.19 In the mental universe of eighteenth-century Britain, the single largest demon was the Otherness of the French.20 The Revolution of 1789 crystallized that sense of demonology. Charlotte Smith conceded ideological ground acknowledging that ‘the name of a Frenchman will hereafter give no other idea than that of a savage’.21 That was precisely what Edmund Burke articulated in his Reflections. For Burke, the political waters were unsettled, poisonous and dangerous. The vitality of the Revolution and the importance it posed to British politics is, therefore, hard to overstate. It consolidated social philosophy and the temperament of allegiance to both monarch and country, the like of which was rarely seen in British politics, the only possible exception perhaps being the days of the English Civil War. The radical Dissenting Minister Dr Richard Price, a close friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, certainly thought so. He wrote, in commemoration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’, celebrating the Revolution in France in the process.22 He triggered a debate.23 In response to him some argued that the constitutional shell within which Britain perceived historical truths was unique with a brilliance of its own, and certainly in no need of change and definitely not contamination by importing impure foreign, that is American and French, ideas. Edmund Burke, a powerful patriarchal voice, spoke in such terms in his reply to Price.24

Patriotism In response to the French Revolution there was a proliferation, and a broadly networked engagement, of political and philosophical commentaries in Britain. The event was used as a medium by which to comment upon domestic politics. In novels and poetry, letters, treatises and reviews, as the new order in France was being forged in and around intricate issues generated by the denouement of power and the subsequent squabble for representation in, and control of, the French polity,25 British women writers exploited the opportunities revealed by this monumental process of change. Charlotte Smith, for example, wrote the epistolic novel Desmond, thereby replicating both the published correspondence of Helen Maria Williams’ Letters written in France, and the epistolary form of Burke’s Reflections. Intertextually linked in this

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way, the ideological point that Smith strove to make was a commentary on British politics. In a footnote, attached to one character’s monologue, Smith declared that the English have a custom of arrogantly boasting of the fortunate situation of the common people of England. – But let those, who, with an opportunity of observation have ever had an enquiring eye and a feeling heart on this subject, say whether this pride is well founded. At the present prices of the requisites of mere existence, a labourer, with a wife and four or five children, who has only his labour to depend upon, can taste nothing but bread, and not always a sufficiency of that. Too certain it is, that (to say nothing of the miseries of the London poor, too evident to every one who passes through the streets) there are many, very many parts of the country, where the labourer has not subsistence even when in constant work, and where in cases of sickness, his condition is deplorable indeed . . . Yet we are always affecting to talk of the misery and beggary of the French – And now impute that misery, though we well know it existed before the revolution.26 Smith, like other women, voiced her own understanding of self, society and civilization.27 Mary Wollstonecraft entered this ‘debate’.28 Burke had spurred many to reply to his contribution: Mary Wollstonecraft did so in her first Vindication.29 It was a hastily written piece, equal to the polemical Reflections, lacking only in the depth of critique of gender that perhaps its title suggested. In this Vindication, Wollstonecraft attacked Burke, his style and his politics as corrupt, personally ambitious and effeminate.30 Wollstonecraft conflated fundamental Enlightenment notions of masculinity, reason and authority with a perceptive critique of patriarchal relations. By castigating Burke as effeminate, Wollstonecraft equated his opposition to the French Revolution with a ‘feminine’ understanding of political change: she argued he had fallen into reasoning with his heart not his head, in other words he displayed what eighteenth-century audiences would clearly have understood as women’s reasoning.31 Her second Vindication elucidated what was meant by that.32 Wollstonecraft dedicated the second Vindication to Tallyrand, the French politician, who was a key architect of the educational constitution of the revolutionary new order. She had hoped to persuade him to include girls in the educational programme that was being developed.33 The republican educational venture was novel, as was Wollstonecraft’s intervention. In

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this way, she succeeded in placing on the post-1789 intellectual table an argument, by a British woman, specifically addressing the social construction of a new politics of gender, which placed women at its epicentre. Wollstonecraft can be seen to have confronted, challenged and changed the way that women were represented in the political, aesthetic and linguistic realms.34 Wollstonecraft, attached to the idea that the Revolution at least proffered the potential for the liberation of womanhood, advocated a new ideal type, a new European woman. Although sympathetic to the extent of freedom enjoyed in England in the wake of 1688 Revolution, Wollstonecraft looked eagerly to Europe. Indeed, she described the French Revolution as a ‘thermometer of the times . . .’35 The political climate clearly left its mark: commenting on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, she wrote, it ‘contains an aggregate of principles the most beneficial; yet so simple, that the most ordinary capacity cannot fail to comprehend their import . . .’36 Her summary: ‘Europe ought to be thankful for a change . . .’37 While there was still much improvement needed for Europe as a whole, including England, there was, she argued, much that England could learn from Europe, and in this instance specifically from France. In this way, Wollstonecraft rhetorically anchored her analysis in the social categorization of ‘European woman’ in the middle of an ideological civil war. If, in that framework, we look at the work of the radical Wollstonecraft in relation to that of the conservative Hannah More, we can see how in the debate over the French Revolution the social construction of womanhood was conducted with explicit reference to patriotism. Wollstonecraft argued that women should be patriots, as interested and as involved, in civic and public life, as men.38 ‘If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism’, she wrote, ‘their mother must be a patriot . . .’39 This, as Sapiro has argued, was not an advocacy for separate spheres, for Wollstonecraft stressed that to be a patriot the structure of the lives of women must be changed so that they can fully participate in civic and public life. Wollstonecraft, as a radical writing in the 1790s, signalled the problematic nature not only of the word ‘patriotism’, but also of its meaning. Linda Colley, writing two centuries later, framed this discussion under the epithet ‘a woman’s place as being in the nation’.40 Hannah More, though the political opposite of Wollstonecraft, took a similar approach.41 Commenting upon the Revolution in France, she was clearly alarmed at the ‘most tremendous confederacies, against religion, and order, and governments, which the world ever saw . . .’42 Her politics was visionary; she asserted a remedy: ‘what an accession would it bring

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to the public strength, could we prevail on beauty, and rank, and talents, and virtue, confederating their several powers, to come forward with a patriotism at once firm and feminine for the general good!’43 Underlying this was the same concern articulated by Wollstonecraft: involvement of women in the public space was morally flat. While the political use to which each applied the notion of patriotism was predicated upon the same normative vision, that is women should have access to the public sphere, the ideological use was of course different. What constituted ‘access’ was different for each. As Linda Colley notes, More insisted that women exert influence on the public domain while remaining in the domestic sphere.44 Wollstonecraft advocated a call to arms, that is direct action. Yet patriotism, like Johnson’s changing definition of it, was a fickle political variable.45 Patriotism is an inherently unstable ideology, which in the late eighteenth century was a fiercely contested notion.46 More’s adoption of the word is significant as an indicator of its shifting definition and social meaning. On the one hand radicals claimed the title; on the other hand, so did the government and its allies. In 1792, Joseph Mather wrote a poem entitled ‘God Save Thomas Paine’, in which he described Paine as a patriot.47 And in 1794, John Thelwell, hailed as the spokesman of English radicalism, while incarcerated, along with Horne Took and Thomas Hardy, in Newgate Prison on a charge of treason wrote a poem entitled ‘The Cell’, in which he clearly regarded himself as a patriot.48 The government, which lost the case against all three ‘patriots’, advocated a patriotic duty, a form of taxation by consent: as Eastwood notes, voluntary subscriptions, which funded poor relief, enabled subscribers to avow not only their charity but also their patriotism.49 Stella Cottrell also notes the shift in what patriotism came to mean as opposed to what it had mostly meant during most of the eighteenth century. ‘Patriotism as constructed within . . . propaganda’, she explains, ‘was essentially different to the notion of patriotism encountered throughout most of the eighteenth century, where it was associated with Whig, Tory, and ultimately radical battles over the constitution and used as the excuse for, or the saving grace of, oppositional parliamentary politics’.50 At the heart of the newer version rested ideas on the recovery and survival of the nation. This was a chronically ethnicized discourse that invoked the idea that real patriots, and not foreigners who merely usurped power within the nation, could claim their rightful place as defenders of faith, freedom and the memory of their forefathers. It was also a highly gendered genealogical politics, which exposed fissures in radical circles. It is an ambience of defiance that sustains notions of

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survival, and that adds an ironical impact to what Helen Maria Williams advocated when she patriotically proclaimed, in concert with aboriginal French, ‘Vive la nation!’51 Williams, who had declared support for the Revolution in her poem ‘Bastille’, and who continued to adhere to its principles when others did not, would have been sensitive to the machinations of Francophobia in late eighteenth-century Britain, which as Cottrell reminds us was a very virulent form of nationalist bonding.52 Such a declaration of sympathy, for the Otherness of the French, would certainly have placed Williams outside the bounds of acceptability, in the same territory as Mary Wollstonecraft. Allegiance to the British state underwent stresses and strains in the wake of the Revolution, and what took shape in the midst of radical and loyalist publications for and against France was a popular politics of patriotism. Accordingly, those who attacked and burned the house, library and laboratory of Dissenting Minister Dr Joseph Priestly, who was a supporter of the principles of the Revolution, can be seen to have taken part in a much broader political agenda in which the affiliation of British patriotism shifted away from its anti-establishment footing. Some allies of the government, however, expressed their disquiet at open mob violence. Political conservatives such as Burke and Gibbon were clearly quite fearful of an end to the then existing social order, that is the liberty, freedom and property of the upper echelons of the social hierarchy of British society. Mary Alcock, in a sarcastic contribution to the debate on the rights of man, which had been placed firmly on the political agenda by the Revolution in France, put her finger on the pulse of fear which gripped those of wealth, rank and fortune: ‘All law abolished and, with sword in hand / We’ll seize the property of all the land, / Then haile to Liberty, Reform and Riot! / Adieu, Contentment, Safety, Peace and Quiet!’53 Hannah More echoed the same. Her poem ‘Will Chip’s TRUE Rights of Man, in Opposition to the NEW Rights of Man’ bore a subtitle: ‘Written for the Volunteers of Somersetshire, when there was an Alarm of Invasion on that Coast’. The text assumed the political-economic voice of an artisan and advocated a sturdy respect for British laws which protected British rights and British freedom. More thus sustained a woman’s contribution to the patriotic conservative stance and swiped at radical ‘rights’ ideology.54 Conservatives were clearly fearful of the radicals’ declared project, that is social and political reforms commensurate with the theses of the Enlightenment. They were also fearful of the alleged anarchy that would flow from social restructuring. Some radicals said they wanted no

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government as any presently constituted; conservatives, however, seemed convinced that radicals meant they wanted no government. Supporters of the Revolution were considered to be ideological foreigners, if not in fact then in deed. It is interesting to note that Thomas Paine, an alleged Jacobin as far as the British Government and its allies were concerned, was in fact an ally of the moderate Girondists in France.55 Mary Alcock and Hannah More were not alone. Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, added his patriarchal voice to the disquiet. He lamented the fact that ‘[m]any individuals, and some communities appear to be infected with the French disease, the wild theories of equal and boundless freedom . . .’56 It affected those who were fearful of what they might stand to lose. In 1798, Susanna Whatman explained in a letter how her husband kept money in a safe place in the home ‘ever since the miseries which broke out in France and our being so near a revolution . . .’57 Such miseries, particularly when war broke out, helped to shape the nature of women’s discourse. Susan Ferrier, for instance, registered a sense of the anxiety that women felt when waiting to hear of news from the most recent battle in which their menfolk were engaged. With trepid anticipation they were left to wait, when mobilization took a loved one away.58 Anxiety and fear were not, however, the preserve of the political ‘right’: even Ann Yearsley, a radical working-class poet, was horrified at reports of alleged carnage and death in France, which fuelled her disquiet. The poem ‘Anarchy’, published in 1796, recorded her authorial affectation: ‘On yon white bosom see that happy child! / Seize it, deface its infant charms! And say, / Anarchy viewed its mangled limbs and smiled./Strike the young mother to the earth! – Away!’59 In the assumption that the imagery of children and motherhood would have a ‘natural’ affinity to women, Yearsley presented to her audience the workings of the Revolution as being an abomination of nature. Charlotte Smith raised the political point, which remained unanswered, that the opponents of the Revolution sullied the truth about events in France. Love of one’s country seemingly blinded some to an adherence to or love of the truth. In Desmond, for instance, the heroine of the story, Geraldine Verney, travelled to and consequently provided her family back home with first-hand accounts of events in France. She learned that religion had not been abolished, yet it was widely promulgated in Britain, by Burke for example, to be the case. One French character commented on why the English have to unlearn: ‘. . . throughout the revolution, every circumstance has, on your side the water, been exaggerated, falsified, distorted, and misrepresented, to serve the purposes of party’.60 Smith

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asked her readership to question received wisdom. In any case, a fear of political unrest and an enemy not only abroad but also at home was well established. In that context, the government and its allies embraced the markedly anti-French flavour of mob rule as a calculated and categorical move.61

Nationalism and war The last quarter of the eighteenth century was an epoch in which the politics of the nation was a deeply entrenched anxiety not least because of the loss of American real estate. The era furnished a host of theses that attempted to understand nationalist questions with an analytical focus on the wider issues and interests of nationalism. Adam Smith wrote about the economics of nationhood; Jeremy Bentham wrote about the polity of nations; Thomas Paine wrote about the self-determination of nationalities; Edmund Burke wrote on the sanctity of national traditions; and Thomas Malthus wrote about the ethnography of national survival.62 The nationalist thesis was a vibrant discourse of intellectual concern.63 It was to that canvas of politics and internationalism that Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth added their own voices. Smith’s radical statements first in Desmond, a blunt and sympathetic view of the French Revolution, and secondly in The Old Manor House, veiled as it was as a tale of symbolic history, addressed nationalism with a far greater sense of perception and sensitivity. In Castle Rackrent by the conservative Maria Edgeworth, a prolific writer of didactic tales, many for children, we find a literary intervention about Ireland, which advocated a benign sentimentality behind empire building and nationhood. In the preface to Desmond, published in 1792 and arguably her most political novel, Smith advocated an intellectual distinction between ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’. ‘Nothing’, she declared, ‘appears to me more respectable than national pride; nothing so absurd as national prejudice . . .’64 The text of the novel picks up that distinction. Desmond overhears two francophobes ranting. ‘If the whole race was extirpated’, says one character, ‘and we were in possession of their country, as in justice we ought to be, why it would be much the better – We should make a better hand of it in such a country . . .’65 Smith clearly understood that a political economy underlined what was to all intents and purposes a ‘race-hate’. One character suggests using the Revolution as cover for attacking the French, who would be busying themselves over grand political designs.66 If the French wanted liberty, they could get it from Englishmen: only freeborn Britons understood or merited freedom.67

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Conversely, it is a French character who declares national hatred to be a ridiculous prejudice.68 The authorial voice condemned such anathematizing. The historical background to Smith’s fifth novel The Old Manor House, published in 1793, was a context in which Britain had already lost its American colonies, following a long, expensive and bloody campaign. The American War of Independence is the setting for the novel, and a large portion of it is devoted to the political economy of the conflict: Smith thereby provides a critique of war as an instrument of foreign policy.69 She wrote about the futility of war as a means by which one nation could impose its will on another, even on one’s own colonists.70 Underlying this was an assessment of international relations that saw war as the result of vested interests conducted by governments and the arms industry, a posture that anticipates the tradition of (early) liberal theorists of international relations.71 Writing about the British attempt to prevent America from gaining its freedom, Smith declared: ‘Elate with national pride they had learned by the successes of the preceding war to look with contempt on the inhabitants of every other part of the globe . . .’72 Smith therefore fused a sense of nationalism with an embryonic understanding of racial conflict. In this way, she adumbrated an ideological awareness of the ethnic sentiment of patriotism as the means by which the young of the nation were sucked into the dangers and horrors of war. In 1793, Smith wrote a poem entitled ‘Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War’. Her text registered carnage: ‘. . . while each hideous image to his mind / Rises terrific, oe’r a bleeding corse / Stumbling he falls; another intercepts / His staggering feet . . .’73 In The Old Manor House, she had pointed a finger at the ideology that contributed to and fuelled conflict with the people living on the land that was being fought over. What is more, the real human cost of the war was personally brought home to her. Her third son, described by Martin Fitzpatrick as a reluctant soldier, suffered the amputation of a leg in 1793. 74 Thereafter, Smith viewed matters differently. Excessive national elation, about which Smith remonstrated, was in her eyes, an evil and powerful force by which people identified their ethnic, national or racial interests. The Francophobia that lay behind the Great War with France, indeed behind the eight other wars with France during the eighteenth century, was a prime example of patriotic folly.75 Smith who initially had warmed to the ideas that inspired at least the early stages of the French Revolution went sour on it, unlike other radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft, when after the September

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Massacre of 1792 the Revolution had itself curdled. The Revolution and the fighting that took place to sustain it saturated Britain with fear. Beyond the fear and distrust of the neighbourhood of voluntary spies whom Jane Austen drew attention to in Northanger Abbey,76 ownership and control of Ireland came to symbolize that fear.77 Vested interests were imperilled. Maria Edgeworth spoke of the political economy upon which such interests were based, and as such reflected much of the colonialism that permeated British social philosophy of the time. Castle Rackrent contains vivid characterizations of the Irish ancien regime, its peasantry and landlords. At one level it is a simple tale of dissolute and absentee landlords, but at another level it addressed those who resented English colonial domination in Ireland. It attempts therefore to provide a benign perspective on national interests, assuaging feelings of patriotism within a nationalist framework, which clearly bucked against the English presence and English interests in Ireland. In this light, Maria Edgeworth, who with her father lived and worked in Ireland, may be seen as an apologist of British commercial and political interests there. Rackrent was, significantly, published one year before the Act of Union came to pass; yet she proffered timely advice in the preface: ‘Nations as well as individuals’, she insisted, ‘gradually lose attachment to their identity . . .’78 The impending Union thus offered salvation and hope for the future. ‘When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain’, she argued, ‘she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence.’79 Clearly, Edgeworth viewed her characterization of the Irish with an English complacency. At the end of the tale, Edgeworth adds a wry commentary on the political economy of empire building, the consumption of one nation state, Ireland, by another, England: ‘the domestic habits of no nation in Europe were less known to the English than those of their sister country, till within these few years’.80 With the prospect of an invasion by the French, Castle Rackrent clearly presented a bleak utilitarian option, a union with Britain or France.81 War shaped the lives and experiences and the political objectives of the whole of Europe, from 1793 until 1815. During what may properly be termed the First (modern) World War, orchestrated across Europe, Africa and the Americas,82 Britain fought France against a background of entrenched poverty and economic instability, as the war economy dislocated production and foreign trade.83 The war against revolutionary, and later Napoleonic, France had two fronts: military and ideological. Militarily, the war pivoted around two theatres of operation both of which stared British political and economic standing squarely in the

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face: Europe and the Caribbean. Europe was clearly under the sway of France, and British influence on the continent was being pushed to the margin if not obliterated altogether.84 British armed forces were spread across the globe: they were on the Continent, in Ireland, India, Africa and the West Indies. Britain saw a need to secure West Indian dominions in case of a defeat by France in Europe. The economic leverage Britain hoped to retain with possessions in the Caribbean was leverage it badly needed in any prospective negotiations with a triumphant France. To bargain with France was undesirable but to bargain from a weakened position economically was unthinkable.85 That leverage, however, was felt to be in danger of being compromised.86 This was social panic; British interests were deemed to be under threat everywhere on the globe. So, turning her attention to what are euphemistically termed the Napoleonic Wars, Fanny Burney thought she had matters in proportion: ‘Bounaparte’, she wrote, ‘was now engaged in a new War, of which the aim & intention was no less than The Conquest of The World . . .’87 Or, as an anonymous poet put it in 1798: ‘. . . This is THE AGE OF WAR the age / When ev’ry bosom swells with rage, / And burns with military fame, / When Mamlucks, Pr[ie]sts, and foplings arm, / Whilst Europe sounds the loud alarm, / And pride her children’s breasts inflame . . .’88 The struggle represented a pall over the British mind. The culmination of the war was monumental. Susan Ferrier described the bloody field of Waterloo as a battle that decided the fate of Europe.89 The quality of army medical surgery at the time of Waterloo in 1815 was still fairly ‘primitive’, although David Howarth points out that it was getting better.90 Howarth vividly writes of the gruesome wounds and the treatments meted out to deal with them. Some men whose legs were removed at the hip had actually survived, but although amputation was a common practice many attempts proved to be fatal.91 Louisa Stuart Costello, an Irish poet, recorded her sadness at the loss of life, which clearly impacted on those left behind: ‘While thro’ the streets the news of conquest spread, / Each parent listens with consuming dread. / Those shouts of triumph breath’d from every tongue, / Some anxious heart with agony has wrung . . .’92 Fanny Burney wrote of the gory aftermath of Waterloo. ‘[E]ven the Churches’, she wrote, ‘were turned into Hospitals...’93 The carnage was absolute: ‘Three Thousand Peasants were employed all at once, in burying the heaps, masses, hills of Dead, on the plains!’94 It took, she writes, upwards of five days to remove all the wounded from the battlefield. Fanny Burney, an indefatigable writer of great stature, was very astute about the ideological promotion of French Otherness. The Otherness of

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the French, a potent vein within English nationalism, was the subject of critique by Burney (some twenty-five years after the Revolution was started, and written before the wars against France were finally over) in her last novel, The Wanderer, published in 1814. The Wanderer was set during the Terror. Burney noted, in her journal in 1802, the breadth and depth of feeling surrounding the Terror of Robespierre: it was always safer to pretend to support him than not.95 Such fear took root on the English side of the Channel. Burney straddled the Francophobia replete in British society as the nation lived in fear of foreign rule.

Raciology of belonging A feeling of common bonding, that is a sense of ethnic togetherness, circumscribed that sense of fear. This was similar to, yet different from, the position of the radicals of the day. Radicals had deeply imbibed a politics of ethnic reassertion, that is an advocacy of re-birth and belonging. William Blake, who was probably no more than an associate of Mary Wollstonecraft, was a champion of this, with incessant calls to Albion, an archaic form for Britain. ‘Albion’ is a concept that has tended to conflate England and Britain. As John Lucas has pointed out, Albion ‘conveniently identifies the most ancient name of Britain with a sense of unbroken history while at the same time allowing for its identification with England . . .’96 Blake, in concert with other Romantics, looked to the past as a model of social, political and ultimately nationalist and ethnic purity, for the benefit of the future. Radicals, like Blake, were keenly interested in the idea of ethnic re-birth which, as Lucas has argued, was a very fashionable notion at the close of the eighteenth century.97 This was advocated in cultural and political iconography as ‘ancient British liberties embodied in the constitution, liberties that have been realities at certain times but suppressed by tyrannical governments in others’.98 One of the central features of this has been, as Stafford has observed, the ‘myth of “the Norman yoke” – the belief that Britain was free, perhaps democratic and egalitarian, in the Anglo-Saxon period and that liberty was suppressed by the Normans’.99 Blake certainly thought so. This further sustained the anti-French vein of English nationalism. The bullish conflation of English as British is an integral feature that marked the asseveration of the British ethnie. It was, moreover, an important cornerstone of the triumphalist radical politics that mushroomed at the end of the eighteenth century. For William Blake this was actualized with reference to, and gleaned great meaning from, an evocative theological framework: ‘And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the children of

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Albion . . .’100 This glossed his assertion that the New Jerusalem would be found in the green and pleasant lands of England.101 Among his many references to Albion, including the mythologized creations which ascribe personality to the concept, his poetic prophecy crafted in ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ extended, as Marilyn Butler points out, freedom to women and slaves.102 His New Jerusalem was meant to be a land which, as Janet Todd has argued, normalized a hedonistic, promiscuous sexuality.103 This resonates with the scholarly claim that in Wollstonecraft, Blake saw the ideal woman.104 However, the nostalgic rendition of racial essence engrained in Albion was something that hinged upon a gendered idyll in which the woman–nature equation is prominent and Popean, which is not so flattering. Nevertheless, not only does Blake attempt to undermine late eighteenth-century sexual orthodoxy, the suggestion is also a lustful objectification of the female subject. Meena Alexander has drawn attention to the contradictions within Blake’s discourse on female desire. ‘Nowhere in Blake’, she writes, ‘do we find a woman both sexual and a bard.’105 Taken to its logical summation, Alexander concludes that ‘the feminine, however much it might wish to be in and for itself, exists primarily to minister to the creative dynamism of the masculine’.106 That patriarchal framework dovetailed smartly with the patriotic and nationalist. The past in the Blakeian vision was not only heavily masculinist, but was also racialized, for central to his advocacy of the nation was a concept of racial lineage. There are two aspects to this. First, Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, published in 1789, bear the imprint of a recognizable sense of racialized culture making. Not surprisingly, ‘The Little Black Boy’ is testimony to this. That poem associates not only maleness (as a gender-specific poem) but also, emphatically, whiteness with the possession of a soul. In the first stanza we are told, ‘My mother bore me in the southern wild / And I am black, but O my soul is white! / White as an angel is the English child / But I am black, as if bereaved of light.’107 We may discount the theology of the text for the moment, and focus instead on the advocacy of the black and white worlds of place and meaning. Blake identified the ‘southern wild’ as a place that was peopled by blacks who by virtue of their blackness were bereaved of light. Contrasted with that is the angelic whiteness of the English. The paradigm is crude. The black boy is depicted as outside the ethical pathway to first spiritual salvation and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, human salvation. What we are asked to accept as the only true and complete state of the human condition, therefore, is that of the white man. Amelia Opie also sanctioned this. In her poem, ‘The Negro Boy’s

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Tale’, she coupled black and white worlds in a similar way: assuming the boy’s voice, she wrote: ‘Missa, dey say dat our black skin / Be ugly, ugly to de sight; / But surely if dey look vidin, / Missa, de negro’s heart be vite.’108 Opie concretized differentiation with her parody of diction. The second feature of Blake’s raciology was similarly as primitive and transparent. The ancient bards of Albion represent past racial purity. The infectious rhetoric embedded in volk found its fulfilment in late eighteenth-century notions of re-birth, and Blake can be seen to have sustained that creed of idea. ‘Jerusalem’ is part of the preface to his long poem ‘Milton’, in which England is depicted as having once been a Holy Land where Druids practised the same religion as the Jewish patriarchs. Blake declared his desire to ‘awake Albion from his long & cold repose’.109 Again he is gender-specific. Elizabeth Moody, however, took the thesis adumbrated by Blake further still, with an invocation of woman at the centre of the meaning of Albion and not, as with Blake, as the focus of sexual attention: ‘O days of Albion! happier far I ween, / When woman’s knowledge owned its boundaries here!’110 With this, on the tide of ethnic assertion argued for in radical circles, Moody took the opportunity to assert womanhood in and for itself. Her historical imagination, using a Classical discourse in her poem, spoke of happier times for women; a time in which the subjection of women was alien to the social and political structure of ancient Britain. By claiming a more egalitarian sexual past as the basis for a Britain of the future, Moody reinforced the ideological and political links about which Wollstonecraft had spoken. What Moody aimed to do, therefore, was forge an understanding of gender relations within the radical movement. The political message from Moody was quite simple: the radical movement, which advocated a politics of the nation, conceptually rooted in an understanding of the ‘race’, would have to embrace its egalitarian past, between the sexes, if a full deliverance of the ‘race’ were to take place in the future. This linked ‘race’, sex and nationhood together as vibrant, patriotic and, in essence, oppositional tools of political attachment outside the parameters of the state, that is the formalized mechanics of power. In this sense the politics of the British ethnie, it can be argued, was more complete. In one very obvious way, therefore, Moody exposed some of the contradictory tensions contained within ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’, as well as ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’. On this terrain, however, we find the concept ‘maternal nationalism’, in which, as Elizabeth Fay observes, the making of the Romantic nation appropriated motherhood through prescriptive conservative idioms (for example ‘protect’, ‘nourish’

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and ‘cohesion’) such that ‘future British citizens would be produced, nurtured, and properly educated into political loyalty and social responsibility’.111 Clearly, women ran with ideas of ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’ as far as they possibly could, in concert with the likes of Blake for instance, but as with Moody a considerable amount of revision was required. For Charlotte Smith, the thesis proffered some insight to national self-assertion but at a cost she found unacceptable, leading ultimately to a pathway of destruction, physical and ideological. Although it is possible to read in Blake deep-rooted Enlightenment postulations on human commonality, there is in such a paradigm a tendency to overlook deep-rooted hostility found in Enlightenment postulations on difference, as Dorinda Outram has noted.112 Blake embraced, as part of his Romanticized Christian – Swedenborgian – religious framing of social and political emancipation, an advocacy of humanity that strove for peace and love but did so at the expense of all non-Christian worldviews. So, while Blake’s vision goes against the Protestant mission, which does not see Britain as the Holy Land itself, both, however, comprise a vivid vaunting of British virtues which contributed to the vagaries of nineteenth-century British imperialism. In popular terms, as Linda Colley, echoing S.T. Coleridge, has noted, ‘God had trusted Britons with empire.’113 Scriptural references and allusions to the Bible, endemic features of Blake’s works, gave a quasi-theoretical gloss, both nationalistic and raciological, to justify what the British did. The ideological overture of Romanticism constructed an aggressive self and nationalist testimony. But Blake’s command over Albion was not absolute, as the Poet Laureate Henry Pye demonstrated in 1807: ‘While ploughing seas of classic fame, / Nile yields once more to Albion’s powers, / And Alexandria vails her towers / To George’s mightier name.’114 His poetic statement was twofold. It was as much an attempt to assuage national anxieties and boost national morale, in the light of the unsuccessful British effort to maintain its hold in Egypt, as it was an attempt to celebrate imperial interests of the British nation. It was still eight years before the wars against France would cease. As conservative as it was, it was not too far from radical Blakeian raciology.

Representation The French Revolution was a volcanic expression of dissatisfaction with political, aesthetic and linguistic representation.115 British radicals, gleaning much inspiration from the Revolution, pressed home the message that the system of representation in Britain was too exclusive. Intriguingly,

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in one sense, access to the production of ‘culture’ was beginning to be more diffuse. As Diane Dugaw writes, ‘the eighteenth century witnessed a cultural shift premised on increased literacy, cheaper printing, a populace with more access to currency, and the increasing substitution of orality and performance at every level by individual reading both for information and pleasure’.116 Problems in representation, however, go beyond the quantity of the number of participants in a particular undertaking, such as novel writing. It is, moreover, also a qualitative issue. Late eighteenth-century Britain was an era gripped by dissatisfaction with political representation. This was as much a product of the absolutist system of government, which had been somewhat clipped in the seventeenth century but the logic that had pruned the monarchy was not carried to a satisfactory conclusion, thus leaving vestiges of corruption firmly in place. The reformed Commons in Parliament remained a carbuncle on the modern body politic. So with the aim of puncturing the system of patronage and rotten voting, and achieving an extension of the franchise, radical groups concentrated efforts on further reform of Parliament. A ferment of ideas reflected the widespread aspiration to overcome the status quo. This was part of a much larger and complex debate, although this word signifies more of the sedate than is appropriate, about the efficacy of the constitution of the British nation state. In essence, this was an argument, which had raged in Britain acutely since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, about a new settlement between the balance of interests in the constitution. Then in 1789, constitutional, political, social and religious horizons were severely dislocated. The mentality of reform was shaken by the menace of revolution. And as the 1790s developed, the ‘debate’ became more widespread and more vociferous. It became chronic after the epithetic ‘reign of terror’ of 1792. It was in that context that Charlotte Smith, for instance, tapped into the social anguish that had saturated the American War of Independence with a biting reference to taxation. A no-play-no-pay principle lay behind her acknowledgement of the ‘impossibility of enforcing in another country the very imposts to which, unrepresented they would not themselves have submitted . . .’117 Smith italicized the word taxing. Dissatisfaction with representation broadly spoke volumes to women generally, and this formed, particularly through the works of women such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, an integral ideological feature of the radical spectrum. The dramatic events in France hinged on many intricate Machiavellian issues of citizenship. But what concerned many women, across all political persuasions, was the unchallenged continuum of patriarchal relations. The disquiet felt by

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women was, as a consequence, qualitatively different from that felt by their male counterparts, such as Edmund Burke. As a woman, Wollstonecraft stood outside the conventional boundaries of citizenship, as it was then commonly understood.118 Kennedy and Mendus argue that ‘successive barriers to full citizenship had to be overcome before everyone was entitled to the rights of modern liberal democracy’.119 Women were marginalized, indeed, as Kennedy and Mendus note, ‘[o]f all the groups excluded from full citizenship, none was more stubbornly barred than women . . . Mary Wollstonecraft’s plea that the philosophical justification for political equality applied just as well to women as to men, fell on deaf ears . . .’120 But Wollstonecraft was also a radical; consequently, her confrontation with Burke has a resonance lacking in that of even Thomas Paine’s condemnation of the same Reflections. The dislocation of traditional social relations, symbolized by the Revolution in France, and echoed by an intensification of radical activity in Britain, provided the ideological space in which social critique could speak of possibilities for the future. Women, of whom radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays were arguably the most vocal, knew what they would change. For ‘women’, as a social category, were emphatically at the margin of the polity, of government, of the nation. Hence, the patriotic discourse that Wollstonecraft advocated in the shadow of Blake’s declaration, that is loyalty to the nation not necessarily the state, as opposed to the patriotic advocacy by Hannah More, which focused on loyalty to the state, captured the allegiance of those whose loyalty dovetailed with, and celebrated, the dislocation of social relations that patriarchal citizens such as Burke and Gibbon wished to preserve. Although not a radical in the sense in which the term has been handed down, we find Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a seasoned Dissenter, speaking of the essence of freedom as being at one with the triumphant ascendancy of the nation: ‘Rise, mighty nation, in thy strength, / And deal thy dreadful vengeance round; / Let thy great spirit, roused at length / Strike hordes of despots to the ground! . . . / Then build the tomb – O not alone / Of him who bled in Freedom’s cause; / With equal eye the martyr own / Of faith revered and ancient laws . . .’121 The passion with which Barbauld spoke drew from the broader radical politics of patriotic nationhood and, in the wake of Wollstonecraft’s second Vindication, it was a commentary purposefully extended to also include the status of womanhood. Just like Moody. ‘Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!’ she wrote, ‘Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed . . .’122 Though somewhat ironical, Barbauld ultimately embraced Wollstonecraft’s advocacy.

