Elizabeth Carter and the Theatrum Mundi

Abstract

The previous chapter revealed the variety of literary means and the moral agency Elizabeth Carter deployed in her literary career. It also detailed the degree to which she was aware of her own image and influence in the public sphere, as well as the figurative and literal melding of her literary life and ‘afterlife’. This chapter is concerned with texts and contexts: the literary and moral arguments Carter made for the intrinsically social and religious nature of happiness; the efficacy of her conservative ideologies; and the continued importance of letter-writing as a medium for intellectual exchange and social cohesion in the female literary tradition.

I was much obliged by your Court intelligence, which was the first of any kind that I have received since I left London, and I longed to know a little how the world was going. Though I am very little a party in the said world, few people I believe are more attentive to it as a spectator, or receive more amusement from the shifting scenes. People whose interests and passions are engaged in the bustle have very little leisure to attend to the spectacle which affords such an entertainment to quiet uninterrupted observers, who content themselves with seeing the drama without any wish for the plumes and the tinsel, and the long trains of the actors.⁵²³

We are led to form much too magnificent ideas of our own powers of action, and by this means, to overlook, with foolish contempt, the proper occasions for exercising them. It is not in the study of sublime speculations, nor amidst the pompous scenery of some imaginary theatre of action, that the heart grows wiser, or the temper more correct. It is in the daily occurrences of mere common life, with all its mixture of folly and impertinence, that the proper exercise of virtue lies. It is here that the temptations to vanity, to selfishness, to discontent, and innumerable other unwarrantable affections arise; and there are opportunities for many a secret conflict with these in the most trifling hours, and it is our own fault if the business of life is ever at a stand.⁵²⁴