Abstract
In her Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (1782), Elizabeth Griffith issued what was by then a standard caution to her readers on the subject of economy: ‘Neither rank nor riches can place any person above œconomy; and perhaps those who possess such advantages in the highest degree, have the greatest occasion for the practice of this humble virtue.’1 The diverse uses to which the word ‘economy’ is put during the course of the eighteenth century, however, makes interpretation of the phrase ‘above economy’ a necessarily complicated task, a fact that Griffith herself acknowledges to some extent in her characterisation of the subject as a ‘cameleon [sic]’ which must ‘take its hue from the surrounding objects’.2 As previous chapters have shown, the range of meanings attached to ‘economy’ is wide. It includes management of the private household, of public finances and national resources; it also encompasses frugality and ‘laudable parsimony’ of the kind approved by conduct books, which meanings lead on to associations with prudence, chastity and propriety. Yet in certain cases economic dexterity in women becomes virtually synonymous with sexual experience, while in others ‘economy’ and patriarchal government can be written as apparently inseparable.
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Notes
Elizabeth Griffith, Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (London, 1782), pp. 109–10.
For similar advice, see for example, Lady Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters, in a Letter to Miss Pennington (1761), p. 63,
and John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (London: Strahan, Cadell, Balfour & Creech, 1774), pp. 52–3.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 3.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 118–19.
Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy (2 vols, London: Millar and Cadell, 1767), vol. I, p. 1.
Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne and the Theatrics of Virtue’ , in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). p. 210.
Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton, A Novel in Letters (1771; 2nd edn, 3 vols, London: T. Davies & T. Cadell, 1773), vol. I, p. 68. Subsequent references in the text will be to this edition.
Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (1757; 3rd edn, 2 vols, London: W. Johnston, 1767), vol. I, p. xxiv.
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore and London: The johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 12.
Genuine Letters, I, 57. In this Frances agrees with David Hume, who wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 573) that ‘Courage, which is the point of honour among men, derives its merit, in a great measure, from artifice, as well as the chastity of women’.
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 24 (subsequent references in the text will be to this edition); Mullan, p. 61.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 402: ‘The skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners. The different stations of life influence the whole fabric, external and internal …’; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 11th edn, Edinburgh, 1808), 2 vols, vol. I, p. 444; The Economy of Human Life, p. 33. In Radical Sensibility, Chris Jones notes how Hutcheson too ‘had counselled his benevolent readers against thinking of lower-class characters as having the same sensibility of their hardships as the sympathizing middle-class onlooker. Their minds and bodies are “soon fitted to their state” and this should “support a compassionate Heart, too deeply touched with apprehended Miseries, of which the Sufferers are themselves insensi-ble”’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 68).
John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771; 3rd edn, 1779),
reprinted in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 176. In Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), James Thompson underlines this point when he refers to the way in which Adam Smith ‘assumes that the subject is defined by his income, by his property, what C. B. Macpherson terms “possessive individualism.” This interrelation has considerable significance for understanding the ways in which individual subjects are represented in eighteenth-century literature, particularly the novel which proceeds by defining subjects according to their possessions — what they own, and how they own, and why they own’ (pp. 84–5).
Harriet Guest, ‘A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730–60’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (Summer, 1990), p. 490.
Elizabeth Bellamy, Private Virtues, Public Vices: Commercial Morality and the Novel, 1740–1800, unpublished PhD thesis (Cambridge, 1988), p. 313.
Mackenzie, The Man of the World (1773), in Works (8 vols, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co., 1808), vol. I, p. 318.
See, for example, The Mirror (1779–80), nos. 12 and 25 and The Lounger (1785–87), nos. 17 and 98, in Rev. Robert Lynam (ed.), The British Essayists (30 vols, London: J. F. Dove, 1827), vols 24 and 25.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 30.
Jane Spencer, The Rise of Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 124.
Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694; 2nd edn, London: R. Wilkin, 1695), especially pp. 48–9;
Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (London: J. Newbury, 1762).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 11th edn, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfoute et al., 1808), vol. I, pp. 287–8.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; rpt 1987), p. 21. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
See Arthur Hill Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966).
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© 1999 Gillian Skinner
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Skinner, G. (1999). ‘Above œconomy’: The History of Lady Barton, The Man of Feeling and A Sentimental Journey. In: Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372566_5
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