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Yet, curiously it must be stressed, France did not offer the ideal road down which women could agreeably travel. For women, who had been at the forefront of the struggles for a French republic and despite concerted efforts to achieve full citizenship, were pushed to the periphery.123 To many British women the Revolution in France acted as a spur; they initially felt inspired to claim legal and political rights for themselves; but such a reaction was dampened as its sense of liberation dissipated. It let them down.124 Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris, as did many radicals, to see for herself what was happening, and though no royalist felt disturbed at the treatment of Marie Antoinette. The demise of Antoinette under the glare of a public execution acted as an unnerving symbol of how women could be treated under French rule. This was, as Linda Colley has argued, a matter of deep-seated concern for many British women.125 It acted as a prompt to the gendering of patriotism in that, as Colley points out, women publicly engaged with the war effort through ‘female virtues of charity, nurture and needlework’.126 So, by ‘supplying the soldiery with banners, flannel shirts and other material comforts . . .’ women were able to demonstrate that ‘their concerns were by no means confined to the domestic sphere’.127 This connected them to citizenry. But what also clearly compounded the sense of angst felt among British women, often expressed in terms of fear of French domination of Britain, was that, later on in the same year when Marie Antoinette met her fate, women were banned from political activity.128 Antoinette, Olympe de Gouge and Manon Roland were guillotined; symbolically, so too were all women.129 It is important to recognize here a significant ingredient to the making of ideas about culture and civilization and that is the notion of ‘contrast’. Such a notion of difference is predicated upon dualistic schemes of binary thinking, which is atomistic in structure with an intellectual parentage that is, prima facie, rooted in the classical world. It is, moreover, reductionist in that it closes off alternative modes of perception which do not correspond to, or fall outside of, the dialectic. The concept of civilization is one such idea that has been built on that structure of social polarity. In Samuel Johnson’s time, ‘civilization’ was defined largely as a legal term. A secondary definition also related it to the state of being civilized, that is not barbarous. Just over a half century later when Charles Hall published his Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, it had come to mean more of the second definition as opposed to the first. Sandwiched between Johnson and Hall, the word had acquired a different social meaning. It is hardly surprising that at a time of British social, political and economic expansion both at home and overseas,

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the idea of ‘civilization’ shifted its point of focus. The nature of contrast across time compounded with a nature of contrast between people affected contemporary observations on difference. In 1805, Hall declared that civilization meant ‘that manner of living in societies of men, which is opposite to that of those who are called savages . . .’130 The gendered definition of the word further advocated contrast. Radicals generally proclaimed a sense of true ethnicity, that they represented an authentic sense of nationhood. For the making of such authenticity, radical women, like Mary Wollstonecraft, added to that equation an assessment of domestic life and motherhood, a maternal guardianship of civilization. Although radical ideology dovetailed with and drew upon the idiom of the republican movement,131 it also underpinned what was to become by the middle of the nineteenth century the expectation that the organic role of women be cultivated, not only as propagators of the ‘race’ but also as disseminators of racial ethics, as custodians of the moral economy of the nation.132 Racial difference and othering was central to that strategy.

Othering Radical ideology also received a racializing impulse in theses which subsumed the concept of ‘character’ with that of ‘nation’. ‘A Frenchman, like most women,’ wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘may be said to have no character distinguishable from that of the nation.’133 This was nationalistic othering. The Otherness of the French in English nationalism was a potent agent for the assessment and moulding of so-called national character. Othering was also underscored by British women writers who not only embraced theses of contrast within their literature, as we have seen around issues of ‘race’, poverty and compassion, but also can be seen to have, on that very basis, confronted and challenged radical politics per se. British sorority from across the political spectrum, including Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More on the one hand and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft for example on the other, questioned the patriotic making of national identity, and importantly also nationalist politics. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, was fully aware of what it meant to be an English woman in the context of European radical politics and history. Felicity Nussbaum notes that the sexual politics that Wollstonecraft argued, in her second Vindication, was constructed with references to the racial Other.134 Nussbaum comments that Wollstonecraft argues forcefully on behalf of the European woman.135 In the process, Wollstonecraft

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condemns the sexual practice of polygamy in Other races.136 Wollstonecraft never lost sight of racial contrast: ‘And, modesty, the fairest garb of virtue!’ she wrote, ‘has been more grossly insulted in France than even in England, till their women have treated as prudish that attention to decency, which brutes instinctively observe’.137 What unlocks this for latter-day audiences is the word ‘brutes’; eighteenth-century usage of the word was mixed but not ambiguous. Dr Johnson explained in his Dictionary that ‘brute’ meant not only ‘senseless’ but also ‘savage’ and ‘bestial’. Its subtext was racial, and it is to this that Wollstonecraft referred in a loose critique of the context, adornment and movement of the white female persona and body. By deploying ‘brutes’ in this seemingly innocuous way there was a conscious valorization of the domesticated English female body, as opposed to that of ‘brutes’, the racialized Other. Consequently, women’s bodies were promoted and seen as the means by which comparative civilization could be gauged. Decency is ideological; it is a social value emphatically underscored in a physical manifestation of cultural difference. Thus, the body is site to socially ascribed meanings of a collective nature. Wollstonecraft alluded to the colonization of bodies in a verbal gesture, comparing France and England in relation to the world of the racial Other.138 Wollstonecraft’s discourse consequently fused together the ‘homeland’ by design and the ‘hinterland’ by default, that is self and Other. Indeed, what she can be seen to prefigure here is a vital ingredient in the post-Enlightenment understanding of Othering. Associated with that politics of ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ was the nature of inclusion and exclusion to which Wollstonecraft and others were privy. That hermeneutic, doubly acute for radical women, was still couched from within the prevailing, deeply entrenched notion of racial togetherness. As Victor Kiernan has argued, despite tribal infighting, Europeans clearly recognized their differentness from everyone else.139 Indeed, as Kiernan concludes, Europeans projected the idea both to others and themselves that they were one race.140 The voices spoken may very well have been disparate but the script was singularly omnipotent; thus in his panoramic critique of European civilization, the patriarch Edward Gibbon emphatically declared that Europe may be considered ‘as one great republic whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation’.141 The point Gibbon was keen to stress was that ‘the savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society’.142 Political outsiders like women, and ideological outsiders like radicals, fought the political and canonical establishment about the composition of state polities and the rights of citizenship, but they did so as insiders of the ‘race’ and clearly knew it.

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It was relatively easy to draw on the imagery of slavery to promote and propel their arguments, as British women writers did, perennially. Indeed, as ‘race’ moved to the centre of British politics between 1788 and 1792, the appropriation of slavery as a mode of argument in the writings of British women took root more deeply and more widely. It served two purposes. On the one hand, anti-slavery campaigns certainly placed eighteenth-century British women on a moral map. As Victor Kiernan has noted, the anti-slavery struggle was regarded as an attempt to encourage a more humane treatment of ‘primitive’ peoples.143 On the other hand, in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft for instance, it served as the means by which British women could compare and contrast their own social status to menfolk. ‘Would men but generously snap our chains’, wrote Wollstonecraft in her second Vindication, ‘and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience . . .’144 The sense of selfhood, of womanhood, was painfully alienated, subject to a male Otherness. Charlotte Smith offered another angle, a less introverted optic, on Othering, when she published The Old Manor House in 1793. Two small yet highly significant parts of the story illuminate not only the mind of Smith but also the discourse on slavery in British society. The first concerns Orlando, the central male character, who, en route to America as part of a contingent of the armed forces, experienced incommodious methods of travel and reflects upon his discomfort. His thoughts are quite specific. ‘Nothing’, wrote Smith, ‘could equal the inconvenience to which his soldiers were subjected, but that which the miserable negroes endure in their passage to slavery . . .’145 Smith stood tall as an anti-slavery ideologue; she went much further. She added a footnote to the word slavery: ‘It has been lately alleged in defence of the Slave Trade’, she wrote, ‘that Negroes on board Guineamen are allowed almost as much room as a Soldier in a Transport. – Excellent reasoning!’146 Her sarcastic exclamation joined her italicized emphasis in a poignant display of compassion for slaves. Schematically this leads to the second piece, which although even smaller is still significant. It involves the relationship between Orlando and a Negro ‘servant’ called Perseus. Perseus is described as very intelligent.147 Essentially, the description of Perseus’ intelligence is not dependent upon Orlando’s impression of him; it is not a relativistic presentation. Smith was not discrete in her statement. An aside such as this would have struck a chord with her late eighteenthcentury audience, placing her in direct opposition to received wisdom of the day. She not only presented to her public the antithesis of what they were used to and perhaps mostly expected, but also locked

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intellectual horns with the racist architects of her own day and those of the historical period about which she had written, such as Edward Long.148 At the end of the novel, Smith concluded her critique of the political economy of slavery with an attack on merchant slavers. ‘The merchant, who sits down in his compting-house’, declares one character, and writes to his correspondent at Jamaica, that his ship, the Good Intent of Liverpool, is consigned to him at Port-Royal with a cargo of slaves from the coast of Guinea, calculates the profits of a fortunate adventure, but never considers the tears and blood with which this money is raised. He hears not the groans of an hundred human creatures confined together in the hold of a small merchantman . . .149 This was not an isolated textual moment: Moira Ferguson has drawn attention to the abolitionist sentiments embedded in Smith’s previous novel, Desmond. ‘Using a conversation between Desmond and a plantation-owning member of Parliament’, writes Ferguson, ‘Smith ridicules typical plantocratic racism.’150 Desmond pleads for the abolition of the slave trade; the ‘adversary’, who as a Member of Parliament, is an absentee landlord, contends that Negroes are not to be ‘called men – they are monkies’.151 An echo of Edward Long. Desmond retorts, with an allusion to polygenetic theory, that although they are different from the European ‘race’, they are human.152 That sense of humanity framed the following remark which otherwise would have left some white men charged with bestiality, for it may be noted that part of the ideological attrition between the two is a sexual currency: ‘I have even heard’, it is said, ‘that captains of our ships of war, have often professed that they prefer the sable nymphs of Africa to the fairer dames of Europe . . .’.153 Although a genealogy of influence is notoriously difficult to trace, it is probably fair to say that what lay behind this is again the racialized thesis of Edward Long. Long identified a rabid sexual appetite among negroes.154 Sexual activity was, he maintained, rife. Long certainly left a racist legacy for others to follow, and Bryan Edwards, for instance, did so in History of the British Colonies in the West Indies which appeared in 1793, the same year as Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House. Edwards echoed the racialized language of Long.155 In an interesting intertextual note, Maria Edgeworth made reference to Edwards’ History in her novel Belinda. In a passage on obeah, Edgeworth writes that ‘Mr Vincent knew the astonishing power, which the belief in this species of sorcery has over the minds of the Jamaica negroes . . .’ Edgeworth inserted a

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footnote on the word ‘sorcery’ which reads: ‘See Edwards’s History of the West Indies, vol. II.’156 This attempted to give her fiction a factual gloss. What underscored the perspective of Smith’s critique, and to some extent also that of Maria Edgeworth, was a poetics of development, which was not only social but also racial. This was imbued in the latter years of the eighteenth century with a perennial, though at times laconic episteme of civilization. In the concept of civilization, powerful metaphors of refined and civilized, and vulgar and savage, as Olivia Smith notes, are engrained in the compare-and-contrast mentality of cultural awareness.157 This needs to be read in the methodological context of deep-rooted social angst. In the bloody wake of the 1792 massacre in Revolutionary France, cultural awareness pivoted around the French Revolution, which themed discussion on civilization.158 That is why Desmond by Charlotte Smith has such a tremendous resonance. Smith explored Francophobia in British society, and broader still British perceptions of civilization. In a broader framework still, the modern British mind can be seen to have looked from the present to the future, signified by a confluence of time and space. Mary Hays, for example, ascribed to her character, Emma Courtney, a Lockean awareness of her gendered and racialized self in the late eighteenth century. ‘The necessaries of the civilized man are whimsical superfluities in the eye of the savage’, she writes, adding rhetorically, ‘Are we, or are we not . . . the creatures of sensation and circumstance?’159 The particular circumstance that triggers this reflexive discourse is the social rules underpinning courtship. Such rules Emma/ Mary declares are ‘the unnatural and odious inventions of a distempered civilization’.160 The discourse is a neatly woven critique about self, society and civilization generally. Hays comments upon the heritage of civilization, and the effect that it has on individuals such as Emma. Emma, like Hays in real life, was anguished and hurt by unrequited love and spoke of the unfairness of rules which circumscribed the etiquette of courtship in society. She reflected upon the general trajectory of civilization. Clearly underlying ‘inventions of a distempered civilization’ is a communion of ‘our’; thus she alludes to, and sustains, mental associations of difference. Again we find the imperative of ‘contrast’. What gives her narrative foundation is her understanding of modernity, not only the trepidation she perceived in its making but the lines of thought which de facto equate rationality with civilization, and savagery with nature. Her authorial emphasis is an integral part of her own anxiety and philosophical reflection. ‘While the source continues troubled, why expect the streams to run pure?’161 she asks. Commenting upon the oppression

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of women in the preface to her next (and aptly named) novel, Hays returned to that thesis. ‘Let man revert to the source of these evils,’ she wrote, ‘let him be chaste himself, nor seek to reconcile contradictions – Can the streams run pure while the fountain is polluted?’ she asked, again.162 In Emma Courtney, Hays provided context; she identified the source of civilization from which the springs of life flow, conferring civic sensibilities. She metaphorically referred to streams of emotion, passion and choice, the lifeblood of human existence. These bestow mixed tensions, emphatically social, and the mix provides for deep disquietude. Indeed, in the case of Mary’s Emma, they manifest as personalized pain and madness. As far as Hays is concerned they are civic maladies. ‘The character, you tell me’, Emma proclaims, ‘is modified by circumstances: the customs of society, then, have enslaved, enervated, and degraded woman.’163 Hays argues that it is the social structure which is responsible for the modality, mentality and mien to which women, and men, were subject. They might exercise choices, for example to marry, but they do so under circumstances not of their making: ‘Marriage’, says Emma, ‘generally speaking, in the existing state of things, must of necessity be an affair of finance.’164 That is, a commercialization of the sexes. Hays, like other Romantic authors, identified the source of ‘our’ civilization as an alliance of ancients: Roman, Greek and Jewish; invoking tales of Jupiter, Hercules and Sampson.165 The battle of the Ancients and the Moderns saturated all forms of eighteenth-century social criticism, and it was to that that she cast her eye, and importantly suggested that such legends were from ‘ages less degenerate than this, and states less corrupt’.166 Significantly, she alluded to the modern veneer of western social structures that determined feelings and behaviour. ‘Ask your own heart’, she says, ‘whether some of its most exquisite sensations have not arisen from sources, which to nine tenths of the world, would be equally inconceivable: Mine, I believe, is a solitary madness in the eighteenth century . . .’167 Hays thereby sourced the cultural footing of the West, and its racial genealogy: her anxiety manifested as a highly racialized discourse. In the process, however, Hays parted company with Mary Wollstonecraft who, in her assessment of the importance of the French Revolution, had declared that ‘flagrant follies and atrocious crimes have been more common under the governments of modern Europe, than in any of the antient nations, if we except the Jews . . .’168 In this respect, Wollstonecraft, it may be noted, can be seen to be following Edmund Burke, a self-declared anti-Semite. Hays made no such distinction. There is another equally interesting dimension to Hays’ critique. The subtext of her general point co-joined an oblique reference to the abstract

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rational-cum-irrational ‘debate’, which ran through eighteenth-century intellectual discourse; she grounded that debate in a woman-centred reality. A reality conditioned by a sexual hierarchy the pernicious effects of which could reduce a woman to madness, of which Emma Courtney was a fictional account, or raise the sensibility of a woman to the level of incapacity. It is hardly surprising then that Mary Hays, just like Mary Wollstonecraft, publicly expressed a desire to emulate the so-called masculine rationality, and consequently also attempted to puncture that gendered structure. ‘Mr Francis appeared to me a rational man’, says Emma in one discussion, ‘and my understanding was exercized and gratified by his conversation.’169 Emma was duly chastised by her uncle, who remarked, ‘You are but little acquainted, Emma, with the customs of society; there is great indecorum in a young lady’s making these distinctions . . .’170 so-called masculine rationality was taboo for women; yet throughout Emma Courtney, we find that Hays had Emma pursue typically non-female perspectives and desires, the attributes of which were typically associated with men. Emma analytically dissected the world. ‘I reflected on the inequalities of society, the source of every misery and of every vice’, she says, and we can note this included ‘the peculiar disadvantages of my sex’.171 That huge canvas of political economy placed Emma Courtney, and Mary Hays, at the fringe of respectable female sensibilities.

Civilization and slavery There is more, however, to Hays’ racialized discourse chronically situated in European ethnogeny, which is the sense of implosion of European civilization that clearly racked the nation states of Europe in the wake of 1789. Hays showed a sensitive awareness of the politics of ‘race’ in a critical disquisition on soldiering, war and slavery. It was another revolution, the Haitian, which can be seen to have underwritten that discourse. About halfway through Emma Courtney we are invited, by Hays, to judge what she entertainingly argues. The scene happens to be a dinner party at which are assembled a range of characters through whom Hays voiced her concerns. Among the guests is Pemberton, who had recently arrived in England from Jamaica, where he had been bequeathed a plantation. Pemberton held a commission in the militia, a fact which elicits special condemnation from Emma: ‘. . . their trade is murder . . .’, she declared.172 Emma is castigated in a triumvirate of ethnic, sexual and class survival: ‘. . . surely you would not confound the brave fellows, who fight to protect their King and Country, and the ladies,

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with common ruffians and housebreakers!’173 Emma’s isolation was compounded when Mr Melmoth joined the fray. Melmoth interposed by wishing that they had some thousand more of these murderers in the West Indies, to keep the slaves in subordination, who, since absurd notions of liberty had been put into their heads, were grown very troublesome and refractory, and, in a short time, he supposed, would become as insolent as the English servants.174 The West Indies, it must be remembered, became a persistent site of struggle in the wake of the heroic effort of slaves on Haiti.175 The near-invisible world of servitude was, in Emma Courtney, subjected to the full glare of critique as the conversation continued. Mrs Denbeigh suggested that servants/slaves may ‘. . . happen to think their superiors unreasonable!’176 An interjection from Mr Melmoth was revealingly sarcastic: ‘Think! sister . . . what have servants, or women, to do with thinking?’177 Hays crafted her position. She identified a gendering, in concert with Mary Wollstonecraft, of the cognitive attributes upon which the economic, social and political power of possessing and commanding servants/slaves rested. She saw social arrangements as a man-made system, not an act of nature or of God. Hays was to write two years later, in her ‘Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women’: Of all the systems, – if indeed a bundle of contradictions and absurdities may be called a system, – which human nature in its moments of intoxication has produced; that which men have contrived with a view to forming the minds, and regulating the conduct of women, is perhaps the most completely absurd. And, though the consequences are often very serious to both sexes, yet if one could for a moment forget these, and consider it only as a system, it would rather be found a subject of mirth and ridicule than serious anger . . .178 In this way, Hays, as a British woman, engaged in a critique of western social philosophy in which she teased out the mechanics of maleness and rationality. The conversation, in Emma Courtney, returned again to servitude, ‘to the subject of English servants, which gave rise to a discussion on the Slave Trade’.179 Hays saw direct connections between the English class system and the political economy of the institutions and practices of the slave industry. Mr Harley, we are told, advocated the ‘cause of

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freedom and humanity with a bold and manly eloquence’.180 Emma listened with delight while he ‘exposed and confuted the specious reasoning and sophistry of his antagonist . . .’181 The pro-slavers at the dinner party were silenced. Moira Ferguson persuasively argues that Hays was the first British woman writer to promote ‘the first white British abolitionist heroine since the movement began . . .’182 Emma Courtney was the vehicle, Mary Hays was the voice. Yet again, and like Charlotte Smith before her, during the mêlée of the French Revolution, we find an advocacy against war and against the institution of slavery by a woman. Hays was, however, more bold than Smith: she cited not only from Wollstonecraft but also from French authorities, Voltaire, Helvetius and Rousseau, who in the mind of the more educated British public, at that time, were synonymous with having provided an intellectual foundation for the Revolution of 1789.183 In this way, Hays publicly distanced herself from patriarchs such as Edmund Burke who in his Reflections had specifically condemned those authors whom she unreservedly cited. An elastic understanding of change underpinned Hays’ social critique. Civilization had by the close of the century come to embody such elasticity: it was held to be both a process of betterment and an absolute achievement. British society, according to many contemporary observers was leading the way; or as Hester Lynch Piozzi ironically put it in her exposé on ‘society’, ‘. . . to wiser Britain led, / Your vagrant feet desire to tread . . .’184 Social and cultural change, reform or transformation does not occur in a vacuum: Britain was opening up Australasia when Piozzi wrote her poem. Yet the sentient stand of late eighteenth-century British women writers was acutely racialized in two other fundamental ways. First, civilization was already part of a discourse of Christian aestheticism defining the boundaries of European culture, taste, beauty and value. Secondly, civilization was predicated upon a sharpened comparative framework in which Enlightened thought had saturated social philosophy with the Other.185 The ‘us’ identity of the Enlightenment also prescribed ‘them’. That was racial. As Stocking has observed, physical anthropology had a predilection for ideas on the naturalness of racial inequality and this influenced thinking about civilization.186 This form of Othering is perhaps best noted with reference to the commonest trope of comparative contrast and difference in the eighteenth century, the story of Robinson Crusoe.187 The non-European person and society was an evidential barometer by which to gauge the progress of that of the European, and European society.188 At a number of levels, this exposes a contradiction between Enlightenment and Romantic perspectives on history: the former, broadly speaking, arguing that the European way signified

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progress and the latter, broadly speaking, arguing that it does not necessarily pan out like that.189 Central therefore to late eighteenth-century notions of historical change was a racialized aesthetics. Maria Edgeworth advocated comparative, racialized aesthetics in her novel Belinda. A West Indian planter, Mr Vincent, attracted to Belinda, the heroine of the novel, reflected on his desire. ‘Compare that woman’, he says, ‘. . . with one of our creole ladies’.190 When asked why a creole, he replied ‘for the sake of contrast in the first place – Our creole women are all softness, grace, delicacy –’ to which Edgeworth adds through the interjection of another character, ‘and indolence’.191 Then, writing on the West Indian planter’s attraction for the heroine, Edgeworth was at pains to identify the enchantment in racialized terms, as the following passage makes clear: Mr Vincent’s voice faltered in pronouncing the word love; yet Belinda prepossessed by the idea that he was attached to some creole lady, simply answered, without looking up from her drawing, ‘You are indeed very fortunate, peculiarly fortunate. Are the West-Indian ladies –’ ‘West-Indian ladies!’ interrupted Mr Vincent. ‘Surely, Miss Portman cannot imagine that I am at this instant thinking of any West-Indian lady!’ Belinda looked up with an air of surprise. – ‘Charming Miss Portman!’ continued he, ‘I have learnt to admire European beauty, European excellence . . .’.192 Edgeworth had also coupled beauty with ‘race’ in her earlier Letters for Literary Ladies, which first appeared in 1795. ‘Ask a northern Indian what is beauty . . . and he will answer, a broad flat face, small eyes, high cheek bones, three or four broad black lines across each cheek, a low forehead, a large broad chin, a clumsy hook nose . . .’193 The emphasis on both the East and West Indies is more than geographical reflection. It takes the reader into a world of female/feminine ethnicized value. European beauty and European excellence were offered to Edgeworth’s audience as the norm by which to judge the exotic Other. The exotic, in the fashion of Robinson Crusoe for instance, was a familiar literary trope during the eighteenth century. Exoticism, Rousseau and Porter point out, involved unfamiliar mien and manners: it contravened acceptable cultural, moral and religious standards of life and humanness.194 Edgeworth carried exoticism into the nineteenth century. It is in this context that Maria Edgeworth presented to the readership of Belinda, Juba the black and Solomon the Jew, two Diasporic characters.195 Her characterization ascribed stereotypical beliefs to both. We are told

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that Mr Vincent, the suitor of Belinda, had a ‘black servant of the name Juba, who was extremely attached to him; he had known Juba from a boy, and had brought him over with him, when he first came to England, because the poor fellow so earnestly begged to go with young massa . . .’196 Juba is presented as a loyal, yet simplistic, ‘servant’. Loyalty, however, has its price and needs to be read against a wider canvas. As British political and economic structures towards the end of the eighteenth century experienced spasms of social angst around issues of representation, across all artistic (including linguistic), legal and political forms, the fallout from the moral underside of that set of tensions clearly led Edgeworth to cast Juba as a ‘servant’ and not as a ‘slave’. This linguistic artifice risks more than it actually reveals. It is possible to read this presentation differently. Juba, as an actual slave, was someone who was shrewd enough, it could be said, to see in Mr Vincent an escape route from the drudgery of life under the weight of plantation slavery. Hardly the act of a simpleton. The Jew in Belinda, moreover, is an untrustworthy moneylender.197 In one scene, the Jew and Juba confront each other. Juba, under the impression that Solomon had swindled his master, attacked Solomon, seizing him by the throat, accusing him of robbery.198 Solomon explains that he is a moneylender. Juba does not trust Solomon for he believed ‘his master to be the richest man in the world; besides, the Jew’s language was scarcely intelligible to him . . .’199 The authorial voice is clearly derogatory. Solomon in turn ‘had an antipathy to the sight of the black, and he shrunk from the negro with strong signs of aversion . . .’200 The authorial voice, here, is particular in its narration of the conflict. It mixes fact and fiction in that what is superimposed on the descriptive features of the protagonists’ encounter is normative assumptions. So, the mutual mistrust, fear and contempt each feels for the other was what Edgeworth succeeded most in conveying in the scene. The motives and feelings of Juba, drawn from a stock of received wisdom about the dependency culture and mentality of slaves, were portrayed uncritically. Most obviously, Juba was cast as part of the culture of victimology, seen as wholly passive and not as an agent in his own right; yet the subtext here is that if Solomon, or anyone else, succeeds in bankrupting Vincent, then Juba’s own security away from plantation slavery would be jeopardized. Edgeworth’s characterization was the subject of correspondence between herself and Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. Lazarus complained of the portrayal of Solomon; she expressed dismay at the anti-Semitism contained in Belinda. Lazarus was disturbed by literary representation of Jews. She rhetorically asked whether the Jewish ‘race’

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was naturally ‘mean’, ‘avaricious’ and ‘unprincipled’.201 Edgeworth was moved enough to write her novel Harrington, as reparation in 1817; as an exercise in damage limitation.202 Edgeworth tapped into and regurgitated a concoction of racial innuendoes and prejudices. Such caricatures, the bedrock of raciological contrast, are deeply engrained in the notion of British civilization. Many late eighteenth-century social critics were uncomfortable with that notion, and they quietly and loudly said so. What social criticism opened up was a veritable can of worms, which then proceeded to crawl over much of what British civilization was said to stand for. Social criticism was a very broad church, including conservatives such as Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, and radicals such as Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft. The anti-slavery movement, which cut across most political divisions, drawing strength from the whole of the political spectrum,203 was an integral part of the general equation of clamour for reform during this period.204 But the tactics and motives of those engaged in the struggle for the abolition of British slavery fell under the general cult of suspicion that followed the growth of radical politics in the early stages of, and the years following, the Revolution in France. British civilization as it was had not only detractors but defenders too. That British radicals, like Mary Hays, had a propensity to support the principles of the Revolution (some, like Mary Wollstonecraft, even during and beyond the September Massacre of 1792, and the subsequent Reign of Terror) and argued that the rights of man meant all men, and that most were supporters of the movement for abolition, was not lost on the Government and its allies. Nonetheless, the broad alliance politics of the anti-slavery movement addressed, in a very fundamental way, the moral economy of the British nation. The nature of such a disquisition was often glossed with a theological vernacular: ‘Bring each benighted soul, great God, to thee / And with thy wide Salvation make them free!’ wrote Hannah More in ‘Slavery’.205 A poignant combination of ethnic and ethic. The moralizing project of the British upper classes, exemplified by Protestant evangelicals such as anti-slavery campaigners in the Clapham Sect which included Hannah More and William Wilberforce, brought together ideologies of order and behaviour wherein the relations of ‘races’ and social classes were fixed both temporally and spatially under one great hegemonic plan. The blueprint was as much ethnic by design as it was ethical by intent.206 Conspicuous here is a recognition of the raciological basis for the (re)invention of British civilization. This discussion has many interlocking parts; but what brings focus to it is the raciology of the colonial project. The patriotic national identity

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under construction towards the end of the eighteenth century in the midst of a tremendous struggle with France relied heavily on a consciousness of the racial and the spatial. Britain saw an imperialistic necessity at hand. Formally embracing Ireland under the watchful eye of Maria Edgeworth for instance, Britain also expanded colonial possessions to the West in the New World as war booty, and also in the East. The sense of historical mission to which this alluded and the foundation of community, of ethnie, to which it gave rise are very suggestive. We have seen that the years of the French Revolution were axiomatic in shifting definitions of patriotism, and that patriotism was a highly charged racial discourse. It complemented the assertions of nationalism. ‘The French wars’, writes H.L. Malchow, the abortive rebellion in Ireland, the spread of the ideals of the French Revolution to Haiti, and armed resistance to British suzerainty in India served to heighten xenophobia and validate ethnic prejudice as patriotic anti-Jacobinism. In this context the assault on slavery, as well as its vigorous defence, established a discourse that served both to highlight inherent cultural and, increasingly, racial differences between the English and the Other . . .207 British national identity, in the context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a ready-made Other: the French. Charlotte Smith recognized as much in the preface to her novel Desmond. ‘To those however who still cherish the idea of our having a natural enemy in the French nation’, she wrote, ‘. . . I can only say, that against the phalanx of prejudice kept in constant pay . . . the slight skirmishing of a novel writer can have no effect . . .’208 The ‘constant pay’ and ‘skirmishes’ to which she refers are a commentary on Jacobin politics, allegedly including Smith, which supported the Revolution in France. The imaginative, argumentative and didactic value of the way many women engaged in literary, political discourse may be seen as truly radical. Women writers certainly used the novel as a vehicle in and through which to vent commentary. Smith, who did so, was socially frowned upon but even so stuck to her quill. The French Revolution, nonetheless, served as a common denominator in the shaping of British domestic and foreign politics. On this basis, it is plausible to suggest that assertions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British notions of ‘self’, ‘society’ and ‘civilization’ need to be read as a process of connectivity in which the racial Other, as black slave, as French, as Irish, as Jew, was ever present.

4 Moral Economies of Nature, Religion and Science

At the end of the eighteenth century, British women writers across a range of political sympathies, such as Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, were keen to demonstrate that they too had witty, enquiring and hungry minds just like men. Women writers used literature, therefore, as a vehicle to explore ‘nature’, ‘reason’ and ‘education’; their dialogue pivoted around the possession of, and the ability to express, rationality. This was an exposition of personal and social development, and was in essence an ideological and political battle waged inside British culture. At its heart were sexual and racial subjectivities. It was canonical authorities that women had first to confront; those authorities had advocated that women were endowed with a different intellectual, and ultimately spiritual, make-up. Women, despite their centrality to much of the strength and power of the Bible per se, remained at the social, political and intellectual periphery of society. The canonical view that women were somehow different mapped out their lives and determined so-called women’s roles in the great scheme of nature and man, and provided a justificatory gloss for their subordination. Both the Enlightenment and, what is commonly cast as its antithesis Romanticism, presented doctrines on ‘nature’, ‘man’ and ‘society’ as eternal truths. Consequently, women’s ideological struggle situated them at the centre of the turbulent Romantic religious imagination of the late eighteenth century. The women who tackled those sexualized strictures, talking not only to their audiences but to each other as well, entered the public sphere at a time saturated with the troubles concerning the French Revolution. Their interventions took the form of, and embodied a whole series of, ethical critiques. Ultimately, women explored and questioned the nature of ethical interaction within the nation; this 84

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rested on sexual and racial subjectivities: it was a racialized moral economy, wrapped as it was in the Otherness of the French and Christian ethnogeny. This chapter, therefore, concentrates on a series of interrelated issues, which both foreground and relate to: the raciology of reason; the extent to which Christianity was a civilizing force rooted in a Western raciology; and the extent to which the situation of women in British civilization enabled them to confront, challenge and change late eighteenth-century raciology in British social thought.

