Abstract
So thought Adam Smith in considering the disadvantages of ‘a commercial spirit’. Both Robert Bage’s Barham Downs (1784) and Agnes Maria Bennett’s Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (1785) are concerned to ‘remedy these defects’. In the process, each novel relies on the convergence of discourses rarely seen, thus far, as explicitly compatible: on an openly intimate and beneficial relation-ship, that is, between commerce on the one hand and sensibility and femininity on the other. Examining the lines of thought that enabled such a relationship to develop reveals its crucial connection with a particular tradition of eighteenth-century social theory.
The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is extinguished. To remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention.1
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Notes
Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 259;
quoted in Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 61.
Elizabeth and Richard Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (1757; 3rd edn, 2 vols, London: W. Johnston, 1767), vol. I, p. xxiv.
Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’ , History Workshop Journal, 19 (1985), p. 121. Tomaselli discusses, among others, Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), Diderot’s ‘Sur les femmes’ (1772), John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) and William Alexander’s History of Women (1782). In his Distinction of Ranks, John Millar wrote that the condition of women ‘is naturally improved by every circumstance which tends to create more attention to the pleasures of sex, and increase the value of those occupations that are suited to the female character; by the cultivation of the arts of life; by the advancement of opulence, and by the gradual refinement of taste and manners’ (3rd edn, 1779; reprinted in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960], p. 203).
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London: Strahan, Cadell, Balfour & Creech, 1774), p. 7.
Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, principally designed for the young ladies (4th edn, London: T. Cadell, 1785), p. 13.
William Robertson, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe (1769); reprinted in Works (12 vols, London: William Baynes, 1824), vol. XII, p. 82; quoted in Hirschman, p. 61.
Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality (1765–70; London: Routledge, 1906), pp. 25–6. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 134.
For other discussions of The Fool of Quality see for example Elizabeth Bellamy, Private Virtues, Public Vices: Commercial Morality and the Novel 1740–1800 (unpublished PhD thesis; Cambridge, 1988), pp. 264–5,
and Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 95–6.
Robert Bage, Barham Downs (2 vols, London: G. Wilkie, 1784), vol. I, p. 2. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
Peter Faulkner, in his Robert Bage (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), quotes this pertinent passage from The History of Birmingham (1782) written by Bage’s life-long friend and business partner, William Hutton: ‘Civility and humanity are ever the companions of trade; the man of business is the man of liberal sentiment; a barbarous and a commercial people is a contradiction; if he is not the philosopher of nature, he is the friend of his countrÿ , and comments that ‘Bage’s novels embody a similar mercantile confidence’ (p. 18).
Agnes Maria Bennett, Anna; or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress: Interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob (1785; 2nd edn, 4 vols, London: William Lane, 1786), vol. III, p. 240. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. Although Agnes Maria Bennett is hardly known today, it is worth bearing in mind Dorothy Blakey’s comment about Bennett in her history of the Minerva Press: ‘when Mrs Bennett died in 1808 the whole body of her work ranked her, in the eyes of contemporaries at least, with Fielding and Richardson’ (The Minerva Press, 1790–1820 [London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the University Press, Oxford, 1939], p. 57).
Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: the Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 35. See also my Chapter 4, pp. 72–3 and 86–7.
See Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 66, and my Chapter 5, p. 98.
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 205.
See Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton (1771; 2nd edn, 3 vols, London: T. Davies & T. Cadell, 1773), vol. III, p. 214, and my Chapter 5, p. 105.
Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (2nd edn, London: T. Cadell, 1776), p. 11.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787);
Todd and Butler (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (7 vols; London: William Pickering, 1989), vol. 4, p. 25.
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 82.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. I, p. 283.
See Wealth of Nations, II, 924, in which Smith roundly criticises such a view put forward in J. F. Melon’s s Essai politique sur le Commerce (1734; trans. D. Bindon 1738). See also Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy 1662–1776 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 400, n. 10 which explains how Isaac de Pinto’s Traité de la circulation et du crédit (1773, English translation 1774) ‘maintained that the public debt supported “circulation” and that England’s economic advance had been promoted by her public debt and public credit.’
Peter Faulkner, Introduction to Hermsprong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. vii.
For a discussion of the extent of the radical debt to country ideology, see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), Chapter 6, ‘The Development of a Radical Ideology’.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814; London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 432.
See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; reissued with a new Introduction, 1987), pp. 242–5.
See Harriet Guest, ‘A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730–60’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (Summer, 1990), pp. 479–501, and my Chapter 5, pp. 107–8.
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© 1999 Gillian Skinner
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Skinner, G. (1999). ‘The first soft system’: Commerce, Sensibility and Femininity in Barham Downs and Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress. In: Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372566_6
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