Abstract
Chapter 3 investigates the presence of maternal imagination in two emerging literary genres: ramble fiction and the sentimental novel. Such fiction uses the tropes of maternal imagination to investigate a pregnant woman’s agency, responsibility and power over both her foetus and her household. Novels such as Tobias Smollett’s ramble novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and Samuel Richardson’s sentimental fiction Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741) create a space to discuss the paradoxical power and threat of maternal imagination. This chapter reads these novels against eighteenth-century midwifery literature by respected practitioners such as William Smellie, William Hunter and Sarah Stone, which also prefers to leave the limits of maternal power as an ambiguous force.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Dennis Todd takes Toft’s confessions at face value and claims that “the hoax was solely motivated by money” (1995, 4). Alternatively Lisa Forman Cody suggests that Toft was a compliant, rather than cunning, woman, who followed instructions from her mother-in-law or other relations (2005, 130). Toft’s confessions vaguely indicate that she hoped to profit from the affair, but are to be taken lightly as they are clearly given under severe mental and physical pressure.
- 2.
It is implied that Tape invested because his pregnant wife’s advice was not to be ignored, due to the nature of her condition, however the pamphlet does not explicitly state this.
- 3.
As I have outlined in Chapter 2, Blondel did not count physical injury (damage arising from physical shocks to the body) as part of the theory of maternal imagination.
- 4.
Vic Gatrell (2006) also comments on a lively eighteenth-century culture of coarseness and exuberance.
- 5.
- 6.
See Chapter XI of Laure Junot (1895). After spending a night caressing the pineapple, the duchess decided that she didn’t want it after all – rather like Sally Pickle. Fiction also often highlighted the expense of the fruit; in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1802), Adeline cannot afford the two guineas for Glenmurray’s pineapple. Matthew O Grenby (2004, 137) points out the use of a pineapple in George Walker’s novel The Vagabond (1799), which demonstrates the importance of hierarchical economics.
- 7.
Frances Burney employs the pineapple’s association with luxury and frivolity when the heroine of Evelina, or a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) visits Cox’s Museum and views a mechanical pineapple that opens to reveal mechanised singing birds.
- 8.
Grizzle later takes care of Peregrine when Sally has inexplicably rejected him and denied that he is her son.
- 9.
- 10.
Shepard explains that the meaning of these gestures – marks of defiance and humiliation – was more important, than the actual pain of the act. See for example Regan’s plucking of Gloucester’s beard in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear (3.7.30–34).
- 11.
Erin Mackie (1997, 80) also observes irritation surrounding window-shopping in issue 336 of The Spectator.
- 12.
Catherine Ingrassia (1998) has argued that reckless stock-jobbers were characterised as feminine and hysterical. Ingrassia, Mackie, and E J Clery (2004) present Lady Credit as the (disproportionately blamed) female face of public borrowing and ruin and Mary Poovey (1985) has argued women were often portrayed as consumers rather than contributors.
- 13.
Finn argues that control of female sexuality was conflated with virtuous credit dealing (2003, 12). Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace also observes that the obsession with controlling women’s spending was connected to the control of female sexuality, and discusses the managing of the wife’s energy, as well as finances (1991, 134–135).
- 14.
The only physician to cite the case of the lion child is John Henry Mauclerc (1747).
- 15.
- 16.
Aileen Douglas discusses this crossover in regard to Smollett’s use of the body.
- 17.
Dr. James Douglas was of course one of the principal figures in the Mary Toft case, see my Chapter 2.
- 18.
Hill’s attack was probably motivated by personal resentment as he had been rejected for membership of the Royal Society.
- 19.
See Mauclerc’s pro-Imaginationist treatise Dr. Blondel Confuted; Isaac Bellett’s Anti-Imaginationist pamphlet Letters on the Force of the Imagination in Pregnant Women (1745, translated into English 1765); Giovanni Fortunato Bianchini’s Anti-Imaginationist An essay on the force of imagination in pregnant women: addressed to the ladies (1772); and Benjamin Bablot’s Imaginationist Dissertation sur le pouvoir de l’imagination des femmes enceinte (1788). All but Bablot’s text were available in English, however the debate had lost momentum in Britain after Turner’s The Force of the Mother’s Imagination upon the Foetus in Utero Still Further Considered (1730).