Nature, God and women Eighteenth-century writings about nature were at one and the same time a negotiation of the relationship with God.1 ‘To view in Nature’s wonders, Nature’s God!’, as Mary Robinson had declared in ‘The Progress of Liberty’.2 Robinson also recognized the inexorable uncertainty posed by contemporary philosophizing: ‘. . . Every breeze’, she wrote, ‘Seems the soft whispering of Nature’s voice / Fraught with the lore of Reason . . .’3 Robinson brings together exactly what we should not lose sight of, namely that a common late eighteenth-century perspective was that nature was an amalgam of science, morals and God. The shape of ‘reason’, we are led to accept, has been determined by many men in the canon of Western philosophy. The fraternity of the so-called great thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke and Spinoza have bequeathed writings about God, Nature and Man. While it is to be acknowledged that they each arrived at different conclusions, their intention was one and the same, to establish the nature of the human subject including his social arrangements. Furthermore, what each of these great thinkers of the Enlightenment can be seen to have done was craft a tradition that looked at how people perceive. They compared ‘evidence’ from Europe with ‘evidence’ gleaned from around the globe.4 Such conjectural analysis represented an historical anthropology. Moreover, each composed heavily gendered views of the human subject.5 This effectively defines the parameters of our problematic: the male and western characteristics of what ‘reason’ is said to be. It is this that gave shape to the analyses of the mind that occupied the mental universe of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and beyond. Eighteenth-century philosophical traditions may be conceived of as a continuation of the psychological and moral implications arising from social, economic and political arrangements, begun in an earlier phase of modernity. Although the relationship of the mind–body problem,

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a kernel of eighteenth-century thought in both its Enlightened and Romantic incarnations,6 had always existed, it was not pre-eminent as a focus of intellectual discourse until towards the end of the century, especially under Romantic compositions. How the two are connected, where does consciousness come from, which is the more important, how does the mind drive the body, how do we know, are ideas innate – fundamental questions such as these have vexed philosophers from time immemorial. Many eighteenth-century British women participated in this debate. They, just like Locke and Hume, to name but two, focused their attention upon the nature of the mind and its relationship with nature: in 1774, Mary Scott in ‘The Female Advocate’ had speculated, ‘How mind on matter, matter acts on mind . . .’7 The intervention by women in this problematic opened up a further set of questions concerning the nature and possession of rationality; this was an important aspect of representational politics of eighteenth-century British political thought, though it is rarely seen as such in mainstream historiography. There is another more invidious slant on the status of women in the overall paradigmatic framework of nature. This has typically rested upon an association of woman as an earthy, passionate and inconstant creature, in essence primeval and closer to nature than man. Man is cast as divorced from the soddy mess of life and is free to speculate, reason and guide society to greater achievements. As such, this association has provided western thought with some of its more colourful, though less insightful, metaphors. Early in the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope advocated the methodological tone about women which the rest of the century followed. ‘Ladies, like variegated tulips’, he declared in ‘An Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of a Woman’.8 Pope suggested that women are colourful and seasonal, in other words fickle. Anne Ingram, the Viscountess Irwin, was not amused, and in reply to Pope aired her scorn and anger, when she rhetorically asked ‘Would you, who can instruct as well as please / Bestow some moments of your ease / To rescue woman from this Gothic state, / New passions raise, their minds anew create . . .’9 She, like the other women who followed her, focused on his failure, and that of men generally, to foster, if not permit, the intellectual development of women. Additionally, of course this appropriation of womanhood, penned by men for the edification of men, has been often less fanciful than Pope, taking a bitter and spiteful turn instead. Of the late eighteenth-century theorists who articulated this, the work of Richard Polwhele, a miscellaneous writer of poetry and theology, is pre-eminent. He was at pains to stress the casting out of ‘woman’, especially alleged Jacobins such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays:

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‘Survey with me’, he wrote, ‘what ne’er our fathers saw, / A female band despising NATURE’S law . . .’10 In a footnote, Polwhele explained the association with nature. ‘Nature’, he wrote, ‘is the grand basis of all laws of human and divine: and the woman, who has no regard to nature, either in the decoration of her person, or the culture of her mind, will soon “walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government”. . .’11 That Polwhele articulated his concern in this way was typical. Transcendence of the laws of God was an endemic feature of eighteenth-century discourse that addressed the status of women. As Gerda Lerner has argued, no matter which path women attempted to traverse as authors, and whether they were religious or not, they had to negotiate Biblical principles laid down in Genesis, the Fall and St Paul. For centuries, patriarchal authorities used these as the basis to define so-called proper roles for women, and to justify their subordination.12 This is not to say that the issue was one of chronic disputation, though this undoubtedly did figure in the overall philosophical equation. Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, gave their social criticism a higher gloss by invoking religious doctrine as a basis upon which to map out political positions of the present, and aspirations for the future. Women were concerned to show that God had endowed them with the same mental faculties of reason as men. This was perceived to be the only true medium through which to understand the world. Their discourse was framed with reference to nature in the face of God. Those who wrote about their understanding of the science of the human condition negotiated ideas on the body, social order and God’s plan: in Erasmus Darwin, for instance, we find a typical coalescence of humanity, nature and God.13 In that framework, the nature of human nature, that is what it is to be a human being, including vexatious notions of the mind, was signified by a host of rights, duties and responsibilities. However, the ethical posture embedded in what it meant to be a woman, and the socially determined expectations of how women should be treated, was blasted by Catherine Macaulay in 1790. ‘The great difference that is observable in the characters of the sexes . . . as they display themselves in the scenes of social life’, she wrote, ‘has given rise to much false speculation on the natural qualities of the female mind’.14 Macaulay claimed that there is in fact no difference at all between men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft, who endorsed her opinion, lamented that Macaulay did not go further in her claim. ‘The observations on this subject might have been carried much further’, she wrote, ‘if Mrs M’s object had not been a general system of education . . .’15 Hannah More, who always maintained she was unfamiliar with

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Wollstonecraft’s (second) Vindication, also joined this debate on difference and the placement of women in the political and social structure of British society. Her contribution, however, was emphatically permeated by ‘race’. ‘[T]ill the female sex are more carefully instructed’, she wrote, ‘this question will always remain as undecided as to the degree of difference between the understandings of men and women, as the question between the understandings of blacks and white.’16 More argued that nature must, to a large extent, play second fiddle to nurture; that the intervention of men in female education, and white people in the life chances of black people, actually left the playing field unbalanced. ‘[F]or until Africans and Europeans are put more nearly on a par in the cultivation of their minds,’ she asserted, ‘the shades of distinction between their native powers, can never be fairly ascertained.’17 An insightful commentary. Eighteenth-century social and natural philosophy tended to conflate the laws of nature with the net effect of human agency, that is culture. That often posed an understanding of behaviour in general against an understanding of the mechanics of human thought in particular. This was inclined also to mix discourses on the scientific study of human nature with a more general appreciation on ‘life’.18 The religious gloss of this was well entrenched, indeed almost inescapable. ‘A Hymn Written Among the Alps’, by Helen Maria Williams, for example, begins and ends thus: ‘Creation’s God! with thought elate, / Thy hand divine I see; / Impressed on scenes where all is great, / Where all is full of thee!; / . . . In every scene, where every hour / Shreds some terrific grace, / In nature’s vast, overwhelming power, / THEE, THEE, my GOD, I trace!19 God was central to the very act of recording one’s perception. To perceive, to think and to do raised vexed issues of morality, of cultural interaction. This brings together science and moral theory, as Emerson has argued: the ‘scientists thinking about substances, causality, purpose, life, power, or agency’, he points out, ‘were also thinking about the metaphysical bases of morals. Natural philosophy shaped philosophy and tended to shape it in a way which emphasised human choice and freedom . . .’20 Wollstonecraft argues that such freedom was heavily gendered, that men had placed women in a subordinate role, which of course took choice away. As Zaw notes, Wollstonecraft contended that women’s true essence had been distorted by the lives they were forced to live, but that education could remedy such a condition, that it could produce more ‘natural’ results.21 In this sense, her second Vindication stands as a sociology of distortion generally, and women specifically. For Wollstonecraft, the natural results were crafted and deposited by God. She wrote, ‘it is

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necessary emphatically to repeat that there are rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, by their improvable faculties; and that, in receiving these, not from their forefathers, but from God, prescription can never undermine natural rights . . .’22 From God came reason and rationality and from God also came rights. In this sense, God was an intimate part of the general understanding of science and scientific matters. Again, what underscores this is a valorization of cultural interaction in that the culture of rights expressed temporal duties of men and women as the will of a God who had knowingly endowed rights and the ability to exercise reason on all of humankind. It was argued that these rights were, quite simply, God-given, which is how Wollstonecraft put it in her reply to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. To lose sight of such a synergy robs analysis of much of its potential insight. Accordingly, to look at late eighteenth-century science and the sociologies of the mind, body and spirit with which it was concerned, we must look also at the context of philosophy of morals which nature was felt to represent. In this light, part of eighteenth-century intellectual discourse was, as Jordanova has suggested, an attempt to explicate upon human thought.23 For Wollstonecraft, as we have seen, God was in the driving seat. We may flesh this out to say that those who wrote about science, in the eighteenth century, negotiated meanings of civilization in and through their relationship with God and nature itself. For Rousseau, who greatly influenced Wollstonecraft, in the Social Contract, the answer to the burning question how best to civilize lay in a theistic, neo-Protestant, vision.24 And, behind the alleged morality guiding human desire and procreation lay another disquisition on the mechanics of human nature, for it can be seen to dovetail with social philosophy on wealth, welfare and poverty, which caused the Reverend Thomas Malthus a great deal of anxiety. As Jordanova suggests, private acts of ‘sex and reproduction had public consequences in the size and health of the population and its labouring potential’.25 And it may also be suggested for the peopling of a large and prosperous empire. Such connectivity is very suggestive.26

Rationality and human nature In eighteenth-century philosophical discourses, rationality, in other words the possession and use of reason, was deemed to be a male preserve; a quality of existence that only men could aspire to achieve. It was, therefore, that ideology of rationality that women had to negotiate in the very construction of their ontological signification; that is, as they practised

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rationality. There are two overarching structuring properties here, which predominate in that rational understanding of the human condition: Christian ethnology, the religious interaction between individuals, groups of people and nations, and Christian theology. This complex and problematic ontological framework was an edifice rooted in the idea that man was the conduit between God and Nature, and led women into philosophical conflict. Men fiercely guarded the intellectual ground, on which women found they were to struggle in the modern age of reason. The culturally rich but hostile medieval intellectual climate was not moribund. Rationality, the beacon of salvation, was protected as a secular, male, intellectual property that was in many intricate and unforeseen ways also canonized by received wisdom. Although Alistair McGrath contends that classic Christianity has always esteemed rationality and that faith does not involve the rejection of reason or the absence of evidence, it does need to be recognized that Christianity has had a contumacious relationship to rationality.27 The patriarchal authorities who have presided over the ‘proper place’ for women, such as St Paul and St Augustine, form a backcloth to a wider discussion on the nature of western religious sentiment, wherein discourses on nature and God were framed and pivoted around rationality, which has been promoted as a male space. British women writers, such as Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, in various ways and to varying degrees confronted, challenged, changed and colluded with that ideology. In doing so they, in many cases unwittingly, contributed to the construction of ‘woman’ as a separate and distinct category which now resides in modern social theory. Rationality, the ability to reason, is a philosophical category that is ceremonially western. In this respect, the rational west is a highly supple form of racialization. Rationality determined not only the understanding women had of themselves, where critiques of nature are important because women were perennially relegated to the natural sphere in social and political commentaries, but also the understanding they had of their society and more generally the condition of western civilization. That ontology was the media through which British women writers provided ‘rational’ and ‘enlightened’ critiques of ‘womanhood’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’. What is unmistakable in the works of Edgeworth, More and Wollstonecraft is a social discourse articulated with a religious raciology. One of the most effective vehicles through which eighteenth-century writers generally explored ‘morals’, ‘God’ and ‘nature’ was creative writing. Jordanova argues that there exists a broad and deep common ground between writers of science and writers of literature.28 She poses a truism:

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‘Ways of writing about nature are . . . bound up with ways of knowing about nature . . .’29 In one sense, of course, if we take science to be the perception of nature, then literature easily fits that description in that it too constitutes a form of perception of nature. The social role, which may be conceded to creative thinking, is an aspect of feminist consciousness beyond the sense of religious ontology, with which women writers had hitherto been immersed from the early years of the century with Mary Astell right through to the end of the century with Hannah More.30 Literature, precisely because of creative thought, was an important vehicle through which understandings of social and physical philosophies, including civil society and human nature, were diffused. There was a notable increase in the consumption of scientific reading material, particularly journals, throughout the eighteenth century.31 Women formed a particular market, and their interests were duly catered for by other women such as Elizabeth Carter, and by men such as John Baines.32 Given the high level of general interest in nature and science throughout the eighteenth century, it is not surprising, therefore, that we find nature and science inscribe their literature. Within the overall exploration of the natural world, the critique of human nature stood out the most. In Romantic literature this tended to focus upon what Gary Kelly has termed hermeneutic works, inspired by notions of sense and sensibility. In their novels and poetry, writers deposited their understanding of human nature. Kelly, writing about Jane Austen, has put this rather well: ‘The novels are laced with a hermeneutic terminology – “understand”, “believe”, “credit”, “perceive”, “know” – that is almost philosophical but remains a language of interpretation in everyday life, for devices of psychological “realism” developed by Austen and others were designed in part to naturalize the philosophical or theological underpinnings of their novels.’33 Indeed, Jane Austen made explicit links between mind and body. The underlying assertion was that nature is within and without. To this end she made judicious reference to the ways in which nature impacts on the nurturing of the mind. It is this that shapes the meaning of the passage in Mansfield Park, in which Fanny Price tussles with the activity of her mind if her fingers only were busy.34 The roll-call of language philosophers of the late eighteenth century has been dominated by men, including, of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge. However, the exclusion of women, whose writings also engaged a deconstruction of language with perhaps a far greater degree of subtlety and richness than their male counterparts, robs analysis of more than it could hope to gain. The body of thought deemed responsible for manners,

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attitudes and behaviour was prised open by Romantic women writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Hays, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and others. These women writers held a belief in the power of their own reasoning focusing on the composite of emotion and ethics which formed their understanding of human nature and social behaviour. This Romanticism was a phenomenology of mind.35 Such authorial imagination is found in the women writers of the late eighteenth century from across the political spectrum, and clearly suggests an epistemological standpoint, a woman-centred critique, on the social construction of the nature, structure and politics of the meaning of the mind and reason. The western nature of this is often ignored. The mind was critically important, indeed within Enlightened thinking as a whole ‘reason’ was accorded a deified status. Certainly, Wollstonecraft eulogized ‘reason’ in this way. To negotiate the science of the mind was to negotiate nature, and that was a discourse on God. This was acutely the case at the tail end of the eighteenth century as Romanticism became more deeply rooted as a social, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic medium of critique. That God was seen as rational was explained in terms of observable phenomena, as Lockean principles were more and more socially cultivated. It was held that the invisible hand behind Newton’s mechanics of nature, for instance, shaped and fashioned the world according to specific mathematical criteria.36 This view had an extensive currency. Margaret Kirkham has summed this up succinctly. In an age which ‘made Reason a God, and turned God into The Rational Being’, she writes, ‘it was widely accepted that authority rested on rational judgement’.37 The essential claim by eighteenth-century feminists, Kirkham points out, was that ‘woman’ had not been denied the powers of reason per se, but that women simply did not possess the moral status commensurate with the title of rational being formed in the image of a rational God.38 The rationality upon which this is based is predicated upon an assumption about human nature, and human culture, and is a core feature of the liberal thought of the Enlightenment. Alison Jagger has argued that liberalism is grounded in an assumption that humans possess a special mental capacity, which is rationality.39 This idea, of course, further assumes that there is a natural, organic, tripartite relationship between the individual, the autonomous actualization of reason and a propensity towards collectivities.40 This in itself forms the sum and substance of social contract theory. Viewed from this perspective, ‘rationality’ is culturally specific. This is, however, only a part of the equation. For the nature of empiricism, to which the narrative of rationalism is ultimately

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related, has, as David Goldberg argues, enabled the taxonomy of differences between people, which rationalism has concretized as racialized subjectivity.41 Rationality, therefore, in the sense in which it is a spiritual guide, is a form of western metaphysics. It is highly racialized. Eighteenth-century rationalism, at the vanguard of the explication of so-called innate distinctions, served to explain apparent behavioural dissimilarities between ‘races’.42 Deeply embroiled in the laws of nature and, if not in deed, then by association, with the purported will of God, such rationality concretized nature, and importantly was a raciology of difference in nature. The cognitive and normative apparatuses of rationality have signified the epistemological discrimination of both ‘women’ and ‘blacks’. Jeremy Bentham certainly argued as much. Like Hannah More’s disquisition on difference, Bentham’s disquisition on ‘reason’ and ‘feeling’ was also signified by a raciology. He pointed out, in a footnote, to the philosophically minded Briton that the essential factor to bear in mind was not whether an animal or woman or black person could reason with force or clarity equal to that of someone else, in other words a white man of his social class, but whether an animal or woman or black person each could feel and therefore suffer.43 Mary Robinson turned the issue slightly on its head: ‘Let me ask this plain and rational question’, she wrote in 1799, ‘– is not woman a human being, gifted with all the feelings that inhabit the bosom of man?’44 Bentham, however, had argued that they should not be made to suffer simply because they can suffer. Moira Ferguson touches upon this dialectic in her discussion of the anti-slavery poem by Ann Yearsley, ‘The Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’. Ferguson argues that the thrust of the depiction in Yearsley’s text is one in which Africans are seen as a homogenous people who feel, and should be sympathized with, but not as a people who think, that is, in eighteenthcentury parlance, reason. Yearsley and Bentham, to some extent, complement each other, though Ferguson does not make that connection.45 Hannah More also added her voice to this discussion. In a poem on slavery, she wrote: ‘Plead not, in reason’s palpable abuse, / Their sense of feeling callous and obtuse: / From heads to hearts lies Nature’s plain appeal, Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel . . .’ And in a footnote More offered the following commentary: ‘Nothing is more frequent than this cruel and stupid argument, that they do not feel the miseries inflicted on them as Europeans would do.’46 Critics of rationalism per se similarly miss that important nexus. The social role ascribed to rationalism is related, on the one hand, to the material development of political and social arrangements, which attempt

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to make human action predictable and controllable. And, on the other hand, it is related to representation of the mind, that is the principles of logic and science. I would suggest that both these forms of rationalism are deeply racialized in that they are a liturgy of Western thought, shaped by European tribal eschatology. Rationalism, as an ideological bloc, is seen as having shifted human effort towards the production, accumulation and systematic use of knowledge that emanated from Western science, a science that allegedly unlocked God’s secrets. So, the quantitative sense of knowing more, and qualitatively better knowledge at that, was a deeply entrenched and highly valued guide to ethical behaviour in eighteenth-century western civil society.

Enlightenment, Romanticism and racial subjectivities Romanticism demanded, and indeed ushered in, a new theology, a radical redefinition of the relationship between God and nature, between God and Man. Isaiah Berlin argues that the emergence of Romanticism stands as the most significant shift in thought since the Renaissance.47 It is in nature that both the alleged principles of Enlightenment methodology, that is rationality and reason, are fused with the alleged principle of Romanticism, that is emotional wonderment. That wonderment is what Berlin has cast as the apotheosis of Romanticism.48 But the Enlightenment and Romanticism are not always as readily separable as many have tended to suggest.49 A bi-polar dialectic, a clear-cut thesis that pits Romanticism against Enlightenment is an arid presentation that actually denies a reality of interconnectedness. The so-called atmosphere of the age was one that valued the order and symmetry of nature.50 Blake’s famous cliché about the face of a tiger is a case in point. Romantics did not buck against the general subscription to the spirit of rationality; the literary dissection of nature by Wordsworth, for example, does not contradict it, it complements that mindset. McGrath makes a similar point: Romantics admired nature moulded by human agency and activity.51 Indeed, as Marshall Brown points out, Romanticism ‘far from being a repudiation of Enlightenment . . . was its fulfilling summation’.52 Romanticism marks a significant cultural shift in the structure of Christian belief wherein the anti-rationalistic Augustinian framework was, if not punctured then at least, pricked. A key to understanding late eighteenth-century assertions of rationality by British women writers is, therefore, the modernity of Romanticism. Romanticism is an umbrella philosophy and is composed of many strands. One variant, emphatically embraced by Ann Radcliffe for instance, is the

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Gothic. Gothic fiction overwhelmingly focused upon human nature at the interface of grand moral choices. ‘If we look carefully under what at first glance appears an undifferentiated mass of sensationalism’, writes Ann Coral Howells, ‘we shall see a number of remarkable attempts to explore the private hinterland of the human personality.’53 Gothic Romanticism addresses the elasticity of the tensions, such as ‘time’, in that hinterland. Given that Romanticism stands as a conductor between Christianity and modernity,54 that is between the forces of tradition and the contemporary, ‘time’ is no less a major structuring property of Romantic philosophy than any other. An appreciation of ‘time’, a synonym for western progress, is essential for a Romantic understanding of society. It is in this framework that we find transposition occurring within the Romantic imagination wherein difference is explicated in different temporalities. This, as Marilyn Butler has suggested, was symbolic history: the past, particularly one or two centuries prior to the present, was a vehicle by which to legitimize the present-day order, as indeed both Coleridge and Burke did.55 It was also possible to criticize, as many women did. Women Romantic writers manipulated ‘time’ in their interrogation of contemporary society. Their discourses mixed social and historical understandings of both senses of history, that is ‘event’ and ‘tale’, as they straddled both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. On the one hand, they embraced the Enlightenment methodology of treating the past as though it were another country, brimming full with difference.56 On the other hand, given that Romanticism saw the past as replete with value, such symbolic history writing provided an opportunity for women to promote a racialized ethical vision of equality; Elizabeth Moody is testimony of that. Women were of course restricted in their public deliberation on matters of philosophy, politics and history. It was in and through literature that women managed to engage in surreptitious social criticism, indeed with forms of cleverness rarely acknowledged. With an acute sensitivity to the politics of their day, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, British women writers, such as Ann Radcliffe, catapulted their readers back in time. Radcliffe, like women writers generally, managed to critique ideas of conflict and harmony pertinent to the sentiments of contemporary British politics without formally doing so. In one passage from Romance of the Forest, which was set during the seventeenth century, two characters converse about the national characteristics of the English and the French. ‘When we observe the English’, declares M. Verneuil,

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their laws, writings, and conversation, and at the same time mark their countenances, manners, and the frequency of suicide among them, we are apt to believe that wisdom and happiness are incompatible. If, on the other hand, we turn to their neighbours, the French, and see their wretched policy, their sparkling, but sophistical discourse, frivolous occupations, and, withal, their gay animated air, we shall be compelled to acknowledge that happiness and folly too often dwell together.57 Radcliffe attached a footnote to this statement. ‘It must be remembered’, she wrote, ‘that this was said in the seventeenth century’.58 But this is intriguingly double-edged. On the one hand, Radcliffe points out that it is the policies of the seventeenth century that caused social grief, thus she sought to distance herself from any direct support for the Revolution of 1789, which attempted to end such ‘wretched policy’, as she put it. On the other hand, having written this as the French Revolution was still unfolding, it may also be interpreted as a neo-conservative attack on what the French were then trying to achieve. The Romantic dissection of society does not contradict the clinical analyses of human nature and civil society, as written from deep within Enlightenment traditions, though the utopian veneer with which Romantic poets such as Wordsworth glossed this often obscures the discourse. The shift that Berlin speaks of may, in this sense, be seen as a different route, though the trajectory was the same. It too takes us to the core, the very axis of what ‘self’ and ‘society’ and ‘civilization’ were considered to be. British women writers, like Radcliffe, can be seen to have embraced that modern structure of awareness, and forged an understanding of human nature and social development in, through and despite the density of the gendered order of eighteenth-century British society. Ann Radcliffe answered the Romantic calling for a new, emotional and rational theology, elucidating its terms of reference. A number of commentators have consequently registered the view that romantic Gothic fiction was at the vanguard of late eighteenth-century social, political, cultural and ideological thought. Coral Ann Howells suggests that it was experimental, testing eighteenth-century theses of human potential.59 Others, such as Francis Garber, have argued that Gothic fiction stands as a radical statement which is an organizing element of late eighteenth-century western consciousness.60 It is therefore racialized. The western veneer of that view of human nature is an axiomatic feature of the geographical imagination of Romanticism and was codified by

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Christianity. This brings us not only to a physical terrain, located within Europe, but also to the terrain of a moral and racialized geography. As Christianity penetrated into and spread throughout Europe, it was the gravity of its eschatology that determined social interaction. It is necessary that we see Christianity, therefore, as a temporal and geographic ideology as much as a spiritual and sacramental one. It mapped out how bodies were to traverse this earth and life in preparation for the next. In this sense, morals are spatially specific geographical guides. This is something that Hannah More articulated. In ‘Slavery’, she offered a damning critique of the ‘white savage’ who conquered Africa in pursuit of gold and slaves.61 Couched in religious terms, More argued that Britain, ‘where the soul of Freedom reigns’, should bestow liberty across the globe, for that is the moral, the righteous path to take.62 That is the real will of God. The trajectory of her argument suggests that the act of invasion is less important than the reasons behind it; underlying this resides an ethnocentric chauvinism. More was, after all, a diehard evangelist: behaviour is all. The synergy of her poetic text concretely links ‘ethic’ with ‘ethnic’. Religious conflict was seen as a necessary evil; robbery and conquest were seen as just evils. Broader still, Ann Radcliffe also echoed important representations of the Other, which denote conflict with a rival of Christianity: Islam. A significant trope of eighteenth-century thought symbolizing that Other was the ‘turban’. In Mysteries of Udolpho, her most successful novel and one of the most successful of the Gothic genre, Radcliffe introduced the turban to her audience with a short yet effective description. ‘On his head’, she wrote of one character, ‘was a heavy flat velvet cap, somewhat resembling a turban, in which was a short feather; the visage beneath it shewed strong features, and a countenance furrowed with lines of cunning . . .’63 This clearly connects ‘turban’ with ‘deceit’, a criminality, passionately underscoring a racialized confrontation/conflict with Islam.64 This was something late eighteenth-century audiences were highly attuned to.65 The East was viewed with suspicion, as an unsafe and untrustworthy place. In the Mysteries, notions of the Eastern Other, that is a raciology of difference, are reinforced not only with reference to ‘Blackamoors’66 and ‘Saracens’67 but also with the conspicuous reference to ‘gipsies’. Radcliffe adds to the construction of the stereotypical representation of gypsies by characterizing them as plunderers.68 The casting of racial subjectivities as a (re)source of explication was something Radcliffe had previously articulated in her Romance of the Forest. In one sense, this was something that Romanticism positively endorsed under the rubric of ‘variety’. Indeed, the phrase ‘variety is the

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spice of life’ was in fact first coined towards the end of the eighteenth century by the Romantic poet William Cowper, a close friend of Radcliffe.69 Variety also fosters a methodology for constructing the Other. Radcliffe practised her art well, citing the Other in a catalogue of racial subjectivities. It is worth quoting at length a passage from Romance of the Forest: ‘There are certain prejudices attached to the human mind,’ said the Marquis in a slow and solemn voice ‘which it requires all our wisdom to keep from interfering with our happiness; certain set notions, acquired in infancy, and cherished involuntarily by age, which grow up and assume a gloss so plausible, that few minds, in what is called a civilized country, can afterwards overcome them. Truth is often perverted by education. While the refined European boasts a standard of honour, and sublimity of virtue, which often leads them from pleasure to misery, and from nature to error, the simple, uninformed American follows the impulse of his heart, and obeys the inspiration of wisdom . . .’70 He continues his speech: ‘Nature, uncontaminated by false refinement . . . everywhere acts alike in the great occurrences of life. The Indian discovers his friend to be perfidious, and he kills him; the wild Asiatic does the same; the Turk, when ambition fires, or revenge provokes, gratifies his passion at the expence of life, and does not call it murder. Even the polished Italian, distracted by jealousy, or tempered by a strong circumstance of advantage, draws his stiletto, and accomplishes his purpose . . .’71 The Marquis then concludes his speech with a grand statement. ‘It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from prejudices of country, or of education.’72 On the one hand, this speech sits comfortably with Enlightenment postulations on common humanity, such that ‘nature . . . everywhere acts alike . . .’ On the other hand, in concert with the rising tide of Romanticism it contains an assertion of cultural specificity, ‘refinement’, as Radcliffe put it. But the vantage point of the Marquis is one of power and that determines his cultural perspective, hence the refinement is ‘false’, that is he builds into his assertion a norm by which to racially judge others. The reductive currency of alterity was deeply entrenched. In Mysteries of Udolpho, the sense of alterity, as the Eastern Other, is also inscribed through reference to architecture. Architecture is a spatial

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orientation of social value, containing both form and function, harbouring an ideological agenda which is both declared and undeclared. Such form and function is to be found in ‘the roof, that rose into arches built in the Moorish style’.73 The Moors, we may recall, were ‘aliens’ expelled from Christendom, that is European soil and its body politic, in 1492. That reference to the East is further evidence of the extent to which Romanticism was embroiled in Enlightenment precepts, and was deeply imbued with a fascination with Islam, as Ian Netton has suggested.74 To Radcliffe’s audience the reference was a symbol of the exotic Other.

Romantic genealogy of culture Radcliffe, like other women, explored social philosophy with great alacrity. In Mysteries, she spoke incessantly about the relationship held to exist between Nature and Art; that is ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. She juggled characterization, the social structure and the role of the supernatural in a finely tuned blend of Gothic storytelling; the Romantic frame within which she did so is an assemblage of ethical positions. The text is peppered with words and phrases that expose the mental template by which Radcliffe elucidated her cultural understanding of nature and behaviour; woven throughout the critique of gendered society are not only religious but also racialized markers of Romantic notions, which signify value, belief and history. Radcliffe’s discourse focused upon nature, particularly landscape, and the mind, representing the awesome and sublime creations of God. These were two key elements of Gothic Romanticism. Radcliffe fused the two into a whole, deftly combining the rational properties of the Enlightenment, positing its assessment of nature as something that is to be tamed and controlled, with the emotional properties of Romanticism, positing its assessment of nature as something that is to be appreciated as divine creation, as something to be encountered, and as something that evokes awe at its beauty by, as McGrath has noted, a humanity that is utterly aware that it is a dynamic participant in God’s plan.75 In so doing Radcliffe carved for herself a place in the analytical précis of western human nature and western society. Late eighteenth-century ideological construction of landscape, a product of Romantic rationalism, not only locates individuals in places but also signifies attachment.76 Landscape as an ideology suggests a specificity of religious, cultural and racial belonging. Radcliffe used landscape to promote such sentiments, particularly lofty feelings of the sublime. So, when Emily looked at the mountains, ‘the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted

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her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH . . .’77 Similarly, Emily ‘raised her thought in prayer, which she felt always most disposed to do when viewing the sublimity of nature . . .’78 Radcliffe’s representation of gender and landscape was one of religious awe; it was Romantic in the fullest sense of the term. And critically it was a Christianized ethnology, valorizing difference. There is, therefore, more to this depiction than, at first, seems obvious. In particular, the Mysteries, in concert with other Romantic texts, contains a genealogy of the Christian West: systematically peppered throughout the text are references to the racial conflicts which Romanticism, as a Christian discourse, openly subscribes to. This needs to be read against a very large historical canvas, drawing on the Romantic view of the ancient origins of the West. Accordingly, when Emily sees the Adriatic we are told that she ‘thought of Greece, and, a thousand classical remembrances stealing to her mind . . .’79 The allusion is further compounded by the ‘former grandeur and animation’ of the Illiad and Wars of Troy.80 The connections here, between the sensibilities of Christianity and ancient Greece, are deep-rooted.81 At play here is the Romantic representation of history at its most poignant: it attempts to buck against the older Enlightenment wisdom, which bore a greater respect for Ancient Rome and Egypt; Romanticism suggested a shift of emphasis and allied itself with Greece. What ominously underscores this shift is an ideology of ‘race’ at work in the genealogy of the West: the whiteness of European origins is asserted and preserved and the blackness of Egyptian, that is African, involvement is exorcized from that genealogy.82 With her classical nuance Radcliffe reinforces a psychology of history that is anchored in a Romantic, racialized politics. Christianity was perceived to be a civilizing force. That was most evidently the case when the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century provided a cultural space for women to intervene in the moral economy of the nation, embedded as it was in notions of ‘race’ and ‘civilization’. The actual mechanism whereby the ‘nation’, assumed to be a cohesive, self-sustained community, creates a path to the valorization of ‘race’ is ‘culture’. Women such as Hannah More, for instance, were central to the development of this as a general stratagem. Jane Rendall concludes that the impact of women on religion during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the evangelical revival, was a feminization of religion83 that places women, rather than men, in the ideological arena as civilizers, carers, and nurturers of the nation, of nationhood; men are cast as conquerors.84 This was manifestly the case in the sweeping way, to purloin the cleansing metaphor,

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in which Christianity defined and interacted with the non-Christian world. Such a combative level of culture-making requires, at least in the first instance, a cohesive sense of ethnie, that is a collectivity with a shared myth of ancestry marked by a geopolitical boundary, from which to spring forth.85 British women writers of the late eighteenth century, who intervened in that moral, racial and nationalist maze, offered an ideological synthesis which was at one and the same time a modern, Romanticized, religious sense of selfhood. The link that can now be made more explicit is between theology and ‘race’. The connective had long been established as a vibrant ideological entity well before any of the British women writers of this study had even been born, for historically the Christian Church had provided boundaries. According to Satish Saberwal, Christianity shaped a multifarious awareness of community across Europe, which disseminated shared beliefs, folklore, rites and totems.86 Culture is critical. In this sense, Christianity overcame the fragmentation of nation states, which was most evident in the Crusades. Thus the link between the culture of Christianity on the one hand and manifestations of nationalism on the other is far from nebulous; indeed, a sense of community is de facto a structure in which the Other is located and is common ground to both. The space in which an ‘usness’ manifests is reified: homeland is no longer just a bit of dirt, for it becomes an ideology, structured around geographical icons, quintessential virtues and a process of legitimization as to who to include within and who to exclude from, the sense of belonging. Homeland becomes a memory, a psychical geography. The nation that Edmund Burke, Hannah More, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft separately contested the right to speak for was a mythic enterprise in which the idea of territorial sovereignty, rooted deep in the JudaicChristian tradition, drew strength from the time of Babel when God had authorized the separation of people into linguistic entities.87

Islam Important in this context, is the supranational but nonetheless racialized idea of Europe. The geographical and cultural ‘usness’ symbolized by Europe is an historical product, which has a contentious Christian complexion to its making.88 The social fabric of Christian Europe has been predicated upon a racial discourse, in that the foundation of Christianity, in its most basic and ardent form, is as a derivation of Hebraic ethnogeny: a thesis of Judaic racialism. Christian theology, whichever branch, bore a significant relationship to the idea of ‘race’

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right from its inception, long before it rooted in Europe. Most notably, Christianity has been tied to ‘race’ through its relationship of conflict with Islam. The year 1492 not only marks the extension of the modern horizon with the opening up of the New World, but also signifies the banishment of Islam from Western Europe. Islam has of course been instrumental in shaping and defining the social, political, economic and the psychological contours of most of what Europe is and has stood for.89 The threat that Islam has commonly been held to pose towards Christendom can be seen, as Ian Netton writing about the Enlightenment has argued, to be a part of a general canvas of fear in the construction of the milieu of European consciousness.90 ‘The dominant reaction of Western Christendom toward Islam’, writes Johns, ‘remained violently xenophobic.’91 Fear was a source for the crystallization of racial identities; indeed, the religious–racial duality, according to Anthony Smith, is probably the most persistent form around which races have coalesced.92 British women writers of the eighteenth century can be seen to have sustained, maintained and negotiated the workings of that ideological tableau. Mary Leapor, a peasant poet from the middle of the eighteenth century, represents not only early modern feminist authors with poems such as ‘Man the Monarch’ and ‘An Essay on Woman’, but also workingclass success in that canon of early feminist writers.93 In her ‘An Essay on Woman’, an interrogation of the marriage market, she found it engaging to employ the poetic language of racial contrast, referencing the Islamic world: ‘Snow turns a negro and dissolves in tears, / And, where the charmer treads her magic toe, / On English ground Arabian odours grow . . .’94 There are two categories of Otherness here. On the one hand, the depiction of the negro in snow, the alienness of the imagery hinges upon seeing a negro and snow as a misplacement, clearly unhappy to be cold hence the tears, and by deduction not acclimatized to the experience, in other words a foreigner. Montefiore, who argues that the phrase ‘Snow turns a negro and dissolves in tears’ is an aesthetic reference to white beauty and a symbolic reference to the ending of winter,95 nonetheless acknowledges that the reference in its entirety stands as an association of ‘negroes’ with ‘dirt’.96 In that association resides the imperative imagery of cleansing requisite for Christian redemption. Montefiore recognizes that level of connectivity.97 On the other hand, there is also the Otherness of the Arabian odours on English soil. Apart from the structure of women’s subjectivity being rooted in nature, and apart from the inference of contamination, an attack on sanctity and purity, what also is interesting about this particular phraseology of Otherness is that it once again shifts attention to the East. This further underscores the observations of Frances

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Mannsaker regarding the degree to which the mystical, the charm and magic, of the East penetrated European consciousness.98 Central to this partiality was the mesmeric Arabian Nights. Westerners, such as Clara Reeve and Maria Edgeworth, embraced the Arabian thesis to such an extent that they wrote their own oriental tales.99 When writing to her family, in 1799, Mary Elgin, wife of the newly appointed British ambassador to Turkey, invoked the Arabian Nights, to convey the opulence and splendour of the Sultan’s throne room.100 There is, however, more to Islam as Other. It has undergone different twists and turns as a tool of representation than merely one of avid fascination and allurement. Mary Wollstonecraft was quite aware, and knew her audience was quite aware, of the imagery of racial identity commensurate with Islam when she wrote of its alleged oppression of women. In her damning critique of Edmund Burke, for example, Wollstonecraft wove God, Nature and reason together while resting upon shared assumptions of racial identity. ‘Some rational old woman indeed might chance to stumble at this doctrine’, she wrote, ‘and hint, that in avoiding atheism you had not steered clear of the mussulman’s creed; but you could readily exculpate yourself by turning that charge on Nature, who made our idea of beauty independent of reason.’101 Wollstonecraft knew she did not have to even explain or expand her articulations of it, in a discussion on sexual character, beyond what was encoded in her short syntagm. In her second Vindication, she underlined the point while arguing against Milton. She declared that she could not ‘. . . comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation’.102 Although this was an attempt to forge a feminist universalism, in sympathy with women under the yoke of men the whole world over, it clearly also signified at the same time a discourse of Otherness. It acknowledges and proffers a racial typology predicated upon religious faith. It was, and remains, an aperitif of racial identity. This, it must be said, was a common frame of reference. On the wider radical front, Thomas Paine, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, also referred to the Islamic world in this stereotypical fashion.103 This commanded support elsewhere on the feminist canvas. Two such prominent voices of late eighteenth-century British women writers who echoed this attitude were Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More. Maria Edgeworth, while providing a critique of contemporary education, claimed that ‘till of late, women were kept in Turkish ignorance . . .’104

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The Islamic East was proffered as a mode of comparison to the, as far as Edgeworth was concerned deficient but nonetheless still superior, Christian world. Similarly, Hannah More, also writing on the state of contemporary education, advocated a reductive Otherness, racial, spiritual and moral, residing in the world of Arabia. She did so in order to raise and mobilize consciousness in favour of a better education for young British girls. More condemned the nature of education, particularly that meted out to women, which she saw as serving the frivolous, idle and impractical worldly lot women were expected to endure. ‘To use their boasted power over mankind to no higher purpose than the gratification of vanity or the indulgence of pleasure’, she wrote, is the degrading triumph to those fair victims to luxury, caprice and despotism whom the laws and religion of the voluptuous prophet of Arabia exclude from light, liberty and knowledge: and it is humbling to reflect, that in those countries in which the fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the excess, they are slaves; and that their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to mere external charms . . .105 This clearly co-joins the opinion advocated by Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth. But More adds to the mythic constellation of Otherness. First, she alludes to popular images of difference: gratification of vanity, caprice and despotism that serves to underscore ‘us’ and ‘them’. Secondly, she injects moral judgements about the difference that she perceived. What she says weaves sex, ‘race’ and religion tightly together. In that way, in her statement to society ostensibly on the nature of British education for young British girls, More fused together a critique of womanhood with racialized notions of Otherness. She did so within a comparative religious framework and notably at the same time advocated an ethical guide to Christian righteousness. More promoted an ethnic metaphysics. Wollstonecraft went further still. She made much overt ideological connections between ‘race’ and civilization. In ‘Letter Five’, part of her A Short Residence in Sweden, Wollstonecraft speculated upon the genesis of mankind and the most probable geographical region in which that took place. She decided that man was first placed in the north and subsequently was drawn to the sunnier climes of the south.106 Nature was the sole driving force, shaping and influencing the needs and desires of humankind. Wollstonecraft echoed the sentiments of the Enlightenment critique of history and the historical process, in that the environment was granted an importance that was in effect pre-historical. In other

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words, history, the play of events determined by people, was considered to be the mechanical net result of environmental stimuli.107 Similarly, Wollstonecraft, like other theorists of her age, viewed human nature as a single entity, a universal phenomenon, fixed and immutable, and subject equally to the same forces the whole world over. She wrote that she did not wonder why ‘hordes of barbarians always poured out of these regions to seek for milder climes, when nothing like cultivation attached them to the soil’, adding that this is explicable if we take into account the ‘view that the adventuring spirit, common to man, is naturally stronger and more general during the infancy of society’.108 The point she makes therefore, which bears the imprint of Rousseau, dovetails neatly with the accepted wisdom of developmental history promoted by other historical theorists of the Enlightenment period.109 In this way, she similarly attempted, along with other theorists, many of whom she disagreed with, to explicate upon racial difference which, as David Goldberg argues, has been a central feature of modernity.110

Enlightenment and the raciology of civilization Eighteenth-century thought is generally considered to have been grounded, as Isaiah Berlin notes, in the assumption that human nature involved essential, mutually shared universal traits.111 The late eighteenth-century innovative short story writers, Harriet and Sophia Lee, declared in ‘The Scotsman’s Tale’, ‘I know the English are a generous nation: but I also know human nature to be, under various modifications, the same everywhere . . .’112 This allowed some variation but rested on a gloss which was gender-blind and racially specific. Clearly, the human nature eighteenth-century theorists identified and valued was white and male. Cultural difference was determined by God, in the fashion of Babel, and was explained with reference to various climates or other environmental factors, factors which inhibited or facilitated the development of ‘reason’ in the battle to be champion over God’s nature. We have already seen that Wollstonecraft embraced the general thrust of this model of historical process. Bruce Trigger, in his erudite outline which unearths human activity, argues that Enlightenment philosophers believed that all people were fundamentally the same and would respond to environments with the same problems in the same way, but simply at different moments in history.113 In her work on how Wollstonecraft treated ‘reason’, Virginia Sapiro comments that Wollstonecraft ‘debated’ with David Hume, and we can take this exploration of difference as an illustration of this ‘debate’. While

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Hume, in common with other eighteenth-century theorists advocated that ‘there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations’, he nonetheless felt compelled to make a racial distinction here which separated out black people.114 Hume, I would argue, did not actually subscribe to a view of common humanity. ‘There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white’, he wrote, continuing, ‘nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men . . .’115 The connection explicitly made here is that of a causal link between nature, ‘race’ and culture. Indeed, this valorizes culture as the mechanism whereby distinctions of ‘race’ may be found. Given that, as Goldberg points out, ‘empiricism encouraged the tabulation of perceivable differences between peoples and from it deduced their natural differences’,116 what Hume strove to promote was a rectitude of perception. It is with more than a dash of irony, therefore, that it can be said of him that he canonized this as an ethical position. Such rectitude was diffused extensively and was based in the last analysis upon a Lockean framework. Empiricism, which proffered simple truths, bore utility to not just the scientist but also the priest, in that it sanctioned and sanctified perception of God’s natural world. Empiricism percolated the social fabric to the extent that ‘observation’ became a kind of duty for all.117 In this sense, perception per se spoke truth and served to concretize what it was the West saw when looking around the rest of the globe. The visual ideology of the militant geography, as Gillian Rose terms the expeditionary forces of the late eighteenth century, scientifically validated, seemingly beyond question, all phenomena within gaze.118 Yet for Mary Wollstonecraft, an observer extraordinaire, the intellectual position advocated by Hume was one that ordained unnatural distinctions, as Sapiro has argued.119 Sapiro notes that Wollstonecraft, while not dwelling greatly on issues of ‘race’, at least did adumbrate a thesis which, we can see, contradicts that of Hume. Wollstonecraft spoke of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who wrote his autobiography which was published in 1789 and reviewed by Wollstonecraft, in terms of praise with broadsides against those who indulged in racial prejudices.120 Just like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft believed society to be the source of difference, that all humans carry the same nature but progress through stages of development at different rates. That is what made societies different. And in this vein she referred to the world of Islam in her typology of nature, culture and ‘race’. The passage from Letter Five, for instance, is concluded:

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‘The conduct of the followers of Mahomet, and the crusaders, will sufficiently corroborate my assertion.’121 The nature of ‘civilization’ is axiomatic and, furthermore, is a substantive problematic for which the veneer of Christianity, which was perceived to be so natural, is a central factor. The equilibrium of this alleged natural state was founded upon a value system of reason and judgement, that is Godly authority as a lifestyle, broadly speaking culture.122 Like all lifestyles, moreover, it forms a fundamental basis upon which to compare. The ‘noble savage’, for instance, was sucked into the canon of western thought through conflict generated by Christian missions in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas.123 Christianization was at one with the imperial drive of colony and conquest: missionaries spearheaded the colonial project.124 Edward Gibbon asserted in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the Christian religion is ‘professed by the nations of Europe, the most distinguished portion of humankind in arts and learning as well as in arms. By the zeal and industry of the Europeans it has been widely diffused to the most distant shores of Asia and Africa, and by the means of their colonies has been firmly established from Canada to Chili . . .’125 In this respect, Christianity, as a civilizing discourse, was wedded to the idea of ‘race’.

Christianity and slavery Christianity bore a significant relationship to ‘race’ most conspicuously in terms of slavery. Slavery pricked the late eighteenth-century High Protestant sense of moral responsibility. Hannah More was central to this. Two factors, however, proved to be a source of endless anxiety. First, the Church of England had declared that the Christianizing of black people did not mean that they could not be enslaved.126 Opinion was divided on this matter. Olaudah Equiano clearly thought that because he had been baptized he therefore could not be re-enslaved.127 Ann Yearsley, a working-class protégé of Hannah More, provides an interesting twist here. Yearsley was clearly incensed at the treatment black people received at the hands of white Christians. She attempted to publicly humiliate them in ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’ published in 1788. Unlike More, who used a paradigm by which to compare and condemn Islam with Christianity as we have seen, Yearsley compared and confirmed Islamic value to question Christian ethics: Ye hypocrites, disown The Christian name, nor shame its cause; yet where

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Shall souls like yours find welcome? Would the Turk, Pagan, or wildest Arab, ope their arms To gain such proselytes? No; he that owns The name of Musselman would start, and shun Your worse than serpent touch; he frees his slave Who turns to Mahomet . . .128 The Christianization of slaves, thought by some to be a process of liberation, proved only to be an ineffectual stratagem.129 Secondly, there was the embarrassing fact that the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel actively embraced the secular law of property by actually owning slaves itself.130 High Protestant ethics, which do not operate in a vacuum, were galling to many. Moreover, it was even the Quakers who had gained the Christian high ground of moral rectitude by being the first organized group in Britain to oppose the chattel slavery of black people.131 It was in April 1787 that the Quakers, in an alliance with a range of evangelical Protestants, joined with Granville Sharp and his associates all of whom had leaning towards social and political reforms, and together they established the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It is interesting to note that national morale in the country at large was emphatically depleted at this time in the wake of the loss of British real estate in the American colonies; the loss of America was later poignantly ratified in the same year as the French Revolution began when George Washington became the first president of the United States. Some argued, such as those who gathered around William Wilberforce, including Hannah More, known collectively as the Clapham Sect, that what was needed was a strong, uplifting moral cause. At one level, therefore, anti-slavery can be seen to satisfy that need, in that it obviously provided a very clear moral focus around which the nation could be mobilized. Both William Wilberforce and Hannah More became deeply involved in the anti-slavery movement providing a saving grace to High Protestant ethics in the eyes of some. William Cowper, and later Robert Owen, dedicated works in honour of Wilberforce. Hannah More agitated against the slave trade. Living in Bristol, she experienced at first hand its iniquitous impact. Indeed, one incident seemed to confirm a view that secular law was sustaining the worst of all possible evils. In 1790, she witnessed the capture of a runaway slave in Bristol, and this despite the famous ruling by Lord Mansfield. The event marked her deeply.132 She saw also the tremendous wealth slavery offered. That is not surprising given that, as David Richardson writes, Bristol was one of the three largest slave ports

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in Britain.133 Her poem, ‘Slavery’, drew heavily upon the prevalent idiom of the noble savage, and addressed what for many was the thorny issue of Christianity and its relationship with slavery. More was adamant that those who engage in slavery while they may profess to be Christian are not to be considered as such: ‘Savage! thy venial error I deplore / They are not Christians who invest your shore . . .’134 She condemned the motives of greed which drove slavers to their business.135 Slavery, she argued, was an abuse before the sight of God, and she reminded society that ‘God shall vindicate his broken laws.’136 Significantly, More invested her critique with the concept of rights: ‘What page of human annals can record / A deed so bright as human rights restored . . .’137 She spoke throughout the poem to God. She asked that God ‘look down in mercy in thy chosen time / with equal eye on Afric’s suffering clime: / disperse her shades of intellectual night, / repeat thy behest – Let there be light! / Bring each benighted soul, great God, to thee, / And with thy wide Salvation make them free!’138 In this way, More in concert with the spirit and letter of evangelism made her statement. Not only did she publicly rebuke the political economy which guided slavery, and so extending the economic critique of it asseverated by, among others, Adam Smith, she also attempted to throw light on an alternative moral way of life, a religious life amid what she felt was the apostasy of her times. More, however, was not content to let things lie there. Her intellectual powers of moralist reasoning is one thing, indeed cutting and perceptive. That was, however, only part of her prodigality. It was her commitment to an alternative life, one that endowed value and faith in all human existence and not just white people, which governed her adherence to the practical side of the anti-slavery movement. To this end, More organized a boycott of West Indian sugar.139 This was a perceptive strategy of sanctions that fused domestic and consumer society economics and ideology in the context of the overall struggle against the might of the slave industry. In a literal sense she put her mouth where she wanted her money to go. This bridged the spurious distinction between the public and private spheres. The nexus of empire often manifested in the domestic sphere. What, moreover, lay behind More’s intervention was evangelicalism which she translated into a praxis as much as a methodology of preaching. In this way, Hannah More attached to an assertion of womanhood specific notions of Otherness. This was couched within a comparative religious framework, as we have seen with her referencing of the East, which promoted at the same time an ethical guide to Christian righteousness and behaviour. The rectitude embedded here in this racialized

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paradigm of Otherness is only a part of the picture. Hannah More spoke to British society from within the Protestant establishment; its bête noire furnishes us with the rest of the equation.

Catholicism and the other Disaffection with the ancien regime made odd bedfellows of a great variety of social groups and classes of men and women who confronted, challenged and changed the make-up of late eighteenth-century British society. Dissent was, therefore, formally political as much as it was religious. One very obvious dimension to this remained a deep-rooted impasse. England was not Catholic. Catholicism was perceived to be an alien evil controlled by a foreign power, that is Rome. Additionally, two regions within Britain, Scotland and Ireland, though under the hegemonic influence of England, were not adherents of the High Protestant Church of England: Scotland was largely Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Ireland was Catholic. The Union between England and Scotland was not a partnership of equals. And, although Ireland was dominated by Catholicism, there was, moreover, an overriding imperative. Richard Faber suggests that the motivation for the Union, just as it had been with Wales and Scotland, was national security.140 War with Revolutionary France was the invisible hand here. It is therefore, in this context that the Protestant–Catholic duality makes for interesting reading. Elizabeth Inchbald and Fanny Burney were intimately related to this. Their works provide insightful illustrations of Protestant–Catholic tensions as a racialized discourse in Britain in the crisis torn 1790s. Eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism was not simply a matter of cultural politics. The Corporation Act of 1661, the Test Act of 1673 and the Parliamentary Act of 1678 all maintained legal exclusion. They were legal chicanery: although ostensibly applicable to all persons, the oaths they required of office holders were explicitly Anglican, thus precluding Catholics and Jews from seeking and holding any office.141 This had two effects. It framed moral judgements and the taking of sides; additionally, it formally created the cultural space and practice of dissent, based on creed. The cultural inclusivity upon which being a Protestant was predicated shaped a political agency in which bonding and networking mediated a sense of identity, a sense of togetherness, the raciology of which is less than subtle. In the first instance, ideological bonds of Protestant allegiance gave rise to networks against which the Catholic Other, vividly underscored after 1789, was politically and culturally kept at arm’s length. In

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this framework, Linda Colley has argued that ‘Protestantism was able to become a unifying and distinguishing bond as never before.’142 It represented a politics of ‘race’. While it is the case that Protestantism did underscore inclusion within the State polity, and in the process defined political exclusion as everything and everyone else, the role of the Catholic alien Other needs to be addressed more fully. Throughout eighteenth-century Britain, the Catholic Other served to delineate and promote a racialized politics both abroad and at home. By the late eighteenth century, Catholicism was certainly a minority religion with an iconography and language which was Continental and, of course, Catholicism even looked to Rome, and Dublin, for leadership. This placed an official question mark over the allegiance to the state that British Catholics professed. To some extent, therefore, that web of Acts enshrined an uneven distribution of loyalty to the state. It is ironic, of course, that the foreign veneer of Catholicism really hid the fact that Catholicism, as Mary Chamberlain has pointed out, was the native Christianity of Britain.143 Catholics, therefore, could rightly consider themselves as having maintained a devout godliness, where others had not. Their lineage was unbroken. This is a language of mobilization in that it draws upon territory, history and community in a projection of an ethnic past.144 Generically, therefore, this potentially placed Catholics alongside Dissenters, for both shared the same political ground in that they advocated a truer sense of nationhood. The Catholic Lady Morgan, also known as Sydney Owenson, who wrote tales of nationalism about Ireland, and the radicalized Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld trod the same ideological ground. Barbauld in ‘An Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts’, published in 1790, identified common ground to exist among all those who were ‘children of the state, though we are not so of the Church . . .’145 The end of the eighteenth century was witness to such ideological battles inasmuch as radicals forged a racialized politics which, as we have seen with William Blake, was also deeply imbued with the religion of dissenting academies, such as the Sandemanians, Moravians, Inghamites, Muggletonians and (Blake’s own) Swedenborgians.146 David Hempton is correct to identify widespread and deep-rooted anti-Catholicism engrained across the whole of the social and political spectrum in England during the eighteenth century.147 This stands as a de facto displacement of belonging to, and acceptance within, the boundaries of national identity. Hempton, however, does not go far enough. For towards the end of the century we find that anti-Catholicism did not abate under the direction of so-called social superiors, as he

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concludes, rather it became more virulent. We need to see anti-Catholicism of the late eighteenth century, therefore, against the background of a wider context in which social tensions were framed in the racialized wake of the French Revolution. While this certainly drew on a deeply engrained British tradition, the Revolution added a further gloss to its meaning. For in the mental universe of eighteenth-century Britain, the single largest demon was the Otherness of the French. The Revolution of 1789 crystallized the demonology replete in all things French, and Catholicism, it must be acknowledged, was an integral feature of that. Looking at late eighteenth-century Britain from this perspective, we veer away from the Lockean ideology of toleration, which Hempton sees as existing in these years. Thus, the conclusion Linda Colley reaches is very persuasive. Protestantism, she argues, served to cultivate the sense of British national identity in this period as it grew in strength ‘alongside of, and not necessarily in competition with older, more organic attachments to England, Wales or Scotland’.148 Her gloss, however, fails to take cognisance of the depth and extent to which an ideology of ‘race’ both fed into and sustained that alleged ascendancy. British women writers of the late eighteenth century bring to the fore the workings of this complex raciology and ‘race-producing’ theology. Framing our discussion in this way, it is instructive to read the works of these women writers as ethical guides and critiques of behaviour that included a racialized understanding of religion. The era as a whole, volatile and replete with ideas, indigenous and foreign, gave rise to a host of moral critiques. One such example can be found in A Simple Story, a novel by Elizabeth Inchbald. Inchbald, literary historians agree, drew upon her own experience of Catholicism in crafting her tale.149 The sexual politics which runs throughout the story is designed to shock; while this is certainly true in terms of Inchbald’s concern to be successful in the marketplace, this draws also on the sensationalism of the era in general and cannot be separated from the social angst embedded in late eighteenth-century British society. Reading her text against the background in which it was published, the Revolution, exposes the ways in which forms of Christianity are racialized discourses. A Simple Story, first published in 1791, appeared when the French Revolution was into its third year. It is a book of two halves, a story of a mother and a story of a daughter. Miss Milner, the heroine of the first half, hailed by some as containing more Frenchness, became a vehicle through which French eroticism was reintroduced into the English novel.150 Inchbald, as a supporter of the Revolution in France, compounded

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the sense of cultural uneasiness, both delighting and disturbing her audience, by presenting such a powerful outsider to them. Inchbald was herself Catholic and enthused by the social imagination that resided in France. More outside-than-in is indeed a thematic structure around which the entire text is wrapped. Miss Milner breaks the bonds of ‘a woman’s place’ to announce her love for a Catholic priest. This is indeed an echo of Inchbald’s preface wherein she wrote of the social cribbing and curtailment of full and sustained development denied to women; or, as Inchbald put it, an ‘education confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex . . .’151 By presenting a Roman Catholic priest who is gradually drawn into a sexual world, Inchbald carved a tale that was new and exciting. It proffered an account of human relationships that were not confined to the restrictions imposed by their sex or social traditions. The story was an advocacy for a new world, a feminist articulation that must be read against the social dislocation unleashed by the Revolution in France. In this sense, Inchbald traced and exposed the fissures in British society as it responded to the Revolution, and delineated a more defiant paradigm of British womanhood. Inchbald, though a radical who moved in circles which included Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was not, however, an impolitic free spirit. She was astute enough to recognize that indispensable to the feminist canvas was tact. The requirement for such delicacy was something that she, like others, could not escape from. To this end, she wove atonement into the tale. Indeed, the second half of the novel atones for the first. Inchbald used irony to great effect. Read with a broader perspective in mind, we can see that A Simple Story throws into sharp relief what it was that British society, indeed, the whole of western civilization had to atone for. It is equally befitting that the Christian mission in Africa is cited by one character, the Jesuit Sandford, and so furthering the religious undercurrent to the whole story. The intervention of the European Christian mission in Africa was twofold in character; both aspects proved to be a medium by which a dogma of ‘race’ was wedded to theology. First, it sought to practice Conversion. Conversion certainly tries to promote, as Max Weber put it, an ethic of brotherliness.152 However, the starting point of Conversion is an a priori assumption that those in need of the rightful religion have lower morals, that without the rightful religion they are in fact lesser beings. As Sardar et al. have commented, there was a gradation of Otherness in which adherence to Christianity and tractability to Christian instruction was the distinguishing mark of

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what constituted fully humanised and civilised people. It was a quite explicit and persistent part of European consciousness that without Christianity not only was there no salvation but there was no full civil life, since there was no space between the definition of the norms of behaviour of humanity in general and the norms of Christian behaviour.153 That said, it must still be acknowledged that during the eighteenth century there were shifts in Christian perception and understanding, which to some extent qualifies that monolithic sense of cohesion.154 By the end of the century, Romanticism, for example, also further punctured that holistic view of Christian modernity. It was, nonetheless, a firmly held belief system of those Christians actively engaged in proselytizing the word of God. In that sense, Conversion is a racialized discourse in that it is predicated upon an ethnic chauvinism. The ideology of Conversion, therefore, is not just a religious phenomenon, it is also a political act; it is a spatial process of colonization. Missions in the pursuance of conversion provided an interface for conflict, and not only with Islam. Reaction to the missionary as a subject of colonization was, consequently, in many cases a bloody affair. Elizabeth Inchbald records that reality in what is almost a throwaway line. The Jesuit, Sandford, while attempting to dissuade Dorriforth, the priest, from accepting the evilness of Miss Milner likens his task to that of a ‘missionary among savages’, invoking the imagery of the ‘scalping knives of some of them’.155 The spread of missionary work, and the annexation it so often led to, clearly involved risk. Such risk was pecuniary also. Inchbald was equally aware of that. So, in a later scene, Dorriforth, by then the Lord Elmwood, was concerned that he had to return to the West Indies, perhaps the largest and bloodiest location of Conversion in the modern era, in order to save his large estate there from ruin.156 A storyline to be echoed by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park. Fanny Burney provides us with another example of how religion and ‘race’ are joined together. Like Elizabeth Inchbald, Burney’s work contained an ethnic and national raciology relevant to both French and blacks. Her last novel, The Wanderer published in 1814, is a remarkable observation of ‘race’ relations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Indeed, Burney, perhaps the most accomplished of the British women writers from the late eighteenth century, was in no doubt about that state of affairs. Burney tapped into popular, anti-Catholic traditions. The Wanderer, written while she lived in France, that is during the making of the Revolution and actually set during the 1792 Reign of Terror, contains thematic lines in

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the story which address difference in social, political and religious values. Burney does not provide a critique of comparative religion in The Wanderer; she had done that in her ‘Reflections Relative to the French Clergy’ written in 1791, that is twenty-three before The Wanderer was published. Rather, she recognized and wrote about religious themes that she perceived, as a woman and a British national married to a Frenchman, to be important elements in an ontological framework. In this respect, just like Inchbald before her in A Simple Story, Burney identified both anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiments as vibrant organizing principles in the mental framework of Britain during these years of crisis. The ethnic and racial bonds brimming in the text need to be read against that background. Burney was aware of the intricacies of French politics of her day. She was also cognisant, perceptively so, of the Francophobia which characterized much of British politics at that time. Francophobia served as a critical structuring property of The Wanderer. Whereas Elizabeth Inchbald had referred to ‘frenchified’ cultural morés as a backdrop to her A Simple Story, Burney presented to her audience a diet of common prejudices on which to feed. Consequently, there are potent caricatures of the bestial, ignorant and writhing inhumanity of the French. We have a comment on the sexual looseness allegedly all the rage under the reign of ‘Mr. Robertspierre’: ‘A man’s wife and daughters belong to any man who has a taste to them, as I am informed . . .’157 We are told that ‘the French have no spirit’.158 There is an allegation that the French are bloodthirsty: commonest soldier in France, when once he can bring proof he has killed you his dozen or so, with his own hand, is made a general on the spot? If that’s the case, to be sure it’s no great wonder there’s so much blood shed; for such encouragement as that’s enough to make soldiers of the very women and children . . .159 And racial and religious origin concludes a nine-page vitriolic attack on French people: The man may be a tolerable good Christian, mayhap, for a Papist. And indeed, to tell you the truth, though it is a thing I am not over fond of speaking about, I have seen some Frenchmen I could have liked mightily myself, if I had not known where they came from . . .160 In the light of her marriage to a French émigré, it is safe to assume that Burney did not subscribe to that way of thinking. What she succeeded

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in doing, therefore, was to capture a moment in British history by repeating common gossip and widespread anti-French feelings evidently entrenched in the British public.161 Burney exposed the irrationality of national prejudices. Theology became the buttress against which one of the central characters of the novel, Elinor Joddrel, was dramatically cast. It is through Elinor that the ideology of the rights of woman is argued (like Edgeworth’s Belinda). It is she who welcomes the Revolution as an event that promises endless possibilities for the future, just as Mary Wollstonecraft did. It is Elinor who, during the Reign of Terror and reports that filtered across the Channel to England amid the process of de-Christianization in France,162 heralds ‘reason’ as the beacon of salvation. Harleigh, for whom Elinor has an infatuation, is the character through whom the new age ideology is confronted and challenged. He assumes the propriety of the Christian ethic, sublimely deferential and righteous. Elinor and Harleigh have a number of intellectual dogfights in which the rationality of Elinor is pitted against the emotion of his faith. Burney has Elinor lose. Elinor, whose intellectual posture is castigated as a masculine spirit, fails to convince Harleigh of the rectitude of her stance. The notion of patriarchal authority this invokes is at one with Enlightened masculinist culture. Such masculinism resides at the heart of rational authority.163 Maybe Mary Wollstonecraft would have seen this as a compliment and not, as intended, as an insult. Conversely, the religious posture adopted by Harleigh is vindicated when, in the spirit of Lockean toleration, the ending of the novel sees the arrival of the heroine’s much-longed-for guardian. He is a bishop fleeing from the terror of a godless nation to Britain. Fanny Burney provided a commentary. On the one hand, she critiqued the rationality of Elinor and rebuked a host of other women who spoke the same political language. That brand of reason was unacceptable to Burney who, in concert with other Romantic writers, still found room in nature for the hand of God. In a passionately discussed argument, Burney reworked the Lockean tradition. Harleigh says to Elinor: When we cease to speak, to move, to breathe, you assert the soul to be annihilated: But why? Is it because you lose sight of its operations? In chemistry are there not sundry substances which, by certain processes, become invisible, and are sought in vain by the spectator; but which are again brought to view? And shall the chemist have this faculty to produce, and to withdraw, from our sight, and the Creator of All be denied any occult powers?164

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What Harleigh alludes to here is highly significant: describing the cessation of life and the reanimation of a corpse recalls to mind the Resurrection of Christ. However, Elinor retorts that we cannot reason as based upon what is known: Elinor departs from Locke, as the Lockean tradition does not deny the presence of God, and sides with Hume. ‘Will you’, she says, ‘compare a fact which experiment can prove, which reason may discuss, and which the senses may witness, with a bare possibility? a vague conjecture?’165 But Harleigh asserts that what is still needed is faith. Burney rejected the Hobbesian view of human nature and again can be seen to pivot towards Locke. The attrition continues; Harleigh alludes to the world of proof and the invisible hand of God: ‘is any one therefore so wretched, as not to feel any social reliance beyond what he can mathematically demonstrate to be merited?’166 This leads us to the second aspect of Burney’s commentary. She spoke of an invisible hand within chemistry for a reason. She believed in a religious sentiment, one allegedly absent from the New Order in France. It was that perspective that guided her attack on the rationality that had fuelled the reign of terror, the period setting for The Wanderer, in the first place. In this way, Fanny Burney followed Hannah More in that she delineated political, social and sexual values through which a theological sentimentality was woven. Politically, therefore, at one level, The Wanderer strove to outline the ideological nature of comparative social systems. On another level, the structuring properties of that attempt reveal, in essence, an engagement with the Otherness of racial qualities. As we have seen, Christian theology contributed to the formation of a racial discourse, and late eighteenthcentury British feminism, in the fashion of Fanny Burney, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft and others engaging in a theological discourse, embraced theses of ‘race’ as part of that very engagement. The struggle that British women writers of the late eighteenth century recorded was one for a greater level of humanity, and a significant part of that struggle was couched as a doctrinal advocacy of a personal, and godly, politics of behaviour.

Education and patriarchal relations The politics of behaviour was not a tangential concern for British women writers. In one sense it was the bedrock of their discourse. The likes of Macaulay and Wollstonecraft had suggested that behaviour was crafted, that is it was socially determined. That is why education assumes such a key role in their works. Indeed, education was firmly on the agenda of

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late eighteenth-century British women writers from across the political spectrum. Ann Radcliffe similarly wove it into The Mysteries of Udolpho. The education of Emily is accorded a pivotal role in her development, in what was typical of this Romantic genre but decisively untypical of female education of the period. In one sense, of course, eighteenth-century women were saturated in education, but the formal education available for females, allowing for the calibrations of class, was ad hoc and uneven; they were barred from formal schools and universities. Typically, they were home-taught the basics in reading and writing, and in some circumstances formal instruction in some of the sciences, such as botany and chemistry, were deemed appropriate for young girls.167 It is interesting to recall the irony of Maria Edgeworth, a well-educated educator, who, in ‘Letters for Literary Ladies’, wrote that ‘. . . a good cook was only an empirical chemist . . .’168 However, staking a claim for an extensive education, such as the education Mary Hays’ character, Mary, in the fictional autobiography Victim of Prejudice, experienced under the tutelage of her father, which included Romance languages and geometry, algebra and arithmetic, was a very political act.169 Such a claim was often, therefore, couched in a context that professed an ulterior motive: to cultivate a qualitatively better frame of female mind. Radcliffe had Emily schooled in Latin and science, ‘as a well informed mind . . . is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice’.170 An active and healthy mind. This was seen as an antidote to the type of female that Wollstonecraft railed against. In essence this was a state of grace circumscribed by the awesome weight of patriarchal relations; it is that which gives the text its philosophical resonance. The Mysteries of Udolpho addresses that very problematic. Emily’s intelligence was not a warning sign from Radcliffe, far from it. It represents the struggle women faced for a qualitatively better-educated and mental existence in western patriarchy. That formal tussle of much of the story is perhaps best symbolized by reference to one engaging scene in which Montoni, an evil male character, attempts to force Emily to sign away any claim she might make to property he wanted as his own. Montoni admonished Emily for believing that she has a right to claim it; he wanted her to sign away her rights of interest in the property. Emily retorts: ‘If I have no right in these estates, sir . . . of what service can it be to you, that I should sign any papers, concerning them?’171 Not only does Radcliffe address the nature of legal possession, which in most instances was automatically male-centred; Emily exposed with ‘reasoning’ the duplicitous intention of Montoni, who in the process becomes very angry. ‘What had I but trouble to expect, when I condescended to reason

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with a baby!’172 And the point is repeated: ‘. . . I am talking to a baby.’173 He therefore degraded not only Emily but the intellectual capacity of women per se. This locks both sexes into a paradigmatic struggle which, as Anne Mellor points out, characterizes a male sense of justice and action (where Montoni declares his intention to take the property) compared to the female sense of care and response (a reactive, but not passive Emily).174 These dualisms are bedded deep in Romantic critiques of sexual and gender relations. Radcliffe knew her audience would not only sympathize with Emily but also empathize with the emotional framework as it was presented. She also knew the audience would be angry.