- 20.
Compared to the dozens of treatises written by men, there are few midwifery guides authored by women. In addition to Stone’s text, notable female-authored midwifery guides include Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered (1671), Elizabeth Nihell’s A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery (1760), Margaret Stephens’ Domestic Midwife; or the Best Means of Preventing Danger in Childbirth, Considered (1795) and Martha Mears’ The Pupil of Nature (1797).
- 21.
Stone practiced in Bridgewater, Taunton and Bristol.
- 22.
Stone essentially argues that disappointed longing will stimulate fierce disappointment or anger, therefore giving rise to a case of maternal passion. She provides a full case study of a woman who suffered because she strongly craved a certain food (73–75).
- 23.
Henry Bracken’s personal anecdote (1737), is the only exception I have so far discovered. He explains
a neighbour of mine bore a child, who had no fingers upon one hand. I had the curiosity to enquire, if the mother had not (during her pregnancy, and at what particular time of it) been frightened by some Beggar without fingers, and I found she was, by a Fellow who came about begging alms, and the first thing he did at every house, was to put his lame frightful hand in, without shewing the rest of his body”. (40)
For William Smellie’s story of a one armed-beggar, see my next page.
- 24.
- 25.
See my footnote 23 of this chapter.
- 26.
Hunter’s experiment showed that women’s thoughts did not impact on their foetus. Forman Cody cites an anecdote related to Charles Darwin by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who knew Hunter reasonably well (Forman Cody 145). Incidentally Erasmus Darwin believed in the notion of paternal imagination, the subject of my next chapter.
- 27.
Mauclerc and Bellett are obvious exceptions to this statement, but are exempt by the nature of their (Anti-)Imaginationist discursive practice.
- 28.
Joseph is identified by the strawberry birthmark on his breast, caused by his mother’s longing for the fruit. Jenny Jenkins in The History of Charlotte Summers, The Fortunate Parish Girl (anonymously authored, but sometimes attributed to Sarah Fielding, 1753) has the same mark.
- 29.
Dreams were certainly considered to contain powerful forces – in 1637 Maglene d’Auvermont from Grenoble claimed she had dreamt of sex with her faraway husband and become pregnant. She was initially believed in court and her son declared legitimate, although this was later contested (Finucci 2003, 52–55).
- 30.
Aphra Behn’s the The Dumb Virgin (1700) is highly unusual in its presentation of more outlandish forms of maternal imagination. Behn features transfigurative and literal forms in her main characters; Belvideera is deformed through her mother’s fear of pirates, and Maria is born mute due to her mother’s silence during pregnancy.
Behn’s character Dangerfield has a mimetic birthmark (a bloody dagger), which is less common than episodes of maternal passion that result in dead foetuses. However, mimetic birthmarks do occasionally recur later in the century; in addition to the birthmarks mentioned on my previous page, in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Theodore has a bloody arrow birthmark. Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790) is unconventional as she blends maternal passion with mimetic marks in the story of Edward, who is marked with the image of a bow and arrow due to his mother’s fright of Native Americans carrying those weapons.
- 31.
It has been argued that the eighteenth century was the period in which families moved from a public model to a more private, loving model (Stone 1977; Trumbach 1978). Stone’s thesis of affective individualism can certainly be argued to be present in novels, however several critics have argued that this was not the case in reality (Davidoff and Hall, 1987).
- 32.
Erica Harth (1988) also emphasises the connection between capitalism, trade and money.
- 33.
Tavor Bannet argues that the Marriage Act was concerned with how to best manage population in order to increase Britain’s wealth (2000, 102–105).
- 34.
- 35.
Philips claims that the process was not as expensive as other critics have suggested. Despite this, I argue that the fact women had to resort to equity law at all demonstrates their inferior legal status.
- 36.
Armstrong claims that these characteristics of female definition came to be the predominant way of defining all humans by the end of the eighteenth century.
- 37.
For the argument that women were active in the public see the seminal study by Davidoff and Hall, which claims “public was not really public and private was not really private despite the potent imagery of “separate spheres” (1987, xvi). Extensions of the argument include Amanda Vickery’s important article “Golden Age to separate Spheres?” (1993), Elizabeth Eger et al. (2001), and Elaine Chalus and Hannah Barker (1997). Harriet Guest (2000) charts a narrative of gradual change and incremental progress in gender roles during the period and Julie Peakman (2004) looks at the assumptions concerning normative sexual behaviour. Charlotte F. Otten (1992) shows women in the public sphere via print; Lawrence E. Klein (1996) questions the need for such binary oppositions inherent in the “domestic thesis”; for an argument relevant to my concerns of reproduction in this book see Lisa Forman Cody (1999) who has described how man-midwives brought female reproduction into public discourse. For more detail on male activity in the domestic sphere see my Chapter 4.
- 38.
This conduct book went through several editions during the eighteenth century and the above excerpt was quoted in other conduct texts, see The Virgin’s Nosegay (142) under the heading “To a New Married Lady”.
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
This incident occurred on 7th October 1814 (M Shelley 1814, 33).
- 42.
Marilyn Francus notes that “good” mothers are denied a narrative in eighteenth-century fiction. She explores “the erasure of mothers and motherhood from the cultural landscape in eighteenth-century Britain, in terms of the inability to depict the ideal domestic mother and of the recognition and displacement of maternal dissent” (2012, 18).
- 43.
To avoid any confusion of Richardson’s sequel with other, unauthorized, sequels such as John Kelly’s, I will henceforth refer to Pamela in Her Exalted Condition as Her Exalted Condition. In the interest of simplicity, I will refer to Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, as Pamela where necessary.
- 44.
- 45.
As Anna Laetitia Barbauld would later comment, Her Exalted Condition was “less a continuation than the author’s defence of himself” (1804, i: lvii), and perhaps by extension, a defence of his heroine.
- 46.
Felicity Nussbaum (1995) discusses Mr. B and his championing of polygamy and Toni Bowers (1995) argues that in Her Exalted Condition Mr B. succeeds (whereas in Pamela he is defeated by Pamela’s virtue) because his desires are legitimized by their marriage. In a somewhat tangential, but related article, Bonnie Blackwell (1998) has read Pamela as an engagement with the man-midwife debate, viewing Pamela as the pregnant woman, Mr. B as the man-midwife and Mrs. Jewkes as the old-fashioned female midwife.
- 47.
- 48.
By the early eighteenth century many landowners were using strict settlement as it ensured that the family estate would, in each successive generation, remain in the hands of the eldest son. Strict settlement limited the heir’s interest in the property to that of a life tenant, as it was automatically entailed onto the next eldest son.
- 49.
The hoop petticoat first appeared in 1708 as an artificial, formal and uncomfortable mode of dress. See Kimberly Chrisman (1996) for more details.
- 50.
For examples of the way in which the concept of maternal imagination was treated in fiction before Richardson see earlier in this chapter. The remaining chapters of this book will examine the discourse of maternal imagination in novels (and other forms of literature) after Richardson.
References
Alexander, William. 1779. The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time. Vol. 2. Dublin: C Talbot.
Andrew, Donna T. 1989. Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Anonymous. 1731. Letter to a Little Doctor in Scavenger Square Ocassion’d by his Curioys Dissertation in Latin Concerning a S-rr-v-r-nce overbaked, addressed to that great Doctor, Mr. Daniel Turner, To Which is Added The Porter Turned Physician, A Tale. London: Jacob Ginglymus.
Anonymous [pseud. F.… L.…]. 1744. Virgin’s Nosegay, or, the Duties of Christian Virgins, The: Digested into Succinct Chapters,… To which is Added, Advice to a New Married Lady. 1744. London: M Cooper.
Anon. [Sometimes attributed to Sarah Fiedling]. 1753. The History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl. Dublin: J. Exshaw and J. Esdall.
Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: OUP.
Aubin, Penelope. 1726. The Life and Adventures of the Lady Lucy. London: George Golding.
Austen, Jane. 1814. [1985]. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Classics.
Bablot, Benjamin. 1788. Imaginationist Dissertation sur le pouvoir de l’imagination des femmes enceinte. Paris: Croillebois et Royez.
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia ed. 1804. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Vol. 6. London: Richards Phillips.