Women and science It was against the background of women’s intellectual struggle for a qualitatively different education that Fanny Burney used a populist, rational understanding of science and morals. I want now to focus upon the scientific allusion Burney had Harleigh illustrate his argument with, and extend this discussion further still. Science versus religion is, as Owen Chadwick has argued, a debate of epic and controversial stature in modernity’s intellectual history.175 Typically, it is argued that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ vie with each other to command more respect than the other does as explicator of truth. Both address themselves to the source of life. In this sense, science and religion are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, original Scholastic endeavours formed the basis for subsequent scientific enquiry. ‘With the increasing recognition of the physical world in the high Middle Ages’, writes Richard Tarnas, there arose a corresponding recognition of the positive role a scientific understanding could play in the appreciation of God’s wondrous creation. For all its wariness of mundane life and ‘the world’, the Judaeo-Christian religion nevertheless placed great emphasis on the ontological reality of that world and its ultimate relationship to a good and just God. Christianity took life seriously.176 And, as Ludmilla Jordanova has pointed out, eighteenth-century science was in fact a debate on life.177 So, chemistry, the subject Fanny Burney honed in on, is an apposite starting point in that it strikes at the heart of that discussion. Mary Shelley certainly thought so. The overwhelming trajectory of what science was thought to be for was the practical study of, and guide to, life. Chemistry was the flagship

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of science for it revealed the inner laws of nature. Yet this was only half of the scientific equation, for life bore a mutable relationship with the environment, so inorganic matter was also a part of chemical sciences. What John Dalton managed also to achieve with his atomic theory, not long after the eighteenth century had metamorphosed into the nineteenth century, was a mathematical understanding of matter. That stamped a place for the notion of chemical structure, bits and pieces that fitted together in a harmonious and well-ordered relationship, in God’s Plan. The elasticity of that notion played a significant part in what was to be the greatest achievement of early nineteenth-century science fiction, the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The critique of modern science that Mary Shelley proffered was inscribed by gender.178 In Frankenstein, we find the ultimate transgression of nature through the alleged scientific powers of rationality and reason. It certainly is a highly gendered, indeed arrestingly sexualized, tale, such that natural philosophers ‘penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places’.179 The novel deprecated Man in the presumption of creation without Woman; and in the process it represents, as Anne Mellor has argued, a feminist critique of a heavily gendered society.180 Shelley explored science, rationality and gender relations in an analysis of social justice and the excessiveness of intellectual single-minded passion. What emerges, therefore, as a didactic truism is the need to examine whether we should do something just because we could do something. Or, as Mary Shelley put it: ‘Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?’181 A salient point indeed. Shelley certainly acknowledged the rising social importance and power of science. ‘Chemistry’, she wrote, ‘is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made.’182 Though she actually embraced science in its broadest possible sense of application, ‘A man would make a very sorry chemist’, she had one character argue, ‘if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone . . . If your wish is to be become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.’183 Shelley’s vision was holistic. Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Edward Jenner, Joseph Priestly and Charles White, for instance, each added to the stock of interrelated scientific knowledge. Its import could hardly be gauged; a scientific imprint was a seal of approval. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote the preface to Frankenstein, declared: ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of

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impossible occurrence . . .’184 It is recorded in her journal that Mary read The Philosophy of Natural History by William Smellie on 25 October 1814, Elements of Chemical Philosophy by Humphry Davy on 28 October 1816 and Histoire naturelle générale et particulière by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in June and July 1817.185 Frankenstein was written with such connectivity in mind. Mary Shelley used the imagination of natural philosophy, physiology, chemistry and mathematics as a psychological and emotional lynchpin in her tale of life, nature and gender relations. In this sense, Shelley’s natural philosophy, denoting the fusion of science and speculation, brought an element of unity to the worlds of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Chemistry did not play a peripheral part in the social, political or economic wealth and welfare of British society during the late eighteenth century. Chemistry was no longer asleep and once awakened had immediate and obvious uses. It was central to British culture. It literally illuminated life: Pall Mall, for instance, was lit by gaslight as from 1805.186 Galvani discovered the electric circuit in 1786; Volta constructed his battery in 1799 and electrolysis was discovered in 1800.187 Although Maria Edgeworth’s ironic commentary linked chemistry to sound economics of the domesticated household, her annotation nonetheless stands as an echo of chemical relationships as the source of relating to, and understanding, the world. Writing about science or on scientific matters was keenly practised by many eighteenth-century women. Although records of active women scientists and mathematicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are woefully threadbare, there are examples. Some women, like the astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel, achieved professional status. Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville immersed herself in mathematics, corresponding with William Wallace (later a Professor at Edinburgh University) at the Royal Military College, Great Marlow; in 1811, she was awarded a silver medal for the resolution of a mathematical problem set in the Mathematical Repository. Many women made natural history their stomping ground; some, like the palaeontologist Mary Anning, started their intellectual careers at a very early age. Anning was 12 years old when she discovered the ichthyosaurus. She later unearthed the first specimens of plesiosaurus and pterodactyls.188 Many women wrote poetic texts on natural history specifically for children, like Charlotte Smith’s Conversations, Introducing Poetry and The Natural History of Birds.189 They also wrote beginners’ guides, like Priscilla Wakefield’s ‘An Introduction to Botany’, which appeared in 1796. Designed as a didactic tool, ‘An Introduction to Botany’ presented meticulous descriptions of the botanical structure

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of trees and plant life.190 Wakefield wrote extensively on the natural sciences. Similarly, Jane Marcet wrote ‘Conversations on Chemistry’, which first appeared in 1806.191 As Fiona Robertson observes, ‘Conversations on Chemistry’ alludes to the power and sense of wonderment of experimental sciences.192 Mary Shelley clearly took up that spirit in her science fiction. Marcet, like Wakefield before her, structured her text around a series of conversations allegedly between a woman teacher and two female tutees. She was keen to demonstrate that chemistry was not merely a science confined to minutiae operations but that it also had a command over larger horizons. It was a science of significant social and economic application: in medicine, in mechanics and in agriculture. ‘There are many ways’, she wrote, ‘by which labour may be rendered more easy, independently of mechanics; but even the machine the most wonderful in its effects, the steam engine, cannot be understood without the assistance of chemistry. In agriculture, a chemical knowledge of the nature of soils, and of vegetation, is highly useful . . .’193 In this way, Marcet glossed her didactic conversations with an educative and moralizing set of social guides, inculcating a sense of wonderment of western science and the application of western technology in her pupils. Marcet, like Wakefield and many others, was a committed educationalist. Indeed, a common denominator of each of the women who wrote about scientific matters was an assertion that there was a need to provide both boys and girls with an education appropriate for the world in which science was clearly making an impact on British civilization and the global economy. They argued that girls should be included in the schooling process of a scientific education. They also had allies in that call. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, wrote A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, and while it has an obvious social-class dimension to it, it nonetheless struck at the core of what was perceived to be a problem with the education of women. His curriculum was to include the teaching of physical and natural sciences as part of a young girls’ education:194 though science was by no means always so revered. Hannah More, writing from within the same social class as Erasmus Darwin, when commissioned to write a programme of education for the Royal Household, conversely advocated that a young female should ‘not be examining plants, when she should be studying laws; nor investigating the instincts of animals, when she should be analyzing the characters of men...’195 Clearly, the climate of educational concern was brimming with consideration on the nature and influence of science, and women were not absent from that debate. The Edgeworths,

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Maria and her father, Richard Lovell, were ever mindful of the importance of science and technology, and in their Practical Education, published in 1798, they argued that schooling should be able to prepare children, of both sexes, for a scientific world. The science fiction of Frankenstein hinged on education.

Science and race The educational paradigm Mary Shelley valorizes in Frankenstein is Lockean; the monster, literally made from bits and pieces, is the apogee tabula rasa, as it slowly and with evidential joy is enlightened, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle. David Musselwhite argues that Frankenstein is a model of categorization. It is through language that the monster learns how to differentiate between social categories such as male/ female, and rich/poor.196 Language is an important signifier in the text. Both Frankenstein and the character Clerval are proficient linguists. In addition to their aboriginal tongues between them they also study and learn Arabic, English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Persian. For Shelley, language represents a medium of command as much as communication. We may put this in its late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury linguistic context. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, there were significant advances in the science of philology, comparative and historical linguistics, during the late eighteenth century. Henry Pitts Forster, among others, expressed a keen interest in Orientalism, publishing his English and Bengalee Vocabulary, which appeared in 1799 and 1802; women, such as the Oriental scholar Elizabeth Smith, also made significant contributions to the field. Her Vocabulary, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, was published in 1814, eight years after her death.197 The fundamental laws of philology were seen as evolutionary and involved not only the discovery and classification of data, for which empire was an invaluable resource, but the elucidation of reasonable laws of human communication and development. Philology thereby spoke about racial difference, in a very Biblical framework, linguistic nationhood. Philologists made their strides on the back of conquests by European societies all over the globe: Sanskrit was opened up by the British vanquishing Bengal; the hieroglyphs were deciphered following Napoleon’s foray in Egypt.198 Frankenstein cannot be divorced from the wider interests and concerns of such political economy.199 It is in this racialized, and sexualized, context that Safie, a young Arabian woman, signifies conflict between the East and the West: her story is related and revolves around assertions of Enlightened Christianity and despotic Islamic bondage of mind, body and soul. It is hardly

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surprising, therefore, to find that it is Safie who struggles to command a new language whereas the monster, whose enlightenment takes places from a European vantage point, makes greater headway. As Clare Brant suggests, Frankenstein is a racial story: both the monster and Safie embody relations which are social and national.200 But Shelley also gives such differentiation an additional stamp, a gloss which is trans-global; she linked it to the practice of science through Frankenstein’s narration: If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting human kind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would not have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.201 The monster learns about mankind and the racialized political economy of the West. It is appalled at the destruction wrought in the New World and, with Safie, is moved to tears ‘over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants’.202 Nonetheless, a Romantic pall, a racialized dialectic infuses the ethnography of the text: Shelley’s affirmation of Volney’s Ruins of Empire was an advocacy beyond the anthropology she learned with Percy.203 It was also an expression emanating from and endorsing the deeply held Romantic anxiety about the genealogy of the West; its proposition is clearly embedded in the word-association ‘slothful Asiatics’, as opposed to the ‘stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians’.204 Almost an echo of Ann Radcliffe. The anxiety was an obsessively held philosophical platitude. Some time later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge added his own gloss to this ‘debate’ and went so far as to assert: ‘I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to Greek philosophy to be groundless.’205 Underlying that genealogy is an intellectual architecture, built on concepts such as the East and the West, concepts which imply that each is separate and distinct and, importantly, always have been. That, however, clearly simplifies the complexities of social, political and international economic relationships.206 The great play of events catalogued by Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance, suggests a different historical explanation.

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Additionally, that intellectual architecture is also a belief system which is eminently racial, an ‘us’ and ‘them’. The categories, which Musselwhite notes, are, moreover, social maps: the monster’s education in language, which is an arresting dimension of the entire narrative, is the process by which the Othering of racial differentiation and division is also carved into its mind. This is twofold: the acquisition of a tongue and the development of consciousness. Accordingly, the monster is schooled in the raciology of social relations.207 The science of human nature was not separated from the science of nature. For Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, science was a unifying force. It elucidated the secrets of not only nature but also God. To strip away secrets was to reveal perfection and an authoritative guide for human tractability.208 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science was a moral undertaking. Science was a maker of cultural values with a full social history to match. There was no conflict of interests between science and literature; the polymath drew inspiration from both endeavours where distinctions were more a matter of degree than design. But social history is more than a register of virtuoso or polymathic skills. Sandra Harding, who acknowledges the role of not only ‘gender’ but also ‘race’ in the making of science, is correct to stress that science, and the history of science, does not occur in a social and political or historical vacuum.209 That Mary Shelley accorded chemistry, or chemical sciences, such a pivotal role in Frankenstein was not incidental. Chemistry represented a language of cultural iconography that delineated and promoted Western superiority of command over nature. Command over nature was one thing; what about command over people? This was a question which Malthus, ultimately, wrestled with. Isaiah Berlin frames the case rather well: the eighteenth-century empiricists, he suggests, wallowing in the methodologies of natural sciences, which had striven to isolate mistakes, false notions and blind faith, eventually turned their attention to finding out incontrovertible laws of human arrangements, in the economy, the polity and the judiciary. Such arrangements were sanctified by quasimathematical logic.210 The mathematical spirit is an essential ingredient of the moral economy of the West; it codified the world.211 Chemistry also codified research. The chemical sciences brought a semblance of quantitative measurement to inorganic matter, epitomizing what Hobsbawm identifies as an aura of ruthless certainty, a (western) mathematical spirit, which lay behind the rational sciences of human nature, the calculus of observation, classification and manipulation of human

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nature in its social setting.212 Developments in chemistry proffered the most immediate application to industry and trade, and by deduction to the economic survival of British civilization: knowledge and empire complement each other.213 The mathematical spirit pervaded social critique. In Thomas Malthus, for instance, we find the apogee of eighteenth-century logical application of probability to sexual activity and population control. It is possible to look at sex and poverty in that way. But we may also take this much further. Malthus, who it can be acknowledged rode on an enlightened, scientific, mathematical wave, spoke not only about sex and poverty. His discourse was also an integral feature of racial anxiety replete in British society of the late eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century British treatises on human nature, with a myopic concentration on man and society, were informed more and more as the century drew to a close by the imperatives of empire. The gloss was quite simple: there was no official intrinsic compassion for the populace, the size, health and welfare of the labouring population in general, it was rather concern for how best to secure and maintain pre-eminence in global rivalries, that is the colonies and commerce which Britain saw as its future. Attempts to improve the quality of mothering for instance were a means of bettering the population, of nurturing the nation. This was not just a narrow medicalization of social problems. It was more than that. For, as Jordanova points out, private intimacy, sex and reproduction had public consequences on the size and health of the nation’s most important resource.214 Both labouring potential and colonial expansion depended upon the strength and ability of the people to build and expand. That racialized spatial axis lay at the core of British wealth and welfare. Those spheres of social and political operation fostered that recognition, and in this specific sense mothering was seen as instrumental to the imperial overdrive as Britain forged ahead on both the economic and colonial fronts. Malthus, who was to become the first Chair of Political Economy in Britain at Haileybury, the college of the East India Company, scientifically expressed a racialized anxiety about the wealth and welfare of the British nation. The nineteenth-century expansion of the British ‘race’ beckoned. On this basis, the scientific and mathematical spirit, through which Malthus promoted his thesis, was a dogma of ‘race’. Mary Shelley emphatically reinforced the sense of separateness to which this alludes in a passing commentary on the ancients. The modern system of science, she contended, ‘possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical . . .’215 On the one hand, this simply alludes to

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the science of progress, but on the other it promotes the chauvinism of difference. It is that hawkish ambience which sustained the spirit of eighteenth-century natural philosophy as its proponents grew in confidence during the early years of the nineteenth century. Scientific racism was but one step away.

Notes and References

Epigraphs 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe’, in Janet Todd (ed.), A Wollstonecraft Anthology (Oxford: Polity, 1989), p. 138. 2. Jane Marcet, ‘Conversations on Political Economy’, in Fiona Robertson (ed.), Women’s Writing, 1778–1838: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), p. 320. 3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford: Oxford, 1990), p. 159.

Introduction 1. For classic statements see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980); Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution (London: Cardinal, 1988); Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London: Ark, 1985). That the period was unsettled is not disputed: see I. Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pimlico, 1993); D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism: The Working-Class Experience, 1780–1880 (London: Longman, 1988); there is disagreement about political temperament, and resistance to the polity: see J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1985), and Porter’s critique of Clark’s English Society, Roy Porter, ‘English Society in the Eighteenth Century Revisited’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742–1789 (London: Macmillan, 1990). The often-muted, mostly silent, discussion on women and black people in grand socio-economic historical narratives remains arresting; see Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: Virago, 1981); Bridget Hill, Women, Work & Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: UCL Press, 1994); Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984); Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1987); Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scaffe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1985). 2. The economic and social history of this phase of British modernity is laden with deep ideological altercations, which in turn have affected the empirical and theoretical glosses contained in critiques. Much has been written, and much more will be. The significance of industrialization lies in the changes it unleashed in the social structure, and the crises to which that gave rise. The changes did not just rest with industry alone; no feature of life was unaffected: see Mary Davis, Comrade or Brother: The History of the British Labour Movement, 1789–1951 (London: Pluto, 1993), p. 9; P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Eric Hobsbawm, Industry & Empire (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1969). 128

Notes and References 129 3. Writing about the macro-development of feminism, Moira Ferguson has argued that British women writers ‘ . . . displaced anxieties about their own assumed powerlessness and inferiority onto their representations of slaves’ Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. Furthermore, that the ‘historical intersection of a feminist impulse with anti-slavery agitation helped secure white British women’s political self-empowerment’ (p. 6). The conclusions from this pose a hard lesson for latter-day feminism: Ferguson argues that that intersection ‘damaged future race relations’ (ibid.). Anti-slavery colonial discourse, she points out, actually ‘played a significant role in generating and consolidating nineteenth-century British imperialist and “domestic-racist” ideology’ (ibid.). 4. See Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 5. See Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, in T. Bennett, G. Martin, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woolacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process (London: Batsford, 1981). And see Philip J. Stone, Dexter C. Dunphy, Marshall S. Smith, and Daniel Ogilvie, ‘Content Analysis’, in Peter Worsley (ed.), Modern Sociology, Second Edition, 1978 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 125; for a broad methodological précis, see Lucien Goldmann, ‘The Sociology of Literature: Status and Problems of Method’, in Milton C. Albrecht, James H. Barnett, and Mason Griff (eds), The Sociology of Art & Literature (London: Duckworth, 1982), Part v, ‘Methodology’. 6. See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures, Habitus and Practices’, The Polity Reader in Social Theory (Oxford: Polity, 1994).

1

The romantic period, race and Enlightened feminism

1. Ethical thought, relations between people, involves the ideas and ideals, interests and values, which guide behaviour. Arising from this is moral enquiry which, Berlin points out, may be applied to groups of people, nations and mankind: see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 1–2. ‘Ethics’ and ‘ethnic’ are very closely linked. David Goldberg notes, ‘racialized discourse does not consist simply in descriptive representations of others. It includes a set of hypothetical premises about human kinds . . . and about the differences between them . . . It involves’, he points out, ‘a class of ethical choices (e.g., domination and subjugation, entitlement and restriction, disrespect and abuse).’ David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 47. ‘All ethics,’ writes Jameson, ‘lives by exclusion and predicates certain types of Otherness . . .’ Jameson, op. cit., p. 60. It is important to recognize that a fracturing between ethnic and ethics is ultimately false. There is no intention here to value ethnic over ethics, rather the aim is to show that they are in fact inseparable. 2. See Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 4–5. On ‘women’ and ‘Enlightenment’, see Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1985), passim; Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), passim.

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

For an introduction to the economic and political crisis of the period, see Mary Davis, op. cit.; D.G. Wright, op. cit., especially Chapter 3; and specifically on the multifarious political crisis, see Roger Wells, ‘English Society and Revolutionary Politics in the 1790s’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and Popular British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Central to patriarchal scholarship is the concept of ‘patriarchy’, which critics cannot fully agree upon. In one sense it denotes a biological politics that anchors women’s Otherness from men. Alternatively, it seeks to provide an epistemological gloss that addresses ‘how’ and ‘why’ women suffer subordination to men. In that sense ‘patriarchy’ is not biologically reductive but eminently political. It is perhaps more fruitful to talk not in terms of ‘patriarchy’ but rather in terms of ‘patriarchal relations’, as this shifts focus away from historicism to the nature of historical process, hence change. See Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (London: Counterpoint, 1984), passim; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with Patriarchy’, and Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ‘In Defence of “Patriarchy”’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 5. For an introduction to the range of women’s writing in this period, see Clare Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing’, in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Fiona Robertson, ‘Introduction’, in Robertson (ed.), op. cit. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), p. 138. See H.L. Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Past & Present, Number 139 (1993). Frankenstein symbolized the anxiety of the period. Elizabeth Fay observes that the creature’s revenge on its ‘parent’ is ‘like the destructive emotion that escalated the ravages of the French Revolution . . .’ Fay, op. cit., pp. 97–8. Twenty-one years to be precise, from 1793 to 1815, with a brief respite in 1801. See ‘racial’, in Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Flamingo, 1983). See Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (London: Corgi, 2002), p. 359. This takes us into the hitherto murky world of genetics. Bryan Sykes, the eminent Oxford University geneticist, admits that human genetics unsuccessfully circumnavigated taxonomy of human groups, for many years. However, the way out from this genetic cul-de-sac was a signpost known as mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on through the maternal line only, are small structures within cells; its mutability acts like a genetic timepiece, illuminating pre-history with a spectacular brilliance. As a tool of analysis, mitochondrial DNA conclusively established that Homo sapiens developed from one African source. Over time Homo sapiens replaced all other human species. The genealogy of people from Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Asians of the Indian subcontinent, the Far East and Pacifica, indeed people everywhere, is traceable to the same root. An African woman is mother to us all. As Sykes notes, mitochondrial DNA gives us an incontrovertible human history: our origin is in Africa about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago; and from Africa, modern humans colonized the globe. The salient conclusion Sykes offers is that there is only one race, the human race: see Sykes, ibid., pp. 67, 338.

Notes and References 131 10. See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), passim. 11. See Raymond Williams, op. cit. Banton has argued that, during the eighteenth century, ideas of race were too amorphous to be classified as a systematic body of thought: see Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter 1. Popkin would disagree. At the Symposium on Racism in the Eighteenth Century, held in March 1972, he argued that if racism requires a systematic body of justification, then the eighteenth century had it: see Richard Popkin, ‘Symposium: Racism in the Eighteenth Century, Introduction’, in Harold E. Pagliaro (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Volume 3, Racism in the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 241. It is largely a sterile proposition to argue that in the eighteenth century we find not modern ‘race’ and ‘racism’ but instead ‘racial thinking’, as this tends to underplay, if not denies, systemic discrimination. This privileges the ‘historical’ over the ‘racial’ in which the historical specificity of ‘race’ is imprecisely acknowledged. 12. See Hannaford, ibid., p. 188. See Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘Women and Race: “A Difference of Complexion” ’, in Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, op. cit. 13. See Hannaford, ibid. 14. See Paul Baxter and Basil Sansom (eds), Race & Social Difference (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). It would seem that the biological imperative is omnipotent, for in their introductory essay they declare that membership of a ‘race’ is hereditary; furthermore, that social and racial identity is obfuscated by inter-racial breeding (p. 13). 15. See Hannaford, op. cit., pp. 325ff. 16. See Banton, op. cit., passim. 17. See Goldberg, op. cit., passim. 18. Ibid., p. 3. 19. See Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1966), p. 178. 20. See M. Nash, ‘Race and the Ideology of Race’, in Baxter and Sansom (eds), op. cit., pp. 112–13. 21. See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), Chapter 5, passim. 22. For a conventional summary of ‘race’, see Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London: Pan, 1983). 23. Though Scruton, echoing Baxter and Sansom, would seemingly have us accept the contrary, noting that historically human interbreeding has always occurred, which means that there are probably few attributes possessed by one ‘race’ and not another; such attributes might be intelligence or physical strength: Scruton, ibid., p. 390. 24. See Raymond Williams, op. cit. 25. See A.D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), passim. 26. See A.D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), passim, but especially Chapters 8 and 9. 27. Ibid., p. 206. Smith notes also that ‘Archaeology, too, tended in the nineteenth century to lend support to a purely English identity based on Saxon origins, with the wider British and imperial framework . . .’ (ibid.); an assertion which

132 Notes and References

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

is by no means a simple matter: see Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter 5. See Peter Fryer, op. cit., p. 1. Sykes has traced African DNA in Somerset, which he suggests might be a legacy of the Roman occupation: see Sykes, op. cit., p. 358; Paul Edwards, ‘The Early African Presence in the British Isles’, in Jagdish S. Gundara and I. Duffield (eds), Essays on the History of Black in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), p. 9. See Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman (eds), History and Ethnicity, ASA Monographs 27 (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 5. See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others (London: Pluto, 1993), p. 39. Soja makes interesting connections here at the level of ontology. In the sense that the Other is a relational concept of space, it resides at the core of human consciousness. It is a spatial framework from within: see Soja, op. cit., Chapter 5. Taken further, the Other acts as the mechanism through which the individual is unified with the community, the state and the nation. See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, op. cit., p. 10. See David Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth Century Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), who describes the process as agencement. Musselwhite argues that the nineteenth-century novel was a tool of ideology through which narration, as a system of ideas and ideals, has formed part of our learned behaviour. See Jameson, op. cit. Jameson provides a methodological tone implicit in my work. See Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of Its Assumptions, Attitudes and Values (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 9. Michel Foucault asserts that Enlightenment arose at a certain stage of development of European societies; Frank Hearn argues that it was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. See Paul Rainbow, The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), ibid., p. 43; F. Hearn, Reason and Freedom in Sociological Thought (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 8. See A. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Writings, 1910–1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 12. This is the case despite the existence of various Enlightenments: see Maurice Cranston, Philosophers & Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); M.A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2001). For discussions on nature, reason and God, see Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970). See Brian Morris, Western Conceptions of the Individual (New York: Berg, 1991); Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview (London: Pimlico, 1991). See Marshall Brown, ‘Romanticism and Enlightenment’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford: Blackwell,

Notes and References 133

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

1994); W.L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893). See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 76ff. For the most part, the Romantic paradigm of history signalled a belief in the notion of ‘progress’ as denoting ‘later’ as inherently ‘better’. The world was seen through the concept of ‘time’ and in this sense ‘now’ was ‘better’ than ‘then’. This bore a special relationship to ‘space’, for only in ‘space’ was the vindication of one’s racial make-up possible throughout history, which of course begins now. See Collingwood, ibid., pp. 91ff. On ‘time’ and ‘space’ in social theory, see Soja, op. cit. See Linda Colley, ‘Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth Century England’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Volume 1, History & Politics (London: Routledge, 1989). See I. Chambers, ‘Narratives of Nationalism’, in Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (eds), Space & Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p. 155. For an erudite and compelling critique of how models of antiquity have exorcized Egypt from the idea of European civilization, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987). For explorations of this problematic, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987); Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Volume II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). See H.W. Fowler, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 196; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, op. cit., p. 1; on the changing definitions of feminism, see Barbara Caine, English Feminism, op. cit., pp. 2ff. See Sabina Lovibond, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review, Number 178 (1989), 11. See Janet Todd, The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 235. See introductory essay by Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, op. cit., p. 14. Jane Rendall’s declaration also yields significant resonance here: ‘the history of women’s political activity is not identical with the history of feminist movements, though at many points the two must overlap.’ See introductory essay by Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 4. See Alison M. Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983); Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, op. cit.; Caine, English Feminism, op. cit.; Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The ‘first-feminist’ debate is not my concern; it seems to me that it is more fruitful to acknowledge why and when one begins, for in this way one’s work may be challenged. See Eva Figes, Sex & Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (London: Pandora, 1982), p. 1. This needs further qualification, for we are really talking about women of the middle classes.

134 Notes and References 53. See Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 54. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 1. 55. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), Part One. 56. Literary theory, history and criticism have made significant strides in the treatment of literature, which is clearly way beyond the scope of any mainstream sociology of it. This rule, like all good rules, has an exception: Mary Evans, Jane Austen and the State (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987). Evans is a sociologist. Historians too have begun to treat literature seriously. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for instance, recognizes the importance of literature for historical studies not as an indicator of the spirit of the times as historians have, she argues, a tendency to register it, but as an integral feature of moral, intellectual and cultural activity which is historically specific. Warren Roberts, a historian, has focused on Jane Austen. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1984); Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979). Existing scholarship, which focuses upon the late eighteenth century, by and large fails to address racialization as a means by which subjects become subjects. A refreshing exception is Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, ‘Race’, & Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), though this text barely touches upon the 1790s and beyond. 57. See Andrew Milner, Literature, Culture & Society (London: UCL Press, 1996), passim. 58. Catherine Macaulay, ‘Letters on Education: Letter 15’, in Jennifer Breen (ed.), Women Romantics, 1785–1832: Writing in Prose (London: J.M. Dent, 1996), p. 63. 59. See Milner, op. cit., especially Chapters 1 and 2. 60. See Jameson, op. cit., passim. 61. See Milner, op. cit., p. 125. 62. See Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 25. Middle-class women wrote the majority of the primary source texts examined in this work, available in many latter-day editions; though it must be admitted that not all the women writers in this work were in fact middle class. Women of the middle to upper classes have produced the majority of feminist records. Their membership of those social classes, of relative to absolute privilege, may very well have determined, or rather framed, their concerns, desires and perspectives for betterment, but this does not invalidate the understanding they had of the workings of the middle to upper echelons of the British ancien regime. Nor does it invalidate their understanding of the relations of patriarchy to which they were subject and, more importantly, against which they often agitated. In the last analysis, the bottom line in class politics is that class membership does not in itself prescribe ideological and political leaning; it simply means that there is a pressure for one’s class position to be commensurate with a particular ideological and political rationale. 63. Hannah More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’, in Robert Hole (ed.), Selected Writings of Hannah More (London: William Pickering, 1996), pp. 134–5. 64. Fanny Burney, The Wanderer; Or Female Difficulties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 7. First published in 1814.

Notes and References 135 65. See Bryan S. Green, Literary Methods and Sociological Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 66. . . . And ‘time’ co-joined with ‘space’, with the rise of alterity: David Goldberg, for instance, has argued that ‘colour symbolism with racial groupings’ were first explicitly linked together in the sixteenth century, which he says is a watershed in the development of Western metaphysics: Goldberg, op. cit., p. 24. Felicity Nussbaum reminds us that the colour of complexion was an organizing principle of the eighteenth century: Felicity B. Nussbaum, ‘Women and Race: A “Difference of Complexion” ’, in Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, op. cit., p. 74. 67. For a critique of the totalizing project embedded in the idea of Europe see Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Macmillan, 1995). Delanty argues that the modernity of Europe revolved not around confrontation with Islam, but nature and non-European peoples (p. 65). Islam, however, as we shall see, still retained the bogey element around which Europe pivoted, and so served, and still serves, as a powerful racialized motif in the idea of Europe. In this way ethnic and ethic are wed together. 68. See Roger Fowler, ‘Literature as Discourse’, in K.M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth Century Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 125. 69. See Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding, Decoding’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 90–8. 70. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 210. 71. Lurking here is Foucault. Critically, the prescriptive nature of ‘who we are’ is determined, in the Foucauldian sense, by a social discipline, which is a function of effect beyond what is manifest: Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Paul Rainbow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). It is interesting to note that Foucault referred to Ann Radcliffe as an illustration of such a functioning of power (p. 114). 72. See Edward Said, ‘The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions’, in K.M. Newton (ed.), op. cit., p. 166; cf. Lois McNay, ‘Foucault, Feminism and the Body’, The Polity Reader in Social Theory, op. cit. McNay notes, ‘Foucault’s analysis does not pay enough attention to the gendered nature of disciplinary techniques on the body and that this oversight perpetuates a “gender blindness” that has always predominated in social theory . . .’ (p. 188). 73. Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 176. 74. See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 21. For an exposition, which is relevant to the period in question, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 75. Eagleton, op. cit., p. 210. 76. See Miriam Brody, ‘The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric’, in Maria J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 106–8. 77. See Soja, op. cit. 78. See Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, in Rainbow (ed.), p. 246. 79. See Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, op. cit., passim. 80. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness’,

136 Notes and References

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

2

in Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (eds), op. cit. On the Black Diaspora, see C.J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: ZED, 1984), pp. 95ff. On the primitive accumulation debate, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Non-History of Capitalism’, in Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Number 1 (1997); Heidi Hartmann, ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex’, in Anthony Giddens and David Held (eds), Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (London: Macmillan, 1982). Neither Wood nor Hartmann focuses on the impact of the slave industry. See A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Oxford: Polity, 1991). See Jurgen Habermas, ‘The Normative Content of Modernity’, The Polity Reader in Social Theory, op. cit., p. 154. See Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). See Anthony Giddens, David Held et al., introductory essay, The Polity Reader in Social Theory, op. cit., p. 1. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit.

Politics of population: Empire, slavery and race

1. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964); Eric Hobsbawm, Industry & Empire, op. cit. 2. The Sierra Leone Company was granted a Royal Charter in 1791 to introduce freed blacks to Sierra Leone, a settlement which had been purchased in 1787: James Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkestone: Dawson Archon, 1980), p. 150. The Dutch were the first westerners to ‘discover’ Australia; they named it New Holland. The British deployed the first large-scale settlement there, a penal colony. The indigenous Aborigines have been almost totally written out of this spatio-historical process. Consequently, the ‘real’ story of Australasia supposedly begins with the first free immigrants who settled in Australia and New Zealand between 1792 and 1793. Van Diemen’s Land, later renamed Tasmania, was acquired in 1804: A.G.L. Shaw, The Story of Australia (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), p. 17; Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel (London: Headline, 2001); Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 3. See William L. Langer (ed.), An Encyclopedia of World History (London: George G. Harrap, 1968), p. 884. 4. See Michael Duffy, ‘World-Wide War, 1793–1815’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), op. cit., p. 201. 5. See W.D. McIntyre, Colonies into Commonwealth (London: Blandford Press, 1966), p. 154. 6. See B. Gardner, The East India Company (New York: Dorset Press, 1971), p. 122. 7. Ibid., passim. 8. See Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1983), pp. 250, 394, 419.

Notes and References 137 9. See P.J. Marshall, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Empire’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742–1789 (London: Macmillan, 1990). 10. See Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, op. cit. 11. See McIntyre, op. cit., p. 32. 12. See James Walvin, Black Ivory (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 258. 13. William Wilberforce, ‘Letter to Lord Harrowby, 29 September 1804’, in James Aitken (ed.), English Letters of the XIX Century (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1946), p. 28. 14. William Cowper, ‘To William Wilberforce,’ Cowper’s Poetical Works (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 384. Written in 1792. 15. See Thomas Paine, ‘African Slavery in America’, in Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (eds), The Thomas Paine Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987), pp. 55–6. 16. Anna Seward, ‘Letter 5: To Joshua Wedgwood, 18th February 1788’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantics, op. cit., p. 46. 17. Ibid., p. 47. Ann Radcliffe prized such logic apart: ‘not only for itself may Manchester be an object of admiration, but for the contrast of its useful profits to the wealth of a neighbouring place, immersed in the dreadful guilt of the Slave Trade, with the continuance of which to believe national prosperity compatible, is to hope, that actions of nations pass unseen before the Almighty, or to suppose extenuation of crimes by increase of criminality, and that the eternal laws of right and truth, which smite the wickedness of individuals, are too weak to struggle with the accumulated and comprehensive guilt of a national participation in robbery, cruelty and murder’. Ann Radcliffe, ‘A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794’, in Robertson (ed.), op. cit., p. 143. 18. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, in Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cath Sharnock (eds), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 14. Barbauld who came from a dissenting family was no stranger to political critique: in 1790 she wrote An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts: see Paul Barry Clark (ed.), Citizenship (London: Pluto, 1994), pp. 117–18. 19. See Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 1770–1838 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 10. 20. See Blackburn, op. cit., pp. 138ff. 21. See Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 18; Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996); Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 22. See Phillip R. Sloan, ‘The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle’, in Pagliaro (ed.), op. cit.; G.S. Rousseau, ‘Le Cat and the Physiology of Negroes’, in Pagliaro (ed.), ibid. 23. For a narration about (white) European attitudes to others, see Victor Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972). 24. See David Lowenthal, ‘Free Coloured West Indians: A Racial Dilemma’, in Pagliaro (ed.), op. cit., p. 335. 25. Hannah More, ‘Slavery’, in Jennifer Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, 1785–1832 (London: J.M. Dent, 1992), p. 17. This poem was written in 1788.

138 Notes and References 26. Ibid., p. 14. 27. See Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., pp. 146–63, passim. 28. Feminist academia remains deeply troubled. The delicate contradiction between conservatives who attempted to improve women’s lot, such as More, and the wider movement confronting men has been acknowledged by Rendall, The Origin of Modern Feminism, op. cit., p. 2. Dorothy Thompson, however, felt assured enough to pronounce Hannah More a feminist: see Dorothy Thompson, ‘Women, Work and Politics in Nineteenth-Century England: The Problem of Authority’, in Rendall (ed.), op. cit., p. 72. Margaret Kirkham notes that More tried to dissociate herself from feminist politicking: see Margaret Kirkham, op. cit., p. 11. Kirkham proceeds, however, to describe More in feminist terms, indeed uniting More with Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. Politically that represents a very broad canvas; ideologically Kirkham is correct to focus on such a narrow gauge. So, the problematic is not so much one that glues More to feminism but rather one in which feminism glues More to it. The problem is, therefore, one of backdating of concepts. It is well known that More disliked Wollstonecraft’s politics, but that is precisely the richness feminism has to offer: a valorization of difference. 29. More, ‘The White Slave Trade’, in Hole (ed.), op. cit., p. 36. 30. See Ann Cromartie Yearsley, ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade’, in Moira Ferguson (ed.), First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578–1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Feminist Press, 1985). 31. Charlotte Richardson, ‘The Negro, Sept. 1806’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), op. cit., p. 128. 32. See Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., p. 170. 33. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (London: Pickering, 1993), p. 235. First published in 1792. 34. See William Godwin, ‘Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman”’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (eds), A Short Residence in Sweden AND Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Godwin precipitated a scandal for sympathizers of the feminist project because it was too frank. See Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘The Wollstonecraft Debate’, in Carol H. Poston (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1988) Kirkham, op. cit., Chapter 7, pp. 48ff. 35. See Moira Ferguson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’, Feminist Review, Number 42 (1992), 82–102. 36. Ibid.; Sapiro, op. cit., pp. 108–11. 37. See Mary Evans, Jane Austen & the State, op. cit., p. 18. 38. Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, The Collected Works of Jane Austen (London: Parragon, 1993). First published in 1814. The troubles in Antigua occur against the background of the American Revolution; the political and economic dislocation caused by the American War of Independence sent a wave of tension and strife across the Caribbean: Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1983), Chapter 14. For a sensitive critique of the impact of ‘race’, through slavery, see Brian Southam, ‘The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park’, The Times Literary Supplement, 17 February 1995. Southam was Chairman of the Jane Austen Society.

Notes and References 139 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

See Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 21. Fay, op. cit., p. 33. Ibid. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 101. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classic, 1982), p. 194. First published in 1790. For accounts of these economic and social histories, see Andre Gunder Frank, World Accumulation, 1492–1789 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 217; Jacob M. Price, ‘The imperial Economy’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 100–3; Walter Minchinton, ‘Patterns of Demand’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The Industrial Revolution (London: Collins/Fontana Books, 1973), p. 123; K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘The New Economic History and the Business Records of the East India Company’, in P.L. Cotrell and D.H. Aldcroft (eds), Shipping, Trade and Commerce: Essays in Memory of Ralph Davis (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), p. 58; Catherine Hall, ‘The Ruinous Ghost of Empire Past’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 8 March 1996. Hall teases out the lost memories of empire replete in drinking chocolate. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, op. cit., p. 61. Others too have drawn from Williams’ thesis: Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scaffe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1985), p. 7. This glosses an important fissure in economic history; for a critique of the racialized foundation of the Industrial Revolution, see Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). As Inikori correctly points out, most of the attention of economic historians has been on profits and specifically their effectiveness as sources of finance; however, ‘once the role of international trade in England’s industrialization has been demonstrated, the main burden of analysis focuses on the extent to which the evolution of the industrial economy during the period rested on the shoulders of Africans. Africans’ contribution centred on the evolution of the Atlantic World economic system. The main thrust of analysis, therefore, has to be on the role of Africans in the growth and development of the Atlantic World economy and of the quantitative and qualitative place of the Atlantic World economy in England’s international trade . . .’ (p. 8). Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 69. See James Walvin, Black Ivory, op. cit. Eric Wolf reminds us that British Celts were treated as half-slaves, but that their status was more privileged: the bondservants were subject to greater legal and social benefit. See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 202. See Davis, ibid., p. 11. See J. Mokyr (ed.), The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985) ignores West Indian slavery or production monocultures. Conversely, Wolf notes that British exports to India destroyed the subcontinent’s handicraft industry; this facilitated British economic expansion in the East. See Wolf, op. cit., p. 287.

140 Notes and References 50. Jane Austen, ‘Persuasion’, The Collected Works of Jane Austen, op. cit., p. 1010. First published in 1818. 51. Ibid., p. 986. 52. See C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Allison & Busby, 1980). 53. Jane Austen, ‘Emma’, The Collected Works of Jane Austen, op. cit., p. 761. First published in 1816. 54. Ibid. 55. Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, op. cit. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 474. 58. Ibid. 59. Austen, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, The Complete Works of Jane Austen, ibid., pp. 48–9. First published in 1811. 60. See W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970); David Lowenthal, ‘European and English Landscapes as Symbols’, in David Hooson (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Leonore Davidoff, Jean L’Esperance, and Howard Newby, ‘Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society’, in Juliette Mitchell and Anne Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976). 61. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 76. First published in 1776–1788. 62. See Bob Press, Trees of Britain and Ireland (London: Collins, 1996), passim. 63. See Barrie Trinder, The Making of the Industrial Landscape (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1982), p. 87. 64. Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, op. cit., p. 423. 65. Austen, ‘Emma’, op. cit., p. 790. 66. Lowenthal, ‘European and English Landscapes as Symbols’, in David Hooson (ed.), op. cit., p. 23. 67. See Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (London: Polity, 1993), p. 108. 68. See W.J. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, in W.J. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 17. 69. Burke, op. cit., p. 181. 70. Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 71. 71. The Gilberts Act of 1782 set the framework of combining unions for the delivery of relief; the systems of relief were not so much chaotic as badly contrived. The parish of Speenhamland came up with a novel idea in 1795: need was calculated on the basis of a quartern loaf of bread. Costs continued to rise, as did prices: the price of wheat, which makes bread, rose steadily up to and beyond 1818. The system of wages was also unsettled during this period; more common was truck, typically payment-in-kind, or payment with conditions on expenditure. For most of this period, wages were insecure for adult male earners and actually declined. Insecurity dogged women earners too, despite greater access to the marketplace due to war. This economic picture of late eighteenth-century Britain represents a politics of population in which poverty, poor law and crisis are a register of not only the ambience of welfare but also the social unrest that marked Britain up to and beyond 1818.

Notes and References 141

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

The unsustainable pressure from the last twenty years of the eighteenth century led to a clamour for reform of the rates system and relief, and was a major focus of concern in the first third of the nineteenth century. See Eric J. Evans, op. cit., p. 402; Eric R. Wolf, op. cit., Part Three, Chapter 9; P.H. Lindert and J.G. Williamson, ‘English Workers’ Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look’, in J. Mokyr (ed.), op. cit., p. 187; Ivy Pinchbeck, op. cit., pp. 62–4. See M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1966), Chapter 3. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 157. See Malik, op. cit., p. 70. Ibid. On the project to repatriate the black poor of London, see Peter Fryer, op. cit., pp. 195ff. Interestingly, blacks were returned to Africa and not sent to Australia, which also had a native black population. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) is a glowing exception; see also Nicholas Rogers, ‘Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers (eds), Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World (Ilford: Frank Cass, 1994). Rogers reminds us that vagrants were pressed into naval service as part of the insatiable demand for seamen. Britain’s national survival rested on its naval supremacy. See Ali Rattansi, ‘“Western” Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a “Postmodern” Frame’, in A. Rattansi and S. Westwood (eds), Racism, Modernity & Identity (London: Polity, 1994), p. 25. See Betty Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). Wollstonecraft attempted, in concert with others, to grapple with the vigorous industrial, economic, political and social dislocation that Britain experienced at that time. She brought to the various analyses of her day a rigorous sexual critique, that is a very sharp and witty exposition of gender relations that left the sea of change more unsettled and choppy than most were able to countenance. Wollstonecraft and others suffered the full vituperative force of menfolk; her claim for rights for women was subjected to ridicule by Graves, parody by Taylor and outright attack by Polwhele: see Richard Graves, ‘Maternal Despotism; Or The Rights of Infants’, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 791–2. This poem was written c. 1792, in response to what was obviously perceived as a mania for ‘rights’ in the wake of the texts by both Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. See Thomas Taylor, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes’, in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Norton Critical Edition, Carol H. Poston (ed.), op. cit. The word ‘brute’ in eighteenth-century parlance was a euphem-ism for ‘negro’. See Richard Polwhele, ‘The Unsex’d Female’, in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 186–9. His 1798 poem, a spiteful condemnation of women advocates of rights, singled out both Mary Hays and the by-then-dead Wollstonecraft. Sympathy, however, was found in many quarters in many voices. See Robert

142 Notes and References

82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

Burns, ‘The Rights of Woman’, in The Works of Robert Burns (Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), pp. 244–5. See Malik, op. cit., pp. 91ff. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 82. See Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780 (London: Readers Union/Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968), p. 143. The living standards debate, waged between two broad camps focusing on the effects of industrialization, is comprehensive. The ‘pessimists’ contend economic diswelfare people suffered as a result of the capitalist project was extensive in terms of the misery caused and the length of time for which it was endured. The ‘optimists’, however, contend the trend has been inexorably towards an improved economic, and social, betterment that manifested sporadically during the course of economic restructuring, a project that is ultimately vindicated by the sheer level of opulence that has accrued to all levels of society. Much of the discourse has been gender and racially blind. See Ron Ramdin, op. cit.; Ivy Pinchbeck, op. cit.; Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968). See Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Mike Fitzgerald, Gregor McLennan, and Jeannie Pawson (eds), Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 10. See Fladeland, op. cit., p. 8. See Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, op. cit., p. 386. See Fladeland, op. cit., p. 10. Ibid. See Foucault, ‘Bio-Power’, in Rabinow (ed.), op. cit., Chapters 15 and 16. ‘Sierra Leone Settlers’, in Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen (eds), Black Writers in Britain, 1760–1890 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 88. Ibid. Ibid. See Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., p. 205. See Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1995), p. 229. First published in 1789. George, op. cit., p. 143. See Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel (London: Headline, 2001). See Felicity Nussbaum, ‘The Other Woman: Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Empire’, in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, ‘Race’, & Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 149. Hyam argues that in eighteenth-century West Indies, it was socially expected for white men of all social ranks to sleep with black women. Mistresses were often openly kept. See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 92–3. See Malik, op. cit., pp. 93ff. George, op. cit., p. 143. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’, in Hole (ed.), op. cit., p. 136.

Notes and References 143 104. See Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 3. 105. Mary Robinson, ‘January, 1795’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 72. 106. Amelia Alderson, ‘Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795’, in Ashfield (ed.), op. cit., p. 150. 107. Ibid., p. 151. 108. Jane Taylor, ‘Poverty’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 121. This was composed in 1804. 109. Taylor, ‘A Town’, in Ashfield (ed.), op. cit., p. 171. 110. Ibid., p. 172. 111. Ibid. 112. See Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto, 1986), Chapter 2. 113. Eliza Kirkham Mathews, ‘The Indian’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 114. 114. Ibid. 115. George, op. cit., p. 139. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., p. 140. 118. Ibid. 119. See Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, op. cit. 120. See Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, op. cit. 121. William Wordsworth, ‘September 1, 1802’, in The Works of William Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), p. 305. 122. Burney, The Wanderer, op. cit., p. 27. 123. Ibid., p. 33. 124. Ibid., p. 482. 125. Ibid. 126. Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (London: Pandora, 1986), p. 141. First published in 1804. 127. Ibid. 128. See Sapiro, op. cit., pp. 108–11. 129. Opie, op. cit., p. 141. 130. Ibid. 131. See Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 126. 132. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (London: Pickering, 1993), p. 332. 133. Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; Or Ruin on the Rock (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 42. First published in 1795. 134. Ibid., pp. 42–3. 135. Ibid., p. 44. 136. Ibid., p. 64. 137. Ibid. 138. See Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History (London: Pluto Press, 1977), pp. 36ff. Eric Hobsbawm, however, commends Malthus not for his

144 Notes and References

139.

140.

141. 142. 143.

144.

145.

presentation of a theory of demography, which attempted to verify a mathematical relationship between population growth rates and the means of subsistence, but for attempting a scientific treatment of unpredictable sexual decisions; accordingly, in Malthus, we find the apogee of eighteenth-century logical application of probability to population control: see Hobsbawm, Age of Revolutions, op. cit., pp. 343–4. William Hodgson, however, while imprisoned for sedition in 1795, wrote that governments should encourage population growth to maximize the strength of the state: see William Hodgson, ‘The Commonwealth of Reason’, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 234. The operative assumption here is that the late eighteenth century held the view that to alleviate the poor actually fostered even greater hardships. Although the work of Malthus may very well typify our view of the late eighteenth-century view of the poor law, a caveat should be sounded. It must be remembered that this view of how the late eighteenth century perceived the poor law has itself been shaped by those eighteenth-century writers, like Malthus, who were actually able to record their views for posterity in the first place. We should be mindful of the class character of the records. See Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970). First published in 1798. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Malthus said that the natural rate of growth of the food supply was arithmetical, whereas for populations it was geometrical. Arithmetic progression means that numbers are sequential, where each differs from the one before it by the same constant amount: for example 3, 6, 9. Geometrical calculation signifies relationships and measurements of points, lines, curves and surfaces. These two mathematical ‘systems’ depict reality differently. Nonetheless, according to Malthus, population would inevitably outstrip the land’s ability to sustain it. Ibid., p. 198. Drayton observes that debates about colonies were affected by statistical reasoning. Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), op. cit., p. 235. Considering Malthus in that light is edifying. William Godwin agreed that the disaster might happen, but thought it would occur at some far future date. Francis Place took the middle ground between the two, arguing that a disaster might happen but could be avoided if action were taken: primarily contraception would alleviate some of the demographic pressure; and as a secondary palliative measure he suggested colonial expansion: see Francis Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967). First published in 1822. S.T. Coleridge, who criticized Malthus, echoed Place. Coleridge wrote ‘colonisation is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea . . .’ S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk (London: John Murray, 1874), p. 238. William Wordsworth also articulated a romantic colonialism in The Excursion. He suggested that the will, the instincts and appointed needs of Britain would establish new communities. He grounded his

Notes and References 145

146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162. 163. 164. 165.

imperialist view in the concept of ‘Albion’s noble race’. This is Romantic teleology in which Britain must complete its glorious destiny: William Wordsworth, ‘The Excursion’, The Works of William Wordsworth, op. cit., pp. 889–90. Malthus, op. cit., pp. 115–16. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 83–4. Ibid., p. 148. See Kurt Heinzelman, ‘The Cult of Domesticity’, in Anne Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 58. William Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1991), p. 171. Hazlitt originally published a reply to Malthus in 1807, and later revised it for Spirit of the Age, which was published in 1825. Hazlitt, ‘On Malthus’, Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 82. Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, op. cit., p. 164. Malthus, op. cit., p. 81. Ibid. pp. 81–2. Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, op. cit., p. 173. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid. Ibid. The Malthusian thesis clearly left its imprint on population control. It has been argued that Francis Place, an influential radical tailor and entrepreneur who locked intellectual horns with Malthus, championed the birth control movement, its history dating from his intervention in the debate around about 1820. See introductory essay by Norman E. Himes to Francis Place, Illustrations, op. cit. Both Rendall and Rowbotham consider him as instrumental in the development of the birth control movement: see Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, op. cit., p. 225; Sheila Rowbotham, op. cit., p. 36. The debate is replete with highly racialized commentaries: in a curious aside Himes, the latter-day editor of Illustrations by Place, boldly asserts that the contraception conducted by ‘primitive’ peoples was often unsuccessful. Himes, ibid., p. 52. Dadzie, however, plausibly argues that women slaves of African origin in Jamaica bore with them a rich array of biological and cultural mechanisms whereby they managed to deprive their white owners of much-desired slave offspring by virtue of African methods of contraception: see Stella Dadzie, ‘Searching for the Invisible Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica’, Race & Class, Volume 32, Number 2 (1990). For Malthus, proactive contraception was taboo; he advocated abstinence. See Jane Marcet, ‘Conversations on Political Economy’, in Robertson (ed.), op. cit., pp. 320ff. Malthus, op. cit., p. 207. Jane Taylor, ‘Poverty’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 122. Ann Taylor, ‘A Child’s Hymn of Praise’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), op. cit., p. 135. Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Better Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 181.

146 Notes and References

3

The French Revolution and British raciology

1. See Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds), The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989). 2. See George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1815 (London: Fontana Press, 1985), p. 210. 3. On European ancien regimes, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979); H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); introductory essay by Jeremy Black (ed.), op. cit. 4. See H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds), op. cit., passim. 5. Charlotte Smith, Desmond (London: Pickering, 1997), p. 297. 6. See Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and Popular British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7. See Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, op. cit., Chapters I and II; J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Sphere, 1970), p. 75: Talmon recounts the internecine struggles for control of the trajectory of the Revolution. He argues that the Third Estate, which included the ordinary citizenry, who laboured to uphold society, was the nation; they carried the privileged strata. The racial division here was between Franconian and Roman stocks, the latter claiming superiority. 8. See Moira Ferguson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’, Feminist Review, 42 (1992), 87. For an account of the heroic San Dominguan struggle, see C.L.R. James, op. cit. It is interesting to note that Helen Maria Williams made an ideological connection between political freedoms embedded in the French new order with the racial freedom of black people: see Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790 (Ontario: Broadview, 2001), passim. Volume 1 of the Letters was first published in 1790, and was followed by other volumes on the politics of the revolution. 9. See Ferguson, ibid. 10. See H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), passim. 11. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., p. 152. Not my italics. 12. See Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), passim. 13. Ibid., passim. I do not wish to suggest that the importance or impact of radicalism be diluted, far from it. My suggestion is that the role and roll call of radicalism be reconsidered in a much more fundamental way than hitherto has been the case. British women writers from the radical camp, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith and others, need to be recognized as having visibly contributed to social criticism: on representation, politics, history, science and so on. Perhaps in many ways more significant, women writers such as Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, who clearly were not radical in their own day in the way that the term has been deployed in historiographical literature ever since, may also be seen as having contributed to the commentary, critique and challenges posed by the crisis of the period. All these women argued with the male fraternity; they agreed and disagreed but above all they

Notes and References 147

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

were present in the textual circles of debate. I would go so far as to suggest that the literature of these women should be seen as part of an extended definition of radicalism. Current historiography, from within the Marxist or Weberian schools of critique, and from across the political and sexual spectrum, is left wanting in this respect. See Wright, op. cit., passim; Davis, op. cit., passim. See Robin Blackburn, op. cit., especially Chapters II, IV, VIII. Indeed, as Iain Chambers has argued, even the latter-day radical project is not unsullied. Radical critics and historians, he notes, ‘such as Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, have, in their appeals to continuities of native traditions and experiences, perhaps inadvertently conceded the ethical and racial pretensions of a national(ist) mythology . . .’ Chambers, op. cit., p. 154. British feminism is no exception to this. Thomas Paine, ‘The Rights of Man’, The Thomas Paine Reader, op. cit., p. 359. Paine wrote his Rights between 1791 and 1792. His remark, it may be noted, relied on a Christian aestheticism of the genesis of civilization, as well as a singularly gendered account of birth. See Ian R. Christie, ‘Conservatism and Stability in British Society’, in Philp (ed.), op. cit., passim; David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’, in Philp (ed.), ibid.; Stella Cottrell, ‘The Devil on Two-Sticks: Franco-phobia in 1803’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism, Volume 1, op. cit. The confrontation against France, and French ideals, was a military and ideological struggle. The tidal wave of anxiety, indeed panic, which took hold of the government and its allies, led to the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1794, and then in 1795, amid social unrest brought on by hunger, the passing of the Treasonable Practices Act and the Seditious Meetings Act; the Combination Acts, following the naval mutinies in 1797 at Nore and Spithead, the Disorders of 1799–1801 and the Black Lamp disturbances of 1801–2, furthered the government’s determination to gag organized opposition. The threat of legal action was greater than the number of prosecutions: see D.G. Wright, op. cit., p. 51. Though clearly this was not the sole preserve of the political right: see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987), passim. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., p. 65. Though it must be said this also valorizes the ideology of the ‘savage’. See Dr Richard Price, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on November 4th, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, London 1789’, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, op. cit., pp. 23ff. On use of the word ‘debate’ in this context, especially in relation to entrenched dissatisfaction with formal political representation, see introductory essay by Mark Philp (ed.), op. cit., pp. 12ff. One metaphor Burke used to describe this was ‘fashion’. ‘We ought not’, he wrote, ‘on either side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty . . .’

148 Notes and References

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Burke, his contemporaries and many commentators since, believed the Glorious Revolution to be the precursor of the French Revolution. The French were, therefore, not in a position to teach the British anything about freedom: Burke, op. cit., pp. 110–11. See W. Doyle, ‘The Principles of the French Revolution’, in H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds), The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness, op. cit. The process of the Revolution was ad hoc and evolutionary. Missing from most critiques, however, is an acknowledgement of the role and impact of republican symbolism predicated upon a gender politics of the nation state: see Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, op. cit., Chapter 2, especially pp. 43ff. Smith Desmond, op. cit., pp. 82–3. The point she made was nonetheless gender-specific. See Gary Kelly Women, Writing, and Revolution, op. cit., Kelly’s summative text on the crisis-torn decade and beyond investigates women’s writing as a crucial element of class, gender and culture in modern Britain. While the text proffers valuable insights into that relationship and that historical moment, it must be stressed that there is an absence of ‘race’ as an equally important dynamic in British modernity. See Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), Chapter 1, ‘Gender, Class and Cultural Revolution’. See Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (London: Pickering, 1993). This Vindication was first published in 1790. See Susan Khin Zaw, ‘Appealing to the Head and Heart: Wollstonecraft and Burke on Taste, Morals and Human Nature’, in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-century Art and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Samuel Johnson defined ‘effeminate’ as ‘Having the qualities of a woman; softness; unmanly delicacy’: Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Andrew Chalmers (London: Studio Editions, 1994), p. 227. See Zaw, ibid. Wollstonecraft loathed such qualities in women and, as was to be seen in her second Vindication, argued that women were that way because (male) society determined it. That was, she contended, what was wrong with women. See Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit. See introductory essay by Maria J. Falco (ed.), op. cit., p. 4. See Sapiro, op. cit., Chapter 6. Wollstonecraft, ‘An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it had Produced in Europe’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 349. Ibid., p. 371. Ibid., p. 372. See Sapiro, op. cit., p. 176. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Todd (ed.), op. cit., p. 70. See Colley, Britons, op. cit., pp. 273ff.

Notes and References 149 41. I am not arguing that the works of Wollstonecraft and More may be superimposed on each other thus revealing close textual similarities. Far from it. I am more interested in identifying the sites of ideological contestation, which de facto brought them together in the emerging canon of feminist thought. Obviously, significant differences exist but there is also, I would suggest, overlap, however nuanced. For a discussion on Wollstonecraft and More, which considers not only their ideological but textual connectivity, see Kirkham, op. cit., passim. This, I acknowledge, might be uncomfortable to some. Others have also suggested that the overarching feminist canvas meant that the broad brush of feminism touched a broad range of women. Moers points out that Wollstonecraft’s radicalism was one element of the feminist spectrum; feminism, she suggests, influenced many women, including evangelicals such as More, conservatives such as Edgeworth, and escapists and wits such as Radcliffe and Austen: Moers, op. cit., p. 125. 42. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’, in Hole (ed.), op. cit., p. 126. 43. Ibid. 44. Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 275. 45. It is necessary to understand what was meant by ‘patriotism’ in the languagecontext of late eighteenth-century Britain. In 1755, Dr Johnson defined a ‘patriot’ as ‘one whose ruling passion is the love of his country’. In 1773, he added, ‘It is sometimes used ironically for a factious disturber of the Government’; see Johnson, op. cit., p. 528; in 1775, he described ‘patriotism’ as the ‘last refuge of a scoundrel’. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, the term itself was largely associated with the political radicals of the day: see Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism’, in Samuel (ed.), Patriotism, Volume 1, op. cit., p. 61; Eastwood, op. cit., p. 160. The meaning of ‘radical’ also changed. Originally, it related to physical matter, as in root. Johnson certainly thought so. The word entered usage in the political arena in the late eighteenth century, as Raymond Williams notes, with special reference in the phrase ‘radical reform’: a kind of back to basics. Politically, however, it attracted vilification because those associated with ‘radical’ were already associated with Johnson’s 1775 definition of ‘patriotism’: see Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Flamingo, 1984); Johnson, Dictionary, op. cit.; Linda Colley, ‘Radical patriotism in eighteenth-century England’, in Samuel (ed.), ibid. What we must be mindful of in this context is the difference between patriotism as a systematic ideology and patriotism as excessive enthusiasm: see Eastwood, op. cit., p. 160. 46. See Cunningham, ibid., passim. 47. See Joseph Mather, ‘God Save Thomas Paine’, in Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, op. cit., p. 790. 48. See John Thelwell ,’The Cell’, in Lonsdale (ed.), ibid., p. 814. 49. See Eastwood, op. cit., p. 163. 50. Cottrell, op. cit., p. 260. 51. Helen Maria Williams, Letters, op. cit., p. 73. 52. See Cottrell, op. cit., passim; Helen Maria Williams, ‘Bastille, A Vision’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, op. cit.

150 Notes and References 53. Mary Alcock, ‘Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England’, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 462. This poem was published in 1799. 54. See Hannah More, ‘Will Chip’s TRUE Rights of Man, in Opposition to the NEW Rights of Man: Written for the Volunteers of Somerset, when there was an Alarm of Invasion on that Coast’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), op. cit., p. 22. 55. See Ian Dyck (ed.), Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine (London: Christopher Helm, 1987), passim; see Wright, op. cit., p. 47. 56. See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 173. First published in 1796. Such commentary would have tapped into what was already a received wisdom in Britain, that anything French was dirty, rotten and impure: see The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (London: Senate, 1994). First compiled by Francis Grose in 1785, it was reissued in 1811 as Lexicon Balatronicum. 57. Susanna Whatman, The Housekeeping Book of Susanna Whatman (London: Century, 1987), p. 55. 58. See Susan Ferrier, Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 400. 59. Ann Yearsley, ‘Anarchy’, in Ashfield (ed.), op. cit., p. 85. 60. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., p. 405. 61. See Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 284. 62. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970). First published in 1776, year one of the American Revolution; Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Methuen, 1982). First published in 1780; Thomas Paine, ‘The Rights of Man’, op. cit.; Burke, op. cit.; Malthus, op. cit. 63. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Canto Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 1. 64. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., p. 7. 65. Ibid., p. 44. 66. Ibid., p. 45. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., p. 115. 69. Smith, The Old Manor House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 246. First published in 1793. 70. Ibid. 71. See Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), especially Chapters 1 and 2. 72. Smith, The Old Manor House, ibid., p. 246. 73. Smith, ‘Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, op. cit., p. 372. ‘Corse’ is an archaic word for corpse. 74. See Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Charlotte Smith’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British Women Writers (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 625. Smith revised Miseries of War in 1797. 75. Linda Colley concludes that the wars were anchored in Protestant–Catholic divisions. One effect of such warring was that it was a school in which Britain learnt rote contempt for the non-Protestant world. The transition to empire

Notes and References 151

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

was, she argues, thereby built on a fixed ideology that included ‘regular and violent contact with peoples who could so easily be seen as representing the Other . . .’ Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 18. See Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, op. cit., p. 159. See Epigraph 3 above. Ireland became a part of the British Constitution in 1801, under the Act of Union, the antecedent being absorption of Scotland a century earlier, and Wales centuries before that. The appropriation of Ireland happened against a background of ‘servitude’ in the words of Mary Frances Cusack, An Illustrated History of Ireland, AD 400 to 1800 (London: Senate, 1995). First published in 1868. Cusack’s sweep of history is arresting. In the preface to the first edition, she wrote ‘The history of the different races who form an integral portion of the British Empire, should be one of the most carefully cultivated studies of every member of that nation. To be ignorant of our own history is a disgrace; to be ignorant of the history of those whom we govern, is an injustice’ (p. 15). Cusack, an Irish Catholic nun, declared that her wish was ‘to draw the attention of Englishmen to those Irish grievances which are generally admitted to exist, and which can only be fully understood by a careful and unprejudiced perusal of Irish history, past and present’ (p. 18). Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 5. First published in 1800. Ibid. Ibid., p. 97. The United Irishmen tried to avail themselves of French assistance, to avoid Britain swallowing up Ireland: see Patrick J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, Rebels and Establishments (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985). As Pakenham notes, the events of 1798 were integral to the grand ideological struggle between Britain and France. It was this that ring-fenced the bloody massacres of Irish men, women and children, as Britain with Irish allies secured its grip on the country: see Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The History of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: Phoenix, 1992), p. 13. Few commentators refer to the war against France in such terms. Two notable exceptions are: A.D. Harvey, Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, 1793–1945 (London: Phoenix, 1992); Michael Duffy, ‘World Wide War and British Expansion, 1793–1815’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), op. cit. The bulk of economic history literature on the effect that war had on the processes of industrialization tilts in favour of the opinion that the wars in Europe between 1793 and 1815 had a negative impact: see J. Mokyr, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the New Economic History’, in J. Mokyr (ed.), The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 15. It is interesting to note that as an anonymous poet put it in 1813, war was a means to wealth. ‘Then what nonsense to talk of the ruin of War, / When such riches are coin’d without bullion from far: / Thus no one can tell what by War’s won or lost, / But the Tellers, who’re paid for not telling its cost.’ See ‘War the Source of Riches’, Jerome J. McGann (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 351. See Ian R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions, Britain 1760–1815 (London: Arnold, 1982), p. 213. See Michael Duffy, ‘War, Revolution and the Crisis of the British Empire’, in M. Philp (ed.), op. cit. Ibid.

152 Notes and References 87. Fanny Burney, Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 155. 88. ‘The Age of War’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), op. cit., p. 139. 89. See Ferrier, Marriage, op. cit., p. 445. 90. See David Howarth, Waterloo: A Near Run Thing (Glasgow: Fontana, 1972), p. 169. 91. Ibid., p. 172. 92. Louisa Stuart Costello, ‘On Reading the Account of the Battle of Waterloo’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), op. cit., p. 85. This poem was written in 1815. 93. Burney, Selected Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 272. 94. Ibid., p. 273. 95. Ibid., p. 85. 96. John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), p. 19. Scholarship on Blake is fairly extensive. However, I am not concerned with the androgynist imagery, nor the deification of feminine qualities, nor the reification of childhood: see Alan Richardson, ‘Romanticism and the Colonisation of the Feminine’, in Anne Mellor (ed.), op. cit. Neither am I concerned with his oppositional, anti-modern discourse: see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). My concern is to expose and explore raciological thought within the Blakeian paradigm. 97. See Lucas, ibid., p. 76. 98. William Stafford, Socialism, Radicalism and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, 1775–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 76. 99. Ibid. 100. William Blake, ‘Brotherhood and Restriction’, in W.B. Yeats (ed.), The Poems of William Blake (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1905), p. 229. 101. See Blake, ‘Milton’, ibid., p. 233. 102. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 45. 103. See Janet Todd, The Sign of Angelica, op. cit., p. 206. 104. See Blake, ‘Mary’, in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Carol H. Poston (ed.), op. cit., pp. 240–2. Scholarship is divided on the extent to which Wollstonecraft influenced Blake. 105. Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 20. 106. Ibid., p. 21. 107. William Blake, ‘The Little Black Boy’, in The Poems of William Blake, op. cit., p. 50. 108. Opie, ‘The Black Boy’s Tale’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), p. 92. This poem was first published in 1802. 109. Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), op. cit., p. 241. 110. Elizabeth Moody, ‘The Housewife; Or, The Muse Learning to Ride the Great Horse Heroic Addressed to Lysander’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 110. Written in 1798. Not my italics. The word ‘ween’ means ‘believe’. 111. Fay, op. cit., p. 91.

Notes and References 153 112. See Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Chapter 5, ‘The Enlightenment and the Exotic’. 113. Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 368. 114. Henry Pye, ‘Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday, 1807’, in Kenneth Hopkins (ed.), The Poets Laureate (London: EP Publishing, 1973), p. 266. 115. The courtly Rococo style ended abruptly with the coming of the Revolution: see Edward B. Henning, ‘Patronage and Style in the Arts’, in Milton C. Albrecht, James H. Barnett, and Mason Griff (eds), The Sociology of Art & Literature (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 357. Artists had been involved in the struggle for artistic freedoms; see Daniel M. Fox, ‘Artists in the Modern State’, in Milton C. Albrecht, James H. Barnett, and Mason Griff (eds), ibid., p. 375; Madelyn Gutwith, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 116. Diane Dugaw, ‘Women and Popular Culture: Gender, Cultural Dynamics, and Popular Prints’, in Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, op. cit., p. 275. 117. Smith, The Old Manor House, op. cit., p. 246. 118. See Colley, Britons, op. cit., pp. 273–4. 119. Kennedy and Mendus (eds), ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 2. 120. Ibid., p. 3. 121. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘On the Expected General Rising of the French Nation in 1792’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, pp. 304–5. 122. Barbauld, ‘The Rights of Woman’, in Lonsdale (ed.), ibid., pp. 305–6. 123. See Darline G. Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, ‘Women, Radicalization, and the Fall of the French Monarchy’, in Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (eds), Women & Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 124. See Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, op. cit., p. 351. 125. See Colley, Britons, op. cit., pp. 255ff. 126. Ibid., p. 261. 127. Ibid., pp. 261–2. 128. See Anderson and Zinsser, op. cit., p. 351. That was Year IV, 1793. 129. See Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World (London: Paladin, 1989), p. 186. 130. Charles Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965), p. 1. 131. See Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, op. cit., Chapter 2, ‘Feminism and Republicanism: Republican Motherhood’. In this context, see Elizabeth Fay, op. cit., on Wollstonecraftian maternal nationalism, which prized motherhood as a benefit to the mother and not under conservative gloss as a benefit to the male. 132. See Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism, Volume 1, op. cit. 133. Wollstonecraft, ‘An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 381. She may be said to have taken her cue from David Hume, who set much of the methodological tone of eighteenth-century social thought here; when writing on

154 Notes and References

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146.

147. 148.