Barker-Benfield, G J. 1992. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Behn, Aphra. 1700. 1967. The Dumb Virgin; or The Force of Imagination. In The Works of Aphra Behn, edited by Montague Summers, Vol. 6. 415–445. New York: Benjamin Blom.
Bellet, Isaac. 1745. Letters on the Force of the Imagination in Pregnant Women. London: W Griffin.
Bewell, Alan. 1988. “An Issue of Monstrous Desire”: Frankenstein and Obstetrics. Yale Journal of Criticism, 2.1: 105–128. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/bewell.html
Bianchini, Giovanni Fortunato. 1772. An Essay on the Force of Imagination in Pregnant Women: Addressed to the Ladies. London: R Baldwin.
Blackwell, Bonnie. 1998. “O, Soften him! or harden me!” Childbirth, Torture, and Technology in Richardson’s Pamela. Genders, 28: 1–64. https://www.atria.nl/ezines/IAV_606661/IAV_606661_2010_51/g28_osoftenhim.html.
Blondel, James. 1729. The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examin’d In Answer to Dr Daniel Turner’s Book Intitled A Defence of the XIIth Chapter of the First Part of a Treatise, de Morbis Cutaneis. London: John Brotherton.
Bowers, Toni. 1995. “A Point of Conscience”: Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7.3: 259–278. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/414206.
Bracken, Henry 1737. The Midwife’s Companion, or, a Treatise of Midwifery: Wherein the Whole Art is Explained. London: J Clarke.
Broad, John. 2004. Transforming English Rural Society: The Verneys and the Claydons 1600–1820. Cambridge: CUP.
Brudenell, Exton. 1753. A New and General System of Midwifery. London: W. Owen.
Buchan, William. 1769. 1772. Domestic Medicine; Or a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines. second edition. London: W Stachan and T Cadell.
Burney, Frances. 1778. [2004]. Evelina. London: Penguin Classics.
Chaber, Lois A. 1996. “This Affecting Subject”: An “Interested” Reading of Childbearing in Two Novels by Samuel Richardson. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8.2: 193–250. http://ecf.humanities.mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2015/10/chaber8_2.pdf.
Chalus, Elaine, and Hannah Barker 1997. Gender in Eighteenth Century England. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.
Chapman, Edmund. 1733. An Essay on the Improvement of Midwifery, chiefly with Regard to the Operation. London: A. Blackwell, A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, J. Walthoe.
Chrisman, Kimberly. 1996. Unhoop the Fair Sex: The Campaign Against the Hoop Petticoat in Eighteenth-Century England. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30.1: 5–23. URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/10692.
Clery, E J. 2004. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. Houndsmill: Palgrave. Macmillan.
Collier, Jane. 1753. An Essay On the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Dublin: John Smith, Peter Wilson, John Exshaw, Matthew Williamson.
Collins, R G. 1979. The Hidden Bastard: A Question of Legitimacy in Smollett’s. Peregrine Pickle. PMLA, 94.1: 91–105. Doi: 10.2307/461803.
Cother, E. 1750. A Serious Proposal for Promoting Lawful Marriage. London: W Owen.
Craik, Katherine. 2006. Introduction. In An Essay On the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, by Jane Collier, edited by Katherine Craik. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall 1987. 2002. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850.revised edition. London: Routledge.
Dickie, Simon. 2011. Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. London: University of Chicago Press.
Douglas, Aileen. 1995. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton eds. 2001. Women Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1800. Cambridge: CUP.
Fielding, Henry. 1742. 1999. Joseph Andrews. Oxford: OUP.
Finn, Margot. 2003. The Character of Credit, Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge: CUP.
Finucci, Valeria. 2001. Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Geruselemme liberata. In Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History From Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, edited by Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, 41–77. Durham: NC and London: Duke University Press.
———.2003. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. London: Duke University Press.
Fissell, Mary. 2003. Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Masterpiece. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series. 60.1: 43–74. doi: 10.2307/3491495.
Flint, Christopher. 1998. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Forman Cody, Lisa. 1999. The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4: 477–495. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/10855.
———. 2005. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons. Oxford: OUP.
Francus, Marilyn. 2012. Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Gatrell, Vic. 2006. City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Atlantic Books.