149. 150. 151.

national character he causally linked ‘race’ and ‘culture’. See Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism’, in Pagliaro (ed.), op. cit., pp. 245–54. Latter-day social theorists such as Anthony Smith tread a similar epistemological path: see Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, op. cit. See Felicity Nussbaum, ‘The Other Woman: Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Empire’, in Hendricks and Parker (eds), op. cit., p. 157. Ibid. Ibid. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 4. Not my italics. For a discussion on the colonizing consciousness of the body, see John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, op. cit., pp. 41ff. See Kiernan, op. cit., p. 15. Ibid. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, op. cit., p. 624. Ibid. See Kiernan, op. cit., p. xxi. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 241. Smith, The Old Manor House, op. cit., p. 345. Her statement also underscores the multiplicity of the Other: the Other of men soldiers, and the Other of non-whites. Ibid. Not my italics. This would have recalled to mind the incident of the slave ship Zong and the outcry that followed the revelation. In 1781, which is during the period setting of The Old Manor House, sick and dying slaves were thrown overboard on the captain’s orders to abate the spread of disease whilst conserving scarce supplies of water; this deflected the cost of their loss from their owners to the insurers. The horror of transportation was a source of bitter disputation: see James Walvin, Black Ivory, op. cit., pp. 16ff. Additionally, we can note that Smith also swiped at those who placed reasoning upon a pedestal. Her sarcasm was concise and to the point: reasoning may contain social failure. Ibid., p. 354. Edward Long who wrote History of Jamaica, in 1774, described Negroes as ‘not properly human and ought not to be treated as such’: Goldberg, op. cit., p. 50. His view of blacks was xenophobic, describing Africans as a ‘brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people . . .’ See Curtin, ‘British Image of Africans in the Nineteenth Century’, op. cit., p. 136. Banton has argued that despite Long’s obvious racism he was not influential in his own time: Banton, op. cit., p. 11. Williams disagrees: see Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (New York: A & B Books Publishers, 1994), passim. Women also proactively supported slavery: Anna Maria Falconbridge defended the slave trade in her autobiographical Narrative, which was published in 1794. Smith, The Old Manor House, op. cit., p. 501. Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., p. 192. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., p. 329.

Notes and References 155 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

176. 177. 178.

179. 180. 181. 182. 183.

Ibid. Ibid. See Hyam, op. cit., p. 92. Eric Williams sees them as intellectually co-joined: see Williams, British Historians and the West Indies, op. cit., pp. 9–12. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 209. First published in 1801. See Olivia Smith, op. cit., p. vii. See George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 30. Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (London: Pandora, 1987), pp. 144–5. First published in 1796. Ibid. Not my italics. Ibid., p. 145. Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994), pp. 1–2. Not my italics. This text was first published in 1799. Hays, Emma Courtney, op. cit., p. 39. Ibid., p. 29. Not my italics. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid. Ibid. Not my italics. Wollstonecraft, ‘An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 384. My italics. Hays, Emma Courtney, op. cit., p. 42. Ibid. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 113. Not my italics. Ibid. Not my italics. Ibid. Not my italics. It is also interesting to note, and again a genealogy of influence is perhaps called for, that in Belinda in a chapter entitled the ‘Rights of Woman’, Maria Edgeworth had one character (Harriet Freke, the freakish feminist) declare: ‘I hate slavery! Vive la liberte!’ adding quickly, to explain her outburst, ‘I am a champion of the Rights of Women.’ Any fact of sympathy is not really the substance of focus here; suffice to say that Edgeworth by design united together discourses on ‘slavery’ and ‘women’ through French vernacular. Indeed, the French slogan, whether real or not, clearly impacted on British perceptions of the world. Edgeworth, Belinda, op. cit., p. 216. Hays, Emma Courtney, op. cit., p. 115. Ibid. Not my italics. Mary Hays, ‘Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women’, in Dale Spender and Janet Todd (eds), Anthology of British Women Writers from the Middles Ages to the Present Day (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 325. Hays, Emma Courtney, op. cit., p. 115. Ibid. Ibid., p. 116. Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., p. 196. Hays, Emma Courtney, op. cit., pp. 60–1, 80, 103.

156 Notes and References 184. Hester Lynch Piozzi, ‘An Ode to Society’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, op. cit., p. 391. 185. See Outram, op. cit., Chapter 5. 186. See Stocking, op. cit., p. 26. 187. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 5. 188. See Outram, op. cit., pp. 63ff. 189. Ibid., pp. 78–9; see R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 76ff. 190. Edgeworth, Belinda, op. cit., p. 219. 191. Ibid. 192. Ibid., p. 224. Not my italics. 193. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, to which is added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 36. Letters, first published in 1795 and revised in 1798. 194. See Introductory essay by G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 5. 195. Intertextuality provided the name Juba for Mary Lamb’s poem called Conquest of Prejudice. This poem, which was written in 1809, is about a young black boy who had been sent to a school in Yorkshire to learn to read and write. However, the head boy, Orme, decided that he did not want Juba to be admitted to the school. Orme caused trouble, inciting racial prejudice among the other boys. The school’s master considered the matter seriously and locked both Juba and Orme in a room for a month. The two boys were left with no option but to resolve their differences. In the passing of time, the head boy was cured of his prejudice: see Mary Lamb, ‘The Conquest of Prejudice’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets (ed.), op. cit., pp. 141–2. Although a simplistic tale, Lamb made a crucial point: racial prejudice may be learned and unlearned. 196. Edgeworth, Belinda, op. cit., p. 206. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., p. 422. 199. Ibid. 200. Ibid. 201. See Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, ‘Correspondence with Maria Edgeworth’, in The Folger Collective on Early Women Critics (eds), Women Critics, 1660–1820 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 392. 202. Ibid., p. 391. 203. See Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, op. cit. 204. See Brian Harrison, ‘A Genealogy of Reform in Britain’, in Bolt and Drescher (eds), op. cit. 205. More, ‘Slavery’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 20. Catherine Hall links the construction of Victorian domestic ideology to a religious stamp engraved in this period. ‘Between 1780 and 1820’, she writes, ‘in the Evangelical struggle over anti-slavery and over the reform of manners and morals, a new view of the nation, of political power and of family life was forged’. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Polity, 1992), p. 75.

Notes and References 157 206. Hyam notes, ‘[t]he erosion of respect, which took place roughly between 1790 and 1840, was followed by the erosion of sympathy and the growth of prejudice . . . The first signs of change appeared in India in the 1790s, when miscegenation became officially disapproved of, and the Anglo-Indian community was rejected as a possible “collaborating class”. This decision, as crucial as it was cynical, did the British no credit at all. It was argued, largely due to the fear generated by the revolt in Santo Domingo, together with a clearer determination to impose a permanent raj, and the beginning of the Protestant missionary movement with its strongly evangelical motivation.’ (Hyam, op. cit., p. 200). Not my italics. 207. H.L. Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Past & Present, Number 139 (1993), 96. 208. Smith, Desmond, op. cit., pp. 7–8. Not my italics.

4

Moral economies of nature, religion and science

1. See Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 21. 2. Mary Robinson, ‘The Progress of Liberty’, in Ashfield (ed.), op. cit., p. 129. Written in 1798, first published in 1801. 3. Ibid. 4. See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 5. See Alison M. Jagger, op. cit.; Kennedy and Mendus (eds), op. cit.; Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason & Objectivity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Mary Warnock (ed.), Women Philosophers (London: J.M. Dent, 1996). This anthology reproduces writings from a number of women from across a range of philosophical positions. 6. See G.S. Rousseau (ed.), The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Brian Morris, Western Conceptions of the Individual (New York: Berg, 1991). 7. Mary Scott, ‘The Female Advocate’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth Century Women Poets, op. cit., p. 322. 8. Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of a Woman’, in Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, op. cit., p. 248. 9. Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin, ‘An Epistle to Mr Pope, Occasioned by His Characters of Women’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth Century Women Poets, op. cit., p. 150. 10. Richard Polwhele, ‘The Unsex’d Females: A Poem’, in V. Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century, op. cit., p. 186. 11. Ibid., p. 189. 12. See Lerner, op. cit., p. 138. 13. See Maureen McNeil, ‘The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin’, in Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), op. cit., p. 200. However, like other eras before and since, the eighteenth century contained many ethical voices. An emerging tendency was to place greater emphasis upon ‘the material world and the human condition rather than a spiritual realm. It is therefore

158 Notes and References

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

consistent that attempts to find morality in nature did so increasingly by reference to human nature, rather than to a nature, created by God . . . This was precisely the attraction of deism.’ A.E. Pilkington, ‘“Nature” as Ethical Norm in the Enlightenment’, in Jordanova (ed.), op. cit., p. 54. Catherine Macaulay, ‘From Letters on Education, “No Characteristic Difference in Sex”’, in Robertson (ed.), op. cit., p. 35. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Review of Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education’, in Janet Todd (ed.), A Wollstonecraft Anthology, op. cit., p. 116. Hannah More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’, in Hole (ed.), op. cit., p. 183. Not my italics. Ibid. See Jordanova (ed.), ‘Introduction’, op. cit., pp. 40ff. Helen Maria Williams, ‘A Hymn Written Among the Alps’, in Ashfield (ed.), op. cit., pp. 79–80. Roger L. Emerson, ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Stewart (ed.), op. cit., p. 34. Not my italics. See Zaw, op. cit., p. 140. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 13; see Zaw, ibid., p. 130; Sapiro, op. cit., p. 53. See Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 41. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). The last section of the Social Contract is ‘Of Civil Religion’. See Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Naturalizing the Family: Literature and the Bio-Medical Sciences’, in Jordanova (ed.), op. cit., p. 111. For a commentary on a later period, see Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, in Samuel (ed.), op. cit. See Alistair McGrath, The Re-Enchantment of Nature: Science, Religion and the Human Sense of Wonder (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), p. 157. See Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 23. Ibid., p. 28. See Lerner, op. cit., pp. 138ff. Bible criticism was instrumental in the genesis and development of feminist consciousness. See Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 24; Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and Society (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970), p. 6. See Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Woman’s Scientific Interests, 1520–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990), pp. 90ff. John Baines was a mathematician who contributed to the Ladies Diary, the first scientific publication that was specifically aimed at women. Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, op. cit., p. 181. See Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, op. cit., p. 573. Ryle has argued that Austen wrote about the motor of human behaviour that is quite synonymous with latter-day behavioural psychologists: see Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 309. See Susan Wolfson, ‘The Language of Interpretation in Romantic Poetry: A Strong Working of the Mind’, in A. Reed (ed.), Romanticism and Language, (London: Methuen, 1985).

Notes and References 159 36. See Kline, op. cit., Chapter XVII. The quasi-religious invisible hand was of course also held to be instrumental in the ordination of the free-market ideology as penned by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations. 37. Kirkham, op. cit., p. 4. 38. Ibid. 39. See Jagger, op. cit., p. 28. 40. Ibid., p. 40. 41. See Goldberg, op. cit., p. 28. 42. Ibid. 43. See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 283n. This text was first published in 1780, and subsequently, with modifications, in 1789. Utilitarianism did not begin with Bentham; however, it was given a modern lease of life by his important glosses. For a sympathetic précis of Utilitarianism, and its relationship with feminism, see Lea Campos Boralevi, ‘Utilitarianism and Feminism’, in Kennedy and Mendus (eds), op. cit. It is interesting to note, moreover, that ‘humane’ must not be confused with the concept of ‘equality’: Stocking points out that, in 1803, the socialist Saint-Simon argued that revolutionary theorists had erred in applying the notion of equality to black people because they had a physical constitution which inhibited them from attaining an intellectual level similar to that of Europeans. See Stocking, op. cit., pp. 25–6. 44. Mary Robinson, ‘Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Subordination’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantics, op. cit., p. 124. My italics. 45. See Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., p. 171. 46. Hannah More, ‘The Black Slave Trade’, in Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharnock (eds), op. cit., p. 21. Not my italics. This poem was first published in 1788 under the title Slavery, A Poem, and later republished under its new title in 1816. 47. See Berlin, op. cit., p. 218. 48. Ibid. There is of course a language of consciousness here that takes us to the heart of modernity. The Christian paradigm of humanity, faith and salvation is dependent on a particularistic understanding of ‘time’, essential for the Creation, Revelation and the Second Coming. The older theological prelapsarianism, that is pre-Fall aetiology, was punctured by revelation, the epiphanic jolts of Romanticism, as Frederick Garber puts it. Scriptural niceties, however they were framed, were thus burst asunder by this shift: change changes everything; see Frederick Garber, ‘Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction’, in Pagliaro (ed.), op. cit., p. 156. 49. See Brown, op. cit., passim. 50. See Cragg, op. cit., p. 236. 51. See McGrath, op. cit., p. 135. 52. Brown, op. cit., p. 38. The dialectic is often trite, the theoretical underpinnings of which are heavily glossed by a social theory deeply infused with Enlightenment precepts of universal reason and progress, rather than the more murky, unclear, anti-Enlightenment of particularity with its pervasive Romantic gloss. 53. Ann Coral Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1978), p. 27.

160 Notes and References 54. This is, of course, a debate which is far from being settled. Tarnas argues that ‘religion itself was an enduring element in the Romantic spirit’, but others have argued that the relationship between Romanticism and Christianity was amorphous: see Tarnas, op. cit., p. 372; Cragg, op. cit., p. 254. 55. See Marilyn Butler, ‘Romanticism in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1983), p. 54. 56. For a discussion on Enlightenment, history and difference, see Outram, op. cit., passim. 57. Ann Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 268. 58. Ibid., pp. 268–9. 59. See Howells, op. cit., p. 7. 60. See Garber, op. cit., p. 156. 61. More, ‘Slavery’, in Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, op. cit., p. 17; see also Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., pp. 8–9. 62. More, ibid., p. 19. 63. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 346. First published in 1794. 64. See Ian Netton, ‘The Mysteries of Islam’, in G. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), op. cit. 65. See Frances Mannsaker, ‘Elegancy and Wildness: Reflections of the East in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination’, in Rousseau and Porter (eds), ibid., passim. 66. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, op. cit., p. 247. 67. Ibid., p. 670. 68. Ibid., p. 40. Gypsies were originally presumed to have come from Egypt, hence the spelling of their nomenclature. The Oxford Companion to British History, under an entry entitled ‘gypsies and tinkers’, notes that they originate from northern India and have retained their Romany traditions. They first emmigrated to the British Isles in the fifteenth century, where they have historically suffered hostility: see John Cannon (ed.), Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 444. 69. See John Simpson, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 238. In eighteenth-century works on aesthetic theory, variety equated to pleasure; Gothic stories presented ‘variety’: other landscapes and other people. Other was integral to variety. People and places were the very stuff of Romanticism. Further afield, Jane Austen used ‘variety’ to eulogize English forestry within a comparative framework. ‘How beautiful’, she wrote in Mansfield Park, ‘how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! – When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature! – In some countries we know that the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing, that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence.’ Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, op. cit., p. 480. 70. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, ibid., p. 222. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, op. cit., p. 472.

Notes and References 161 74. See Netton, ‘The Mysteries of Islam’, op. cit. 75. See McGrath, op. cit., p. 134. 76. See Ann Bermingham, ‘English Landscape Drawing Around 1795’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), op. cit. 77. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, op. cit., p. 6. The capitalized text is Radcliffe’s. 78. Ibid., p. 242. 79. Ibid., p. 206. 80. Ibid., pp. 206, 474. 81. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena, op. cit., Chapters: ‘The Triangle: Christianity and Greece Against Egypt’, and ‘The Alliance Between Greece and Christianity’. 82. Ibid. 83. See Rendall, op. cit., p. 73. 84. See Anne Mellor, ‘On Romanticism and Feminism’, in A. Mellor (ed.), op. cit., p. 4. 85. See Smith, National Identity, op. cit., passim. 86. See Satish Saberwal, ‘On the Making of Europe: Reflections from Delhi’, History Workshop, 33 (1992), 146. 87. See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 111. See also D. Morley and K. Robins, ‘No Place like Heimat: Images of Home(land) in European Culture’, in Carter, Donald, and Squires (eds), op. cit. 88. See Miri Rubin, ‘The Culture of Europe in the Later Middle Ages’, History Workshop, 33 (1992); Ross Balzaretti, ‘The Creation of Europe’, in History Workshop, 33, ibid.; Delanty, op. cit., passim. 89. See Jeremy Johns, ‘Christianity and Islam’, in John McManners (ed.), The Oxford History of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); C.J. Robinson, op. cit., pp. 111–25; Delanty, ibid., p. 27. 90. See Netton, op. cit., p. 35. 91. See Johns, op. cit., p. 200. 92. See Smith, National Identity, op. cit., pp. 6–7. Wole Soyinka puts a slightly different gloss on the whole social process when he suggests that that is the case when there is an ethical claim, an invocation to a higher good, at stake. See Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, Canto Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 77. 93. Modernity speaks: one of her poems bears the subtitle A Modern Love-Letter, see Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth Century Women Poets, op. cit., p. 197. For a discussion on the nature of the canon with reference to Mary Leapor, see Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing (London: Pandora, 1994), pp. 188ff. 94. Mary Leapor, ‘An Essay on Woman’, in Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth Century Women Poets, ibid., pp. 207–8. 95. See Montefiore, op. cit., p. 190. 96. Ibid., p. 192. 97. Ibid. 98. See Mannsaker, op. cit. 99. See Robert L. Mack (ed.), Oriental Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). This text contains four eighteenth-century Arabesque stories, three of which were written by women, Frances Sheridan, Clara Reeve, and Maria Edgeworth.

162 Notes and References 100. See Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 143. 101. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, op. cit., p. 47. 102. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Janet Todd (ed.), ibid., pp. 89–90. 103. In Common Sense, for example, published in 1776, Paine declared that ‘laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey’ in The Thomas Paine Reader, op. cit., p. 71. Not my italics. 104. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary, op. cit., p. 20. 105. Hannah More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’, in Hole (ed.), op. cit., p. 124. Not my italics. 106. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, op. cit., p. 90. 107. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, op. cit., pp. 78ff. 108. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Short Residence’, op. cit., p. 90. There is an irony here: Jeremy Johns notes that the eleventh-century Islamic intellectual historian, Said al-Andalusi, observed that ‘because Europeans lived in a cold climate, the growth of their brains was stunted, so they could not be expected to contribute to civilization’. Johns, op. cit., p. 197. 109. See R. G. Collingwood, op. cit., pp. 86ff. 110. See Goldberg, op. cit., passim. 111. See Berlin, op. cit., p. 175; Outram, op. cit., p. 65. 112. Harriet and Sophia Lee, ‘The Scotsman’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 233. The Tales were published between 1797 and 1805. 113. See Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 56–9. 114. David Hume, ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’, in Steven M. Cahn (ed.), Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), p. 740. 115. Hume, ‘Of National Character’, in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), op. cit., p. 33; see also Philip Curtin, op. cit. 116. Goldberg, op. cit., p. 28. 117. See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 157. 118. See Gillian Rose, op. cit., pp. 70, 87. 119. See Sapiro, op. cit., Chapter 3. 120. Ibid., p. 111. 121. Wollstonecraft, ‘A Short Residence’, op. cit., p. 90. 122. See Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture (London: Blackwell, 1992). Chapter 7. ‘The most telling legacy of the crusading era’, write Sardar, Nandy, and Davies, was ‘the inextricable connections it built in the Western mind between religious orthodoxy and a uniform pattern of living’. Sardar, Nandy, and Davies, op. cit., p. 38. 123. See Kiernan, op. cit., passim. 124. See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, op. cit., p. 33. 125. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, op. cit., p. 260.

Notes and References 163 126. See G. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 167. 127. See Equiano, op. cit., p. 93. 128. Ann Yearsley, ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’, in Moira Ferguson (ed.), First Feminists, op. cit., pp. 393–4. 129. See Blackburn, op. cit., pp. 426ff. 130. Ibid., p. 138. 131. See Ferguson, Subject to Others, op. cit., Chapter 4, and passim. 132. See Jeremy Collingwood and Margaret Collingwood, Hannah More (Oxford: Lion, 1990), p. 69. The law clearly did not protect the innocent and the vulnerable. The case itself concerned James Somerset, a slave, who was brought to England by his owner who intended to take Somerset back to the West Indies. James refused to go, sought shelter and protection, managing to obtain a writ of habeas corpus that was presented before Lord Mansfield in 1772. Mansfield argued that the laws of England did not recognize the status of slavery. His judgment, based on an Elizabethan pronouncement that the air of England was too pure for any slaves to breathe, ordered Somerset to be set free: for an account of this episode in legal history, see William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres, Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), pp. 49ff. First published in 1853. Legal theory, however, did not match legal practice, as Peter Fryer notes: the history of this judgment remained one of confusion and misinterpretation. The ruling was largely thought to pertain only to enforced compulsion of the taking of slaves back to the West Indies. Black slavery still existed in the British Isles, and ownership of slaves in the West Indies was unaffected: see Fryer, op. cit., pp. 124–6, and passim. 133. See David Richardson, The Bristol Slave Traders: A Collective Portrait (Bristol: The Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1985). 134. More, Slavery, op. cit., p. 16. Not my italics. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., p. 18. 137. Ibid., p. 19. 138. Ibid., p. 20. 139. See Collingwood and Collingwood, op. cit., p. 68. 140. See Richard Faber, The High Road to England (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 66. 141. See F.W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 364–6, 515, 520. 142. Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 18. 143. See Mary Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Volume II, Minorities and Outsiders (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 18. 144. See Smith, National Identity, op. cit., p. 78. 145. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘An Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts’, op. cit., p. 117. 146. See E.P. Thompson, Making, op. cit., p. 55. 147. See David Hempton, ‘Religion in British Society 1740–1790’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), op. cit., pp. 218–19. Eighteenth-century anti-Catholic women

164 Notes and References

148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154.

155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

163.

164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

writers, for instance, include Susanna Centlivre and Carolina Nairne: see Janet Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British Writers, op. cit. Colley, Britons, op. cit., p. 18. See Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986), p. 213. See Jane Spencer, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), op. cit., p. xvii. Inchbald, ibid., p. 1. See Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber (London: RKP, 1970), p. 335. A gendered point. Sardar, Nandy, and Davies, op. cit., p. 59. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 182ff. We can add, in concert with Jeremy Johns, that ‘Christians of Western Europe generally accepted without question that Christianity was an essential component of their own humanity.’ See Johns, op. cit., p. 201. However, it is, of course, problematic to speak of Christianity as a monolithic whole. Christianity may be taken to be a unified religious cosmology only if we include the significant doctrinal similarities that exist between the many versions of it. On the other hand, we must not be blind to the many differences that separate the many faiths within the Christian community. Inchbald, op. cit., p. 87. Ibid., p. 196. Fanny Burney, Wanderer; Or Female Difficulties, op. cit., p. 79. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid., p. 842. See Cottrell on late eighteenth-century Francophobia, op. cit. In 1789, a decree was issued by the Estates General in France, declaring that all Church property was to be sold. A process of de-christianization began in 1793. For a chronology, see McManners (ed.), op. cit., p. 727. In place of the Virgin Mary there was to be The Goddess of Reason. Apart from the highly ritualized Adoration of Reason that gripped many parishes across France in November and December of 1793, also very interesting is the gendered nomenclature. See notes to The Wanderer, op. cit., p. 927. See Victor J. Seidler, ‘Fathering, Authority and Masculinity’, in Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988). Burney, op. cit., p. 786. Ibid. Ibid., p. 787. See Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (Harlow: Longman, 1962), p. 39. Maria Edgeworth, ‘Letters for Literary Ladies’, in Dale Spender and Janet Todd (eds), op. cit., p. 370. The Letters were first published in 1795. In the Second Edition, published in 1798, Edgeworth expanded her commentary on chemistry. ‘Chemistry’, she announced, ‘is a science well suited to the talents and situation of women . . . it affords occupation and domestic

Notes and References 165

169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

176. 177. 178.

179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189.

190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198.

purpose . . . there is no danger of inflaming the mind . . . and the pleasure of pursuit is a sufficient reward for the labour’. Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, op. cit., p. 21. See Hays, Victim of Prejudice, op. cit., p. 6. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, op. cit., p. 6. Ibid., p. 393. Ibid., pp. 393–4. Ibid., p. 394. See Anne Mellor, ‘On Romanticism and Feminism’, in A. Mellor (ed.), op. cit., p. 4. See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, Canto Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 7, ‘Science and Religion’; see also McGrath, op. cit., passim. Tarnas, op. cit., p. 298. See Jordanova, op. cit. See Anne Mellor, ‘Possessing Nature’, in Anne Mellor (ed.), op. cit., p. 220; Margaret Homans, ‘Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal’, in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, 1818 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 30. First published in 1818. See Mellor, ‘Possessing Nature’, op. cit. Shelley, op. cit., p. 138. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 3. Percy’s contribution is un-credited. See Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (eds), The Journals of Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, op. cit., p. 225. Ibid., p. 340. See The Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 60. See ‘selected works’ under the entry ‘Charlotte Smith’, by Martin Fitzpatrick, in Janet Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British Women Writers, op. cit., p. 625. Conversations, Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History for the Use of Children and Young Persons, first appeared in 1804. The Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, first appeared in 1807. See Priscilla Wakefield, ‘An Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters’, in Robertson (ed.), op. cit. She was a prolific writer of didactic ‘conversations’: see biographical notes in Robertson, ibid. See Fiona Robertson’s, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Robertson (ed.), ibid., p. xxviii. Jane Marcet, ‘Conversations on Chemistry’, in Robertson (ed.), ibid., p. 317. See Brian Simon, The Two Nations & the Educational Structure, 1780–1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 52. Quoted in Collingwood and Collingwood, op. cit., p. 108. See Musselwhite, op. cit. See Dictionary of National Biography, op. cit., pp. 1047, 2771. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, op. cit., p. 346.

166 Notes and References 199. When Shelley revised Frankenstein, for the last time, in 1831, she added that Clerval’s ‘...design was to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade.’ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831 Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 153. 200. See Clare Brant, ‘Climates of Gender’, in Amanda Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 146. 201. Ibid., pp. 37–8. 202. Shelley, 1818 Text, op. cit., p. 95. 203. Both Percy and Mary Shelley were themselves schooled in ethnographic sciences. Among others, Mary read Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, and Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. See Journal entries 2–4 January 1815, and 18–23 June 1821, in Feldman and Scott-Kilvert (eds), op. cit. Additionally, they read many travelogues written by those who recorded their views on nations and peoples across the globe: see the Shelley’s Reading List, in Feldman and Scott-Kilvert (eds), ibid., pp. 631–84. They read at least 24 such books. 204. Shelley, 1818 Text, op. cit., p. 95. Sarah Pomeroy contends that so-called axiomatic truths about the mental prowess of the Greeks, and Romans, are founded upon a male-centred historiography: see Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, & Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (London: Pimlico, 1994). 205. S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, op. cit., p. 114. 206. See Wolf, op. cit., p. 7. 207. See Musselwhite, op. cit., pp. 55–60. 208. See Sapiro, op. cit., p. 59. 209. See Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), passim. This is a large problematic. A deeply entrenched and widespread belief of Western culture is that mathematics and science are the universal holders of absolute truths, and remain so despite any disjuncture. Scientific logic is, moreover, believed to be above cultural suspicion, in other words value-free, and void of any social characteristics or imprints. As such, a critique of culturally and historically determined cognitive and logical structures of mathematical sciences per se is deemed to be esoteric at best and irrelevant at worst. But mathematical sciences do have social histories. Mathematics supported the British quest for global dominance: it guided its navy across the seas, it assisted the counting and exchange of commercial stocks, which included people and things, and it also served a ballistic purpose which facilitated conquest. Some British women writers were clearly tuned in to this. Mary Shelley certainly knew that science did not operate in a social vacuum. 210. See Berlin, op. cit., pp. 4–5. 211. See Kline, op. cit., passim. See R.K. Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart: The Classical Equilibrium in Fiction and Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983): in this light, perhaps the triple-volume novels by Jane Austen in England and the tripartite structure of symphonic compositions by the supranational Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart assume a much more critical significance than at first seems obvious; not least here is the symbolic

Notes and References 167

212. 213.

214. 215.

association with the Holy Trinity. But there is more to this problematic: what is considered to be Western mathematics in point of fact is not a derivative of the West at all. Western mathematics is a cultural mix, a composite of writing, counting and measuring from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Through trade and administration (for which we might read annexation), the cognitive map of ‘western mathematics’ has been inextricably connected to the effacing of other ethnic ways of counting, measuring and valuing. The buying and selling of slaves in pounds sterling in Africa for transportation to the Caribbean is a case in point. Such transactions were conducted with the complicit involvement of black people against black people, and were contingent upon a specific West European system of commodity accountancy with regard to the value of human life generally. Between 1790 and 1807, a male slave sold in Jamaica could fetch between £50 and £70; a healthy female between £50 and £60: see Wolf, op. cit., pp. 195ff. This system of exchange, we may note, operated a sexual dynamic, in which a black woman was worthless than a black male. Additionally, many localized systems of accounting were destroyed through the agency of ‘western mathematics’ and the imposition of administrative techniques: British colonizers in Nigeria, for instance, did not keep track of large numbers of Igbo by using Nigerian methods of calculation: see Alan J. Bishop, ‘Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism’, Race & Class, Volume 32, Number 2 (1990), 53–4. We may conclude that the logic of ‘western mathematics’ proved to be an invaluable source of vicarious power. It most clearly exhibited its propensity and ability to control as westerners navigated their way across the globe brandishing the spoils of their applied science, technology and industry. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, op. cit., p. 343. See Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), op. cit. At roughly the same time as path-breaking developments in chemistry took place, mechanical improvements of the cotton industry galvanized production in the British Midlands, ushering in the initial phases of the Industrial Revolution. Production in the cotton industry thereafter rose dramatically from the 1780s onwards: see See S. Lilley, ‘Technological Progress and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914’, in Cipolla (ed.), op. cit., pp. 192–7, 226–30. Concurrently, moreover, the British captured and, as Eric Wolf has argued, proceeded to destroy the cotton industry in India: see Wolf, op. cit., p. 287. Raw material from India was shipped to England, where mills in Manchester processed it. The final product was shipped back to India for sale. It is a careless economic history that divorces the chemical development of bleaching techniques and the mastery of dyes and colourings in Manchester from the demise of the handicraft clothing industry in the Indian subcontinent. Britain voraciously subjugated India with a destructive political economy, largely through exploits of the East India Company, and so secured protection for the emerging enterprises back home. Hence Mary Shelley’s Clerval and his imperialistic frame of mind. See Jordanova, ‘Naturalizing the Family’, op. cit., passim. Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 Text, op. cit., p. 23.