Giffard, William. 1734. Cases in midwifry. Revis’d and publish’d by Edward Hody. London: B. Motte, T. Wotton, and L. Gilliver; and J. Nourse.
Grenby, Matthew O. 2004. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: CUP.
Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750 – 1810. London: University of Chicago Press.
Harth, Erica. 1988. The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act. Cultural Critique, 9: 123–154. Doi: 10.2307/1354236.
Harvey, Karen. 2004. Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. Cambridge: CUP.
———.2012. The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: OUP.
Haywood, Eliza. 1722. The British Recluse: Or, the Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos’d Dead. London: D. Brown Jun, W. Chetwood, J.Woodman and S. Chapman.
———.1751. 1998. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. edited by Christine Blouch, Ontario: Broadview.
———.1755. The Invisible Spy by Exploralibus. Dublin: Robert Main.
Hill, John. 1751. The History of a Woman of Quality: or, The Adventures of Lady Frail. London: M Cooper and G Woodfall.
History of Will Ramble, The. 1754. A Libertine. London: G Woodfall.
Ingram, Allan, and Michelle Faubert 2005. Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing: Representing the Insane. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. Authorship, Commerce and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit. Cambridge: CUP.
———.2004. Introduction. In Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood and Shamela by Henry Fielding, edited by Catherine Ingrassia, 7–43. Ontario: Broadview Press.
Junot, Laure. 1895. Memoirs of Madame Junot, (Duchesse d’Abrantès). Vol. 6. Paris and Boston: The Napoleon Society.
Kelly, John. 1741. Pamela’s Conduct in High Life. London: Ward and Chandler.
Keymer, Thomas, and Peter Sabor 2005. Pamela in The Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: CUP.
Kimber, Edward. 1756. The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq. second edition. Vol. 2. London: P. Stevens.
Klein, Lawrence E. 1996. Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure. Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1: 97–109. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/10646
Kowalski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1991. Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. Oxford: OUP.
Lemmings, David. 1996. Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century: Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753. The Historical Journal, 39.2: 339–360. doi: 10.1017/S0018246X00020276.
Lennox, Charlotte. 1790. [2008]. Euphemia. Ontario: Broadview.
MacFarlane, Alan 1986. Marriage and Love in England 1300–1840. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mackie, Erin. 1997. Market a la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Mauclerc, John Henry. 1747. Dr. Blondel Confuted: or, The Ladies Vindicated, with regard to The Power of Imagination in Pregnant Women discussed: With an Address to the Ladies on the Occasion. London: M Cooper.
Mears, Martha. 1797. The Pupil of Nature or Candid Advice to the Fair Sex. London.
Merians, Linda E. ed. 1996. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press.
Midriff, Sir James Pseud. 1721. Observations on the Spleen and the Vapours. London: J Roberts.
Nihell, Elizabeth. 1760. A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery. London: A Morley.
Nussbaum, Felicity. 1995. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Opie, Amelia Alderson. 1802. [1986]. Adeline Mowbray, or, the Mother and Daughter. London: Pandora.
Otten, Charlotte F. 1992. English Women’s Voices. Miami: Florida International Univ. Press.
Ould, Fielding. 1742. A Treatise of Midwifery In Three Parts. Dublin: Oli Nelson and Charles Connor.
Peakman, Julie. 2004. Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century. London: Atlantic Books.
Perry, Ruth. 1990. Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England. In Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, edited by John Fout, 107–138. London: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2004. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818. Cambridge: CUP.
Peters, Dolores. 1981. The Pregnant Pamela: Characterization and Popular Medical Attitudes in the Eighteenth Century. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14. 4: 432–451. doi: 10.2307/2738475.
Phillips, Nicola Jane. 2006. Women In Business, 1700–1850. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Pollock, Linda. 1990. Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-modern Society. In Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, edited by Valerie Fildes, 39–67. London: Routledge.
Poovey, Mary. 1985. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, Roy. 1985b. William Hunter: A Surgeon and a Gentleman. In William Hunter and The Eighteenth Century Medical World, edited by W F Bynum and Roy Porter, 7–34. Cambridge: CUP.