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Index Acts of Parliament Act of Union, 62, 151n Combination (1799–1801), 147 Corporation (1661), 110, 111 Gilberts (1782), 140n India (1784), 24 Parliamentary (1678), 110, 111 Seditious Meetings (1795), 147 Test (1675), 110, 111 Transportation (1719), 36 Treasonable Practices (1795), 147 aesthetics ancient world, and, 10 Christian, 79 Maria Edgeworth and racialized, 80 racialized, 80 Romanticism and, 10 theory, 10 Africa, 23, 25, 52, 64, 74, 130n, 132n, 139n, 141n, 145n, 154n, 166–7n culture and the West, 10 Granville Sharp, and, 37 Hannah More on, 88 and slavery, 27 Thomas Paine on, 23 West Africa, 37 William Cowper on, 23 Agency, 17, 18 human, 88, 94 political, 110 Agential method/methodology Mary Wollstonecraft and, 27 women writers and, 7, 12, 27 Albion, 26, 64 Ancient bards, of, 66 conservative appropriation, of, 67 Elizabeth Moody, 66 radicals, and, 64 William Blake, and, 65 William Wordsworth and, 144 Alcock, Mary, 58–9

Instructions, Supposed To Be Written In Paris, For The Mob In England, 150n Alderson, Amelia, see Opie, Amelia (nee Alderson) Alexander, Meena, 65 Alterity, 7–8, 50, 98 American War of Independence, 61 Charlotte Smith, on, 61, 68 Jane Austen, and, 138 ancien regime British, 53, 110, 134n in European countries, 146n French, 51 Irish, 62 Ancient Egypt, 10, 100, 133n, 160n, 161n S.T. Coleridge on, 124 Ancient Greece, 10, 100, 161n Ann Radcliffe and the Illiad and the Wars of Troy, 100 Mary Shelly and, 124 Ancient Rome, 9, 100 Anderson and Zinsser, 43 Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and ownership of slaves, 108 Anglo-Saxonism, 6, 64 ethnic power, and, 6 ontological meanings in, 6 and racial sovereignty, 6 Anning, Mary, 121 Anonymous The Age of War, 152n War the Source of Riches, 151n Anti-slavery, xii, 27, 42, 82, 156n as moral cause and moral focus, 108 as moral map, 73 Charlotte Smith and, 73 Clapham Sect, 82 feminism and, 129n Hannah More and, 109 190

Index 191 suspicion surrounding campaigners, 82 women and literature, 2 Antoinette, Marie, 70 Arabian Nights, 103 Clara Reeve and, 103 Maria Edgeworth and, 103 Associationist psychology, 9 Enlightenment and, 9 Astell, Mary, 91 Austen, Jane, v, 2, 9, 39, 91–2, 114, 134n, 158n, 166n and family connection with Antiguan Australia, 23, 37, 79, 136n Baines, John, 91 Banton, Michael, 4, 131n Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 2, 71 An Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 111 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 24 on nation, 69 On the Expected General Rising of the French Nation in 1792, 69 The Rights of Woman, 69 Bentham, Jeremy, 60, 93 Berger, Peter, 4 Berlin, Isaiah, 94, 96, 105, 125, 129n Black characters in The Wanderer, 42 in women’s writing, xii Blake, William, 52, 64–7, 69, 111, 152n and Albion, 65 Jerusalem, 65 Milton, 66 New Jerusalem, and, 65 Songs of Innocence, 65 The Little Black Boy, 65 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 65 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 3 Brant, Clare, 124 British economic development and tribalism, 30 Britishness black people and, 6 Brody, Miriam, 18

ideology of, 6 Maria Edgeworth and, 5 Romantics and, 6 Burke, Edmund, 2, 29, 33, 53–5, 58–60, 69, 79, 89, 95, 101, 103, 147n and anti-Semitism, 76 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2, 55, 69, 79 Burney, Fanny, 2, 13, 29, 42, 71, 110, 119 and history, 116 on anti-Catholicism, 115 on chemistry and God, 116–7 on Francophobia, 115–6 on French Otherness, 63–4, 115 on French Revolution, 114 on Napoleon Bonaparte, 63 on novels, 14 on race relations, 114 and racial prejudice, 42 on Robespierre, 64 on Waterloo, 63 The Wanderer, 42, 64, 114–5, 117 Burns, Robert, 141–2n Butler, Marilyn, 50, 65, 95 Carter, Elizabeth, 91 Catholicism, 111 anti-Catholicism and Burney, 115 Carolina Nairne, 163–4n Elizabeth Inchbald, and, 112 Rome, 110, 111 Susanna Centlivre, 163–4n Chadwick, Owen, 119 Chamberlain, Mary, 111 Chemistry, 117, 119 British society and, 121 Fanny Burney on, 116–7 Jane Marcet on, 122 Maria Edgeworth on, 118, 121, 164n Mary Shelley and, 120–1, 125 women and, 121 Christianity, xiii, 100 as a civilizing force rooted in Western raciology, xv ethnogeny, 85 hegemonic influence of Church, 8 romanticized, 67 and time, 159n

192 Index Citizenship, 19, 22, 35–6, 52, 68–70, 72 and British modernity, xii and poverty, 39 and ‘race’, 72 Civilization, xv, xvi, 8–10, 18–20, 44–8, 50–1, 53, 55, 70–2, 75–7, 79, 82–3, 133n, 147n, 162n and British modernity, xiii and poverty, 39 and racial thinking, xiii Class (social), xii, 6, 13–4, 26–8, 31, 34–5, 40, 43–4, 47–8, 52, 59, 77–8, 82, 133n, 134n, 144n, 148n Cobbett, William, 52 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3, 67, 91, 95, 124, 144n Colley, Linda, 30, 33, 56–7, 67, 70, 111–2, 150n Colonial consumer goods, 26 and Ann Radcliffe, 29 Edmund Burke and, 29 and Fanny Burney, 29 Jane Austen and, 29 Colonialism, xi, xiv, 22–3, 62, 144n Comaroff, John and Jean, 7 Compassion, xii, 39–43, 48, 71, 73, 126 Hannah More, on, 39 and Sierra Leone, 38 toward black characters, xii Consciousness, 17, 20, 132n and discourse, 16, 18–20 European, 8 Jane Austen and British, 32 modernity of literary, 13 contradictory concept, 4 as social justification, 5 as structural appellation, 4 cultural cartography of, 5 culture, nation and, 100 and division of humans, 3 embodies political and social programme, 5 Fanny Burney on, 114 ideological nature of, 5 modern annotation of human relations, 4, 15 normative force of, 5 periodization and, 3

relation to affluence, poverty and privilege, 5 systemic nature of, 5 transposing concept of back in time, 15 various meanings of, 4 Costello, Louisa Stuart, 63 Cottrell, Stella, 57–8 Cowper, William, 23, 98, 108 To William Wilberforce, 137n Culture, xii, xv, xvi, 9, 11, 65, 88, 101, 148n and assertions of nation, xiv Catherine Macaulay on, 13 chemistry and British, 121 and contrast, 70 ethnic metaphysics and, 6 European, 79 mathematics and western, 166n modernity and the temporality, spatiality and corporeality of western, 20 nation and race and, 100 ‘race’ and, 5, 106, 153–4n rationality and, 92 Dalton, John, 120 Darwin, Erasmus, 87, 120 A Plan For The Conduct Of Female Education In Boarding Schools, 122 Davies, Merryl Wyn, 7, 113 Davis, Mary, 30 Davy, Humphrey, 120 Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 121 Declaration of the Rights of Man Wollstonecraft on, 56 Descartes, R, 85 Diaspora black, 19 British, xiv Jewish, 19 Difference racialization of social, 34 Discourse, xii, xiv, xv, 40, 47, 52–3, 57, 59, 60, 65, 72, 86–90, 92, 96, 99, 101, 107, 142n, 155n alterity and, 50 and British womanhood, 7

Index 193 and history, 95 anti-modern, 152n Charlotte Smith on slavery, 73 colonial, 129n compassion and, 39 Elizabeth Moody and Classical, 66 feminist, 9 French Revolution and, 50 humanist, 26 Mary Wollstonecraft and patriotic, 69 of Christian aestheticism, 79 otherness, 103 Protestant–Catholic tensions as, 110 ‘race’ and feminism as, 16 racialized, 5, 35, 52, 76, 129n reflexive, 75 Romanticism as a Christian, 100 theory, 16–7 women and racial, xv Disraeli, Benjamin, 4 Dugaw, Diane, 68 Eagleton, Terry, 17–8 Eastwood, David, 57, 149n Edgeworth, Maria, 2, 9, 60, 62, 71, 74, 82–4, 90, 103–4, 116, 118, 121, 146n, 155n, 161n and aesthetics, 80 Arabian Nights and, 103 Belinda, 74, 80–1, 155n and black and Jewish stereotypes, 80–2 Castle Rackrent, 60, 62 correspondence with Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, 81–2 critique of education, 103–4 and empire, 62 and feminism, 138n and French Revolution, 116 Letters for Literary Ladies, 80, 118, 156n, 164n and obeah, 74 on beauty and ‘race’, 80 on Britishness, 5 on chemistry, 118, 121, 164n on Ireland, 60 on Islam, 103–4 on nation, 62

Practical Education, 123 and use of vernacular of French Revolution, 155 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 123 Education, 12, 51, 88, 118–9, 123 British women writers and, 117 Elizabeth Inchbald on female, 113 Erasmus Darwin on girls, 122 and Frankenstein, 123, 125 Hannah More on contemporary, 104, 122 Hannah More on female, 88 Jane Marcet and, 47, 122 Maria Edgeworth and critique of, 103–4 Mary Hays and, 118 Mary Wollstonecraft on Catherine Macaulay and, 87 raciology of mind and, xv Edwards, Bryan The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 74–5 Egypt, 29, 67, 123 Emerson, R, 88 Empire, 53, 89, 139n, 150n, 151n as grand narrative, xiv cultural flux and, 11 episteme, xii imprint on ideology, xiv knowledge and, 126 Maria Edgeworth and, 62 Mary Shelley and, 124 philology and, 123 S.T. Coleridge on, 67 tensions in British, xii wealth, poverty, crime and, 23 Enlightenment, 8–9, 34, 48, 58, 66–7, 79, 84–5, 95–6, 98–100, 160n as a form of ontology, 8 British feminism and, 22, 129n European collective consciousness and, 8 and history, 79–80, 104–5 and Islam, 102 Malthus and, 48 mental universe of, 85 mind and body in, 86 modernity of, 16

194 Index Enlightenment – continued notions of equality, 24 notions of masculinity, reason and authority, 55 ontology of, 8 and Other, 79 overlap with Romanticism, 9, 99, 121 poetics of ‘race’, 19 racially silent, xv rationality of, 92, 94 reason in, deified status of, 92 and Romanticism, 8, 84–5, 94–5, 99, 121, 159n science of human nature and, 9 self-awareness and, 20 temporal span of, 8, 132n Wollstonecraft and, 55 Equiano, Olaudah, 106 Christianization of slaves, on, 107 Interesting Narrative, reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft, 38, 106 Sierra Leone, on, 38 Ethical discursive themes, as, xvii and ethnic moral-economy of the Romantic period, 1 Ethics, 16, 39, 82, 92, 108, 129n Christian, 107 link between ethnicity and, xiii, 97, 135n poverty and, 40 racial, 71 of slavery, 24 Ethnic, 4, 6, 66, 82, 83, 114–5 bonding, 50 commentaries, xiii constellation of the Anglo-Saxons, 6 and ethical yardstick, 53 groups, 52 link between ethics and, xiii, 97, 135 metaphysics, xv, 1, 6, 104 and national raciology, 114 past, projection of an, 111 power, 6 purity, 64 re-birth, 64 realization, 52 reassertion, politics of, 64 sentiment of patriotism, 61

survival, 22, 50, 77 togetherness, sense of, 64 ways of counting, measuring and valuing, 167 Ethnic metaphysics, 6, 104 as ideological arena of myth making, 6 as interpenetration of culture and history, 6 Other and, 7 Ethnicity, 4 black, French, Irish, and Jewish, 3 ethics of slavery and, 24 ethnie, and, 6 link between ethics and, xiii, 129n sense of true, 71 Ethnie, 6, 36, 64, 83, 101 and Britishness, 6 and ideology of ‘race’, 6 and ‘race’, 6 Ethnogeny Christian, 85 European, 77 French, 85 Hebraic, 101 Ethnography, 7 Ethnology Christian, 90 Europe tribal eschatology of, 94 Falconbridge, Anna Maria defence of slave trade, 154n Farraday, Michael, 120n Fay, Elizabeth, 1, 28–9, 66, 130n, 153n Feminism, xiii, 9–12, 14–17, 21 backdating of concept, 15 and contextual social relations of culture, 11 ethical pretensions of late eighteenth century British, xii Jane Austen and, 138n, 151n and late eighteenth century construction of the modern European woman, xii racial categorization and, 15 women–society dialectic, 10 Fenwick, Eliza, 2, 43–4 Indian destitution and, 43 Secresy, 43

Index 195 Ferguson, Moira, 12, 25–6, 28, 38, 52, 74, 79, 93, 129n Ferrier, Susan, 59, 63 Fielding, Henry, 13 Fitzpatrick, Martin, 61 Fladeland, Betty, 35, 37 Forster, Henry Pitts English and Bengalee Vocabulary, 123 Foucault, M, 18–9, 38, 132n, 135n on Ann Radcliffe, 135n Fowler, Roger, 16 France, French, xii–xvii, 112 and Elizabeth Inchbald, 112 otherness, Fanny Burney on, 63–4, 115 Francophobia, 60, 164n Fanny Burney and, 115–6 French Revolution, xii, xiii, 2, 9, 11, 21, 22, 50–6, 58, 60, 64, 67–9, 75–7, 82–4, 95–6, 108, 110, 112–3, 116, 130n, 146n, 147–8n, 153n, 155n as articulation of otherness, xiv, xv, 11 as form of demonology, 50, 54 and British domestic and foreign politics, 50, 83 Charlotte Smith and, 59 Fanny Burney on, 114 Hannah More on, 56 and Helen Maria Williams, 58 impact on Europe, 50 Maria Edgeworth and, 116 Mary Wollstonecraft on, 55 and patriotism, 56 racializing impact of, xiv Susanna Whatman and, 59 Garber, Francis, 96, 159n Gellner, Ernest, 18 Genetics, 130n George, M. Dorothy, 33–5, 38–9, 41 Gibbon, Edward, 32, 58, 69, 72 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 59, 107, 124 Giddens, Anthony, 20 Gilroy, Paul, 20 Godwin, William, 113, 138n, 144n Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 47 Goldberg, David, 4, 93, 105–6, 129n, 135n, 154n

Gouge, Olympe de, 70 Gypsies, 160n and Ann Radcliffe, 97 Habeas Corpus, 147n, 163n Habermas, Jurgen, 20 Hall, Catherine, 139n, 156n Hall, Charles, 71 Effects of Civilization on The People In European States, 70 Hall, Stuart, 16 Hannaford, Ivan, 3 Harding, Sarah, 125 Hardy, Thomas, 52 Hartmann, Heidi, 136n Hay, Douglas, 37 Hays, Mary, 2, 7, 19, 68–9, 75–9, 86, 92, 141n Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, 78 Emma Courtney, 76–8 and genealogy of the West, 76 Lockean awareness, 75 and militia, 77 on consciousness of modernity, 75 on courtship and marriage, 75–6 on Jews and civilization, 76 and rationality, 76, 78 and self, society and civilization, 75 and slave trade, 78 and social criticism, 146n Victim of Prejudice, 118 Hazlitt, William, 46–7, 145n Helvetius, 79 Hempton, David, 111 Hermeneutic terminology, 91 Herschel, Caroline Lucretia, 121 Hill, Christopher, 36 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 39, 134n Historical sociology, xvii, 2, 12–14 Historiography, xiii, 15, 52, 166n and black people, 6 and feminism, 12 ‘history from below’ school of, 44 of Marxist and Weberian schools of critique, 147n and ‘race’, 15 and radicalism, 146–7n

196 Index History, x, xiii, 2–3, 9, 12, 29, 71, 99, 111, 119, 125, 133n, 145n, 163n as event, 95, 105 as tale, 95, 105 economic and social, 128n, 139n, 151n, 167n Enlightenment and, 48, 79, 104–5 Fanny Burney and, 116 feminist, 12, 25 folk, 6 Irish, 151n nature and, 48 ‘poverty’, ‘crime’ and ‘empire’ in British social and economic, 35 Romantic perspective on, 6, 9, 79–80, 100, 132n of science, 125 social criticism and, 146n symbolic, 60, 95 women and, 12, 95, 121, 133n Hobbes, T, 85, 117 Hobsbawm, Eric, 123, 125, 143n, 147n Hodgson, William, 144n Howarth, David, 63 Howells, Coral Ann, 95–6 Human nature, 51, 78, 87–9, 91–2, 96, 125 Ann Radcliffe and, 99 Eighteenth century thought and, 105–6 Enlightenment postulations on, 48 and geographical imagination of romanticism, 96 and Gothic fiction, 95 Harriet and Sophia Lee, 105 Hobbesian view of, 117 Mary Wollstonecraft and, 105 mathematical spirit and, 125 and the European mind, 9 and western society, 99 women on, 11 Hume, David, 85–6, 105–6, 117 Identity, xiv, 5, 7, 9, 79, 82–3, 110–12 Maria Edgeworth on, 62 national, xiv, 5, 9, 19, 71, 82, 111–12 racial, 103, 131n Ideology/ideological

awareness in time and space, 19 interconnectedness, 7 interpenetration of, 17 race, as, 4 social process of, 13 Immigrants and emigrants Dorothy George, on, 34 Imperialism, xi, 67 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 2, 110, 112 A Simple Story, 112–3, 115 and anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiments, 115 defiant paradigm of British womanhood, 113 and French eroticism, 112 missionaries and, 113–4 on female education, 113 and sexual politics, 112 Indies British suzerainty in India, 83 East, 23 West, 23, 28 Industrial Revolution, xii, 10, 28, 32, 36, 139n, 167n Industrialization, xi, 29, 44, 128n, 139n, 142n, 151n Jane Austen on effects of, 33 Ingram, Anne, Viscountess Irwin, 86 An Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of a Woman, 86 Inter-textuality link with male writing, 2 women’s use of, 2 Ireland, 64, 111 Act of Union, 62 British fear and, 62 Maria Edgeworth, and, 60 United Irishmen, 151n Irish immigrants in London, 34 Islam, 135n Ann Radcliffe on, 97 as Other, 103 and Christianity, 97 and Enlightenment, 102 Hannah More, and, 104 Maria Edgeworth, and, 103–4 Mary Wollstonecraft, and, 103–4 Romanticism and, 99 Western Europe and, 102

Index 197 Jagger, Alison, 92 Jameson, Frederic, xvii, 7, 13–4, 16, 129n, 132n Jenner, Edward, 120 Jews, 83, 110 Diaspora of, 19 Edmund Burke as anti-Semite, 76 ethnicity of, 3 immigrants in London, 34 Maria Edgeworth, and, 80–2 Mary Hays and, 76 Mary Wollstonecraft, and, 76 William Blake and, 66 Johns, Jeremy, 102, 162n, 164n Johnson, Dr Samuel, 57, 70, 72, 148n, 149n Johnson, Joseph, 12 Jones, Vivien, 11 Jordanova, L, 89–90, 119, 126 Kant, Emmanuel, 85 Kelly, Gary, 91, 148n Kennedy and Mendus, 69 Kiernan, Victor, 72–3 Kirkham, Margaret, 92, 138n Lamb, Mary, 156n Conquest of Prejudice, 156n and inter-textuality, 156n Landscape, 33 Austen on, 32–3, 160 and religious, cultural and racial belonging, 99 Language, 8 articulation of ‘race’ and, 4 Catholicism, iconography and, 111 communication, 18 ethnic membership and, 6 of mobilization, xi politics of, 18 power of, 13 racial currency in, xi raciology and, 4 Lazarus, Rachel Mordecai, 81 correspondence with Maria Edgeworth about anti-semitism in Belinda, 81–2 Leapor, Mary, 102, 161n An Essay on Woman, 102

Man the Monarch, 102 Leclerc, Georges Louis, Comte de Buffon, 121 Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, 121 Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 105 and nation, 105 on human nature, 105 The Scotsman’s Tale, 105 Leibniz, 85 Lerner, Gerda, 87, 158n Literary criticism/history, 2, 134n feminist, 18 and history, xv and racially silent vision in Enlightenment and Romanticism, xv Literary studies as history, theory or criticism, 13 Literature definition of, 14 key to the past, 14 vehicle for women, 12 Locke, John/Lockean, 85, 92, 106, 112, 116–7, 123 Long, Edward, 24, 74, 154n History of Jamaica, 24 Lowenthal, David, 33 Lucas, John, 64 Macaulay, Catherine, 13, 87 Letters on Education, 13 Mary Wollstonecraft on, 87 on culture, 13 on differences between the sexes, 87 sociological critique of literature, 13 McGrath, Alistair, 90, 94, 99 McNay, Lois, 135n Malchow, HL, 83 Malik, Kenan, 34, 36, 39 Malthus, Thomas, 34, 44–9, 60, 143n, 144n, 145n Essay On The Principle Of Population, 44–5, 47 Mansfield, Lord, 108 Marcet, Jane, v, 47, 122 Conversations On Chemistry, 122 Conversations on Political Economy, v, 47

198 Index Marx, K, 14 Mathematics, 8, 121, 166n Mary Shelley and, 120 Mather, Joseph God Save Thomas Paine, 57 Mathews, Eliza Kirkham, 41 The Indian, 41 Mellor, Anne, 119 Methodology descriptive, xvi qualitative content analysis, xvi Milner, Andrew, 14 Mind, 85 and body, Enlightened and Romantic incarnations in, 86 Mary Scott on, 86 Romanticism as phenomenology of, 92 Mitchell, W.J.T, 33 Mitochondria DNA, 3 Modernity, 135n, 161n abstract notion of Western thought, 18 as metanarrative of progress, 20 assumptions, goals and values in, 20 black, 20 British women writers and, 13, 20 British, xi, xii, xiii, 16, 128n, 148n British feminism and, 15–6 of colonization and empire, 53 depth, texture, meaning and, 16 discursive themes of, 17 and Enlightenment and Romanticism, 16 geographical imagination and, 19 language of consciousness, 159n male writers and, xii Mary Hays and, 75 normative and reflexive content of, 20 and Other, 13, 16 Other and, in male writing, xii poverty and, xii presentness and, 7 ‘race’ and, xvi, 4, 16, 148n sociological theory of, 19 and ‘time’ and ‘consciousness’, 18 Moers, Ellen, 12, 149n Montefiore, Jan, 102

Moody, Elizabeth, xiv, 66–7, 95 albion and, 66 Classical discourse of, 66 Moral panic, 39 More, Hannah, 2, 9, 23, 25, 27, 56–9, 69, 71, 84, 90–1, 93, 100–1, 103, 107–10, 117, 122, 146n anti-slavery and, 109 as evangelical moralist, 25 boycott of West Indian sugar and, 109 charity and, 43 Clapham Sect and, 82 ethnic metaphysics and, 104 and feminism, 25, 138n, 148n and feminist history, 25 on Africans, 88 on compassion, 39 on contemporary education, 104, 122 on female education, 88 on French Revolution, 56 on Islam, 104 on novels, 14 on patriotism, 56 on radical ‘rights’ ideology, 58 on reason and feeling, 93 on science, 122 on slavery, black chattel and domestic, 25–6, 109 public domain and, 57 Slavery, 2, 25, 82, 97, 109, 156n, 159n, 163n social criticism and, 82, 87 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 134n, 142n, 149n, 158n, 162n The Black Slave Trade, 159n The White Slave Trade, 138n Will Chip’s True Rights of Man, in Opposition to the New Rights of Man, 58 witnesses capture of runaway slave, 108 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 166n Musselwhite, David, 123, 125 Nandy, Ashis, 7, 113 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 123 Nash, M, 5

Index 199 Nation, xiii, xiv, 2, 17, 22, 26, 38, 46, 48, 50–3, 56–8, 60–1, 65–9, 71, 77, 82, 84, 90, 100–1, 106, 108, 116, 126, 132n, 146n, 148n, 151n, 156n Anna Laetitia Barbauld on, 69 Charlotte Smith on, 83 Harriet and Sophia Lee on, 105 Helen Maria Williams on, 58 Maria Edgeworth on, 62 Mary Wollstonecraft and, 71 National identity, xiv, 5, 9, 71, 82, 112 Nationalism, xiv, 50, 52, 60, 66–7, 83, 101, 111 Charlotte Smith on distinction between patriotism and, 60 French Otherness in English, 64, 71 making of the Romantic, 66 maternal, 66, 153n Natural philosophy, 88 Mary Shelley on, 120 Nature Enlightened view of, 84, 99 Romantic view of, 84, 99 Netton, Ian, 99 Novels Fanny Burney on, 14 Hannah More on, 14 Nussbaum, Felicity, 38, 71, 135n Ontology/ontological, 91, 115, 119, 132n anglo-saxonism and, 6 British women writers and, 7 Enlightenment as a form of, 8 ideology of rationality and, 89–90 and ‘race’, 4 Opie, Amelia (nee Alderson), 2, 40, 65 Adeline Mowbray, 42 charity and, 43 Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795, 40 on racial difference, 42 The Negro Boy’s Tale, 65 Other/Otherness, xiii, 5, 7–8, 10, 17, 45–6, 58, 63, 71, 83, 85, 97, 101–2, 113, 129n, 132n, 160n alterity and, 7–8 anxieties of racial, xii

as soldiers, 154n British women writers and, 8, 71 Catholic as, 110 discourse of, 103 Eastern, xii, 97, 99, 102–4 empire and, xiv, 11 Enlightened thought and social philosophy and, 79 ethnic metaphysics and, 6–7 French Revolution as articulation of, xiv, xv, 11 male writers and, xii modernity and, 13, 16 multipolaric concept of, xii, 8 patriarchy and, 130n prostitutes and, 38 racial, xii, 47, 71–2, 83, 98, 117, 125 radicalism and, 53 Robinson Crusoe, as commonest trope in eighteenth-century, 79–80 slavery and, 49 womanhood and, 109 Outram, Dorinda, 67, 160n Owen, Robert, 52–3 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), 111 Paine, Thomas, 52–3, 59, 60, 69, 103, 141n, 147n, 162n African slavery in America, 23 Common Sense, 162n Patriarchal relations, 1, 27, 55, 68, 118, 130n Patriarchy, 118, 129n, 130n Patriotism, 9, 52, 62 British modernity and, xii changing definitions of, 57, 149n Charlotte Smith on distinction between nationalism and, 60 Hannah More, on, 56 Mary Wollstonecraft and, 56, 69 Philology, 123 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 79 An Ode to Society, 79 Place, Francis, 144n, 145 Illustrations And Proofs Of The Principle of Population, 144n

200 Index plantation, 28, 32 and British commercialism, 39 and British consciousness, 32 and colonial consumer goods, 29 and East and West Indies, 30–1 effects of industrialization, 33 Emma, 31 and Englishness, 28, 32 and feminism, 138n, 149n and India, 28 and knowledge of the world, 29 and landscape, 32–3, 160 Mansfield Park, 28–9, 31, 37, 91, 114, 138n, 160n moral underside of, 32 Northanger Abbey, v, 62 on mind and body, 91, 157n on variety, 160n Persuasion, 30 plantocracy and, 28 and pre-revolutionary France, 28 and racial geography, 30 racialized spatiality and, 30 and Royal Navy, 28 Sense and Sensibility, 32 slave trade, and, 30–1 slavery and, 30–2, 138n slavery and exciting imagination, 31 slavery, unchallenged by, 31 social standing, 31 and spies, v, 62 and trade, 28–9 Political economy, xi, 25–6, 35, 38, 44, 60–2, 74, 77–8, 109, 123–4, 126, 167n and Jane Marcet, v, 47 Polwhele, Richard, 86–7, 141n The Unsex’d Females: A Poem, 157n Polygamy, 72 Pomeroy, Sarah B, 166n Pope, Alexander/Popean, 65, 86 An Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of a Woman, 86 Poverty and British modernity, xii criminalization of, 35 and race, 36 racialization of, 34–5 Power, 4 Price, Richard

A Discourse On The Love Of Our Country, 54 Priestly, Joseph, 58, 120 Protestant and Catholic tensions as a racialized discourse, 110 Protestantism, 110–12 Pye, Henry, 67 Quakers, 108 Race anxieties of Otherness and, xii and citizenship, 72 contested notion, xvi Racial categorization, 4 Fanny Burney on prejudice, 42 genealogy and, 124 geography, 30 hierarchy, 42 metaphysics, 40 narration, xi, xiv, 46 sovereignty, 6 subjectivities, 97–8 well-being as folk history, 6 Racialization of social difference, 34 Racialized discourses on the human subject, 9 geography, 37, 48 Raciology, xv, xvi, 1, 6, 22, 34, 37, 41, 52, 66–7, 82, 90, 93, 97, 110, 112, 114, 125 as language and articulation of ‘race’, 4 as race-thought, 4 British, xiv, xv captures variety of meanings of ‘race’, 4 of mind, xv of reason, xv, 85 Western, xv, 85 Radcliffe, Ann, 2, 90, 92, 95, 99 A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, 137 colonial consumer goods, 29 education and, 118 French Revolution and, 96

Index 201 and Gothic Romanticism, 94 and gypsies, 97 landscape and, 100 Mysteries of Udolpho, 97–100 on Islam, 97 on nature and art, 99 on slave trade, 137n and psychology of history, 100 racial subjectivities, 97–8 Romance of the Forest, 95, 97 and the Illiad and the Wars of Troy, 100 Radical/s, xv, 25, 51, 56–60, 64, 66–7, 70–2, 82–3, 103, 111, 145n, 146n Amelia Opie as, 42 animated by Other, 53 Ann Yearsley as, 59 Catherine Macaulay as, 13 Charlotte Smith as, 52 Eliza Fenwick as, 43 Elizabeth Inchbald as, 113 imagery of slavery and, 27 Mary Hays as, 69 Mary Wollstonecraft as, 62, 69 patriotism, 9 publishers, 12 ‘race’ and, 25 Richard Price as, 54 and Romantic conception of history, 6 slavery and, 53 Thomas Paine as, 53 Radicalism, 57, 146n, 149n feminist, 53 linked with folk heroes, 52 nature of radicalism, 52 Rationality, 51, 77, 89–90, 92, 94, 116–17, 120 as Mary Robinson and, 93 British feminism and, xiv, 11 ceremonially western, 90 Christianity and, 90 culture and, 92 Enlightened and Romantic theses on, xv liturgy of Western thought as, 94 maleness and, 77–8 Mary Hays and, 76, 78 mathematical spirit and, 8

and modernity of Romanticism, 94 of the Enlightenment, 9 western metaphysics, 93 women and, xiii, 84, 86 Rattansi, Ali, 35 Reason, 93 Ann Yearsley on ‘race’, feeling and, 93 deified status of in Enlightenment, 92 Enlightenment and notions of masculinity, authority and, 55 Hannah More on, 93 Hannah More on feeling and, 93 Mary Wollstonecraft and, 92 mathematics as methodology of knowledge and reason, 8 raciology of, xv spirit of mathematics embedded in rationality and, 8 Rees, Sian, 38 Reeve, Clara, 103 Reflexivity, 20 Richardson, Charlotte, 26 The Negro, Sept 1806, 26 Richardson, Samuel, 13 Robinson Crusoe as common trope of Other, 79 Robinson, Mary, 40, 93 January 1795, 40 Letter To The Women Of England On The Injustice Of Subordination, 159n nature and God, 85 on rationality, 93 The Progress of Liberty, 85 Roland, Manon, 70 Romantic period, xi, 1 British women writers of, xvi Enlightened feminism of, 1 literature of, 91 revision of, xi Romanticism/Romantics, 9, 64, 66–7, 92, 94–5, 98, 100, 159n, 160n aesthetics and, 10 Ancient Greece and, 100 as Christian discourse, 100 as new theology, 94 Christianity, modernity and, 95, 114 colonialism and, xi, 144n

202 Index Romanticism/Romantics – continued emotional properties and, 99 and Enlightenment, 8, 84–5, 94–5, 99, 121, 159n genealogy of self, society and civilization, 9 Gothic, 94–5, 99 history and, 9, 132n Jane Austen and, 32 mind in, 86 modernity and, 16 overlap with Enlightenment, 9, 99, 121 racially silent vision of the world, xv social theory and, 9 social, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic media of critique, 92 temporal span of, 9 unpacking of, xi, xvii variety and, 97 Rose, Gillian, 33, 106 Rousseau G and R Porter, 80 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 79, 89, 105–6, 158n Of The Social Contract, 89, 158n Rowbotham, Judith, 49 Rowbotham, Sheila, 44 Ryle, Gilbert, 158n Saberwal, Satish, 101 Said, Edward, 18, 28 San Domingo (Haiti), 27, 52 Sapiro, Virginia, 28, 56, 105–6 Sardar, Zia, 7, 113 Science, xv, 1, 9, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 118–27, 146n, 164n, 166n, 167n fiction, 120, 122 Mary Shelley on, 126 and moral theory, 88, 119 social history and, 125 value-freedom and, 166n versus religion in modernity, 119 western, 122 women and, 121 Scotland, 110 Scott, Mary, 86 on mind and matter, 86 The Female Advocate, 86

Seward, Anna, 24 on slavery and capital, 24 Sharp, Granville, 37 Shelley, Mary, 2, 119 anthropology and, 124 chemistry and, 120–1, 125 critique of modern science, 120 development of consciousness and, 125 ethnographic sciences and, 166n and ethnography, 124 Frankenstein, 2, 120–1, 123–5 imperialism and, 165n, 167n language and, 123 Lockean education of monster, 123 on ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’, 126 on mathematics, 120 on natural philosophy, 120 on science, rationality and gender, 120 and racial differentiation, 125 racial genealogy and, 124 and racialized political economy, 124 read Bryan Edwards, 166n read Thomas Malthus, 166n science and, 166n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 120 Sierra Leone, 23, 37–9, 136n criminalization and, 35 prostitutes sent to, 38 settlers on, 38 Slavery, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1–2, 19, 22–5 Africa and, 27 Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and ownership of slaves, 108 Ann Yearsley on the political economy of, 26 Charlotte Smith on, 73–4 ethics of, 24 Hannah More on black chattel and domestic, 25–6, 109 Jane Austen on, 30–2, 138n Mary Wollstonecraft on, 27–8 and Other, 49 radicals and, 27, 53 women writers against, xii Smellie, William The Philosophy of Natural History, 121

Index 203 Smith, Adam, 60, 109, 159n Smith, Anthony, 6, 102, 131n, 153n Smith, Charlotte, 2, 9, 23, 51–2, 67–8, 92, 146n, 147n, 148n, 150n American War of Independence, 61, 68 anti-slavery and, 73 commentary on British politics, 55 Conversations, Introducing Poetry, 121 Desmond, 2, 54, 59, 60, 73–5, 83 and discourse on slavery, 73 Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War, 61 internationalism and, 60 multiplicity of the Other and, 154n nationalism and, 60, 71 on demonology of the French, 52 on distinction between nationalism and patriotism, 60 on foreign policy and futility of war, 61 on French Revolution, 59 on human cost of war, 61 on merchant slavers and, 74 on nation, 83 on national pride, 61 poetics of development and, 75 political economy of slavery, 74 political economy of race-hate, 60 racial conflict on, 61 radicals and, 52 The Natural History of Birds, 121 The Old Manor House, 61, 73–4 Smith, Elizabeth Vocabulary, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, 123 Smith, Olivia, 75, 135n Social theory, xii, xvi, 9, 11, 14–6, 18, 20, 39, 48, 90, 133n, 135n, 159n Society For The Abolition Of The Slave Trade, 108 Sociology, 2, 14 historical sociology, xvii, 12–14 of knowledge, 13 of literature, xvii Soja, Edward, 18, 132n Somerville, Mary Fairfax Greig, 121 Speenhamland, 40, 140n

Spies Jane Austen on, v, 62 Spinoza, 85 Stafford, William, 64 Stocking, George W, 79, 159n Sykes, Bryan, 3, 130n, 132n Symbolic history, 60, 95 Tallyrand, 55 Tarnas, Richard, 119, 160n Taylor, Ann, 48 A Child’s Hymn of Praise, 48 Taylor, Barbara, 53 Taylor, Jane, 40 A Town, 40 Poverty, 40 Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, 40 Thelwell, John The Cell, 52 Thompson, E.P, 147n Time Christianity and, 160n creation, interpretation and memorization of the past, 7 presentness as geomythic modernity, 7 Todd, Janet, 11–12, 65 Tooke, Horne, 52 Trigger, Bruce, 105 Trinder, Barrie, 32 Vagrancy, 34 Visram, Rozina, 41 Volney Ruins of Empire, 124 Wakefield, Priscilla, 121–2 An Introduction To Botany, 121 Wales, 110 Wallace, William, 121 Walvin, James, 23 Weber, Max, 113 Wedgwood, Joshua, 24 Welfare, xii, 1, 22, 29, 33–4, 39–40, 45, 48, 89, 121, 126, 140, 142 Whatman, Susanna, 59 on fear of revolution, 59 White, Charles, 120

204 Index Wilberforce, William, 25, 82, 108 Letter to Lord Harrowby, 23 Williams, Eric, 29, 138n, 139n Williams, Helen Maria, 2, 54, 58 A Hymn Written Among The Alps, 88 Bastille, 58 Francophobia and, 58 Letters Written in France, 54 on nation, 58 political and racial freedom and, 146n support for the French Revolution, 58 Williams, Raymond, 3, 6 Winckelmann, 10 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2, 9, 29, 42, 55, 58, 61, 66, 68, 78–9, 84, 86–8, 90, 92, 101, 116–8, 125, 141n, 146n, 152n, 153n A Short Residence In Sweden, 104, 106 agential reasoning and, 27 An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe, v as early feminist, 12 black chattel slavery and, 27–8 charity and, 43 citizenship and, 69 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 56 Enlightenment and, 55 feminism and, 138n French Revolution and, 54, 76 image and metaphor of slavery and, 28 influenced by Rousseau, 89 and institution and economic role of slavery, 27 and Islam, 103–4 and Marie Antoinette, 70 nationalistic othering and, 71 new European woman, 56 new politics of gender and, 56 Olaudah Equiano and, 38, 106 on Catherine Macaulay, 87 on Edmund Burke as effeminate, 55 on genesis of mankind, 104 on human nature, 105–6 on Jews, 76 on motherhood, 71, 153n

on nation, 71 on natural rights, 89 on women, 148n oppression and, 27 patriotic discourse and, 69 patriotism and, 56, 60 and polygamy, 72 raciology in social discourse of, 90 and rationality, 77 and reason, 92, 105 and rights and citizenship, 36 and sexual politics, 71 social criticism and, 82, 87, 146n unnatural distinction and, 28, 43, 106 Vindication of the Rights of Men, 55 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 55, 69, 71, 73, 87, 103, 148n William Blake and, 64–5, 152n and William Godwin, 113 and women compared to men, 73 Woman category of social theory, 90 Women history and, 12, 95, 121 women writers language of mobilization in British, xi modernity and, 13 racialized discourse of, xii Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 135–6n Wordsworth, W, 91, 94, 96 Lyrical Ballads, 40 September 1, 1802, 42 The Excursion, 144n Wright, D.G, 147n Yearsley, Ann, 2, 25–6 A Poem On The Inhumanity of the Slave Trade, 2, 26 Anarchy, 59 on anxiety and fear, 59 on Christian ethics, 107 on commerce and law united by murder, 26 on ‘race’, feeling and reason, 93 on the political economy of slavery, 26 Young, Arthur, 6