Porter, Roy. 1987. The Secrets of Generation Displayd: Aristotle’s Masterpiece in Eighteenth-Century England. Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment, edited by Robert Purks MacCubbin, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Probert, Rebecca. 2005. The Impact of the Marriage Act of 1753: Was It Really “A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex”? Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.2: 247–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053767
Pugh, Benjamin. 1754. A Treatise of Midwifery, Chiefly with Regard to the Operation. London: J Buckland.
Richardson, Samuel. 1740. 2001. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford: OUP.
———.1740–1741. [1902]. volumes 3–4. Pamela in Her Exalted Condition] Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Vol. 4. Chapman.
Rogers, Deborah. 2007. The Matrophobic Gothic and its Legacy: Sacrificing Mothers in the Novel and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Roulston, Chris. 2010. Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Farnham: Ashgate.
Rousseau, George S. 1971. Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica and Peregrine Pickle. In Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M Knapp, edited by George S Rousseau and Paul Gabriel Boucé, 79–109. New York: OUP.
Saville, George. 1688. 1716. The Lady’s New Year’s Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter. London: D. Midwinter.
Sharp, Jane. 1671. [1999]. The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, edited by Elaine Hobby. Oxford: OUP.
Shelley, Mary. 1814. 1987. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844. edited by Paula R Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shepard, Alexandra. 2003. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: OUP.
Sheridan, Frances. 1761. The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Dublin: H Saunders.
Smellie, William. 1752. 1762. A Treatise Upon the Theory and Practice of Midwifery. fourth edition. Vol. 2. London: D Wilson and T Durham.
———.1768. 1779. A Collection of Cases and Observations in Midwifery. second edition. Vol. 2. London: D Wilson and T Durham.
Smith, Charlotte. 1795 [2005]. Montalbert. The Works of Charlotte Smith, edited by Stuart Curran. Vol. 8. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Smollet, Tobias. 1748. [2008]. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
Smollett, Tobias. 1751. 1784. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. London: Joseph Wenman.
Smollet, Tobias. 1771. [1985]. Humphry Clinker. London: Penguin Classics.
Spector, Robert D. 1994. Smollett’s Women: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. London: Greenwood Press.
Stephens, Margaret. 1795. Domestic Midwife; or, the Best Means of Preventing Danger in Child-Birth, Considered. London: S Fores.
Sterne, Laurence. 1759–1767. 2003. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. edited by Melvyn and Joan New. Vol. 9. London: Penguin.
Stevens, George Alexander. 1763. The Dramatic History of Master Edward. London: T Waller.
Stone, Lawrence. 1977. The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row.
Stone, Sarah. 1737. A Compleat Practice of Midwifery. London: T Cooper.
Tanner, Tony. 1979. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Tavor Bannet, Eve 2000. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Todd, Dennis. 1995. Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England. London: The University of Chicago Press.
Trumbach, Randolph. 1978. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press.
Turner, Daniel. 1730. The Force of the Mother’s Imagination upon Her Foetus in utero Still Farther Considered: In the Way of Reply to Dr. Blondel’s Last Book, Entitled The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examined, To Which is Added the Twelfth Chapter of the First Part of a Treatise De Morbis Cutaenis, as It Was Printed therein many Years Past, In a Letter to Dr. Blondel. London: J Walthoe.
Van Sant, Ann Jessie. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context. Cambridge: CUP.
Vickery, Amanda. 1993. Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and chronology of English Women’s History. The Historical Journal, 36.2: 183–414. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639654.
Wahrman, Dror. 2004. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Yale University Press.
Walker, George. 1799. [2004]. The Vagabond. Ontario: Broadview.
Walpole, Horace. 1764 [2014]. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: OUP.
Watts, Giles. 1755. Reflections on Slow and Painful Labours, and Other Subjects in Midwifery. London: G. Keith.
Young, Thomas. 1750. The Effects of the Imagination in Pregnant Women Considered Lecture IX. In A Course of Lectures upon Midwifery, edited by Thomas Young. Edinburgh: n.p.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Buckley, J. (2017). “For One Would be Loath to Spoil a Son and Heir”: The Power of Maternal Imagination in Fiction of the Mid Eighteenth-Century. In: Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53835-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53835-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-53834-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-53835-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)