Abstract
This chapter examines Scott’s novel Millenium Hall (1762), about an exclusive female utopia founded on Christian friendship. Although Scott publishes anonymously, her opening depiction of two male friends, the work’s editor and narrator, cues the reader toward a critical reading of the ideological contradictions that promote the division of private affect from public commerce and the gendering of each sphere. The stories of Scott’s heroines develop the idea of a benevolent providential fortune that brings together female friends and helps them recover maternal inheritances. The novel consciously utilizes and critiques the dynamics of semi-anonymous authorship, a condition shaping the careers of many female novelists in the period.
Copyright © 2015 by the University of Texas Press. All Rights Reserved. This chapter first appeared as “Institutions of Friendship in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 57.4 (2015): 464–490. Revised and reprinted with permission by University of Texas Press.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (1762; Ontario: Broadview, 1995), 52. Future in-text page references are to this edition.
- 2.
Sarah Fielding, Adventures of David Simple, 3.
- 3.
According to James Boswell, “Millar, though himself no great judge of literature, had good sense enough to have for his friends very able men to give him their opinion and advice in the purchase of copyright; the consequence of which was his acquiring a very large fortune, with great liberality.” See Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George B. Hill and L.F. Powell (1791; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934–1950), v.1, 287.
- 4.
Cheryl Turner, Living By the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 89.
- 5.
Tadmor, Family and Friends, 198–215. Tadmor examines Thomas Turner’s male friendships and demonstrates that his use of the word friend is multivalent. His relationships often blur sentimental and instrumental ties, though some “friends” are primarily business relations. On the fraternal character of Turner’s social network, Tadmor concludes: “Such relationships of ‘friendship,’ combining personal and intellectual affinity, business, sports, and public service inevitably left women behind. From a practical point of view, too, it would probably have been very difficult for Thomas to have regular private meetings with women, as he had with his male ‘friends,’ without arousing great suspicion and gossip” (Family and Friends, 208).
- 6.
Eve Tavor Bannet, “The Bluestocking Sisters: Women’s Patronage, Millenium Hall, and ‘The Visible Providence of a Country,’” Eighteenth-Century Life 30.1 (2006): 47–48.
- 7.
For anonymous female authors, building and maintaining a fan base would need to depend more on the use of recurring characters or title pages noting past works by the author.
- 8.
Bree, Sarah Fielding, 1–28; Bannet, “The Bluestocking Sisters,” 25–55.
- 9.
Bree, Sarah Fielding, 24.
- 10.
Bree, Sarah Fielding, 27.
- 11.
These comments revise an assumption I made in an earlier published version of this argument. See “Institutions of Friendship in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Winter 2015). The issue is complicated by the fact that the word “Advertisement” had several different applications within print culture at this time. This instance deviates from the more common usages, such as describing the book’s utility for readers or pointing readers to other books of interest by the same publisher. In his other publications, Newbery typically used “Advertisements” in these more practical ways and there is nothing else quite like this one. For a discussion of this advertisement in the context of Newbery’s career, see John Dawson Carl Buck’s “The Motives of Puffing: John Newbery’s Advertisements 1742–1767,” Studies in Bibliography 30 (1977): 196–210. Buck presumes the piece to be written by Newbery and sees it as consistent with his advertising tactics and cultivated image. I would suggest, however, that the uniqueness and purely ornamental quality of this advertisement should make readers less certain as to who might have written it.
- 12.
The note “The Publisher to the Reader,” published in the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and the “advertisement” that appears in the 1735 Dublin edition share certain features with Millenium Hall’s “advertisement,” though these earlier notes also serve (or pretend to serve) more practical functions. See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Allan Ingram (1735; Ontario: Broadview, 2012).
- 13.
Scott’s name did not appear on any of the first four editions of Millenium Hall published in 1762, 1764, 1767, 1778.
- 14.
While the notion of female authorship, and particularly an author of Scott’s social class, was not uncommon, anonymity was also typical. Many studies discuss anonymity as a function of female writers’ resistance to professional authorship. See, for instance, Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University. Press, 1989); Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a closely related study of Scott’s sister, Elizabeth Montagu, see Markman Ellis, “‘An Author in Form’: Women Writers, Print Publication, and Elizabeth Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead,” English Literary History 79.2 (2012): 417–445. Schellenberg speculates that Scott’s career-long preference for anonymity might have resulted not just from a reticence about acknowledging her identity as a female author, but from a resistance to an intellectual identity in both public and private life. Schellenberg does not address the function of semi-anonymity in Scott’s career (Professionalization, 91–93).
- 15.
Schellenberg, Conversational Circle, 100. Nanette Morton similarly argues that Scott’s subjection of female virtue to the narrator’s male gaze reinforces social hierarchy and restricts female rights to their “proper” sphere in a natural order. See Nanette Morton, “‘A Most Sensible Oeconomy’: From Spectacle to Surveillance in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.3 (1999): 188–189, 204.
- 16.
Bannet, “Bluestocking Sisters,” 45. Bannet bases her claim of “semi-anonymity” on the correspondence in the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library, which includes private letters between Scott, her sister Elizabeth Montagu, and others (46). Schellenberg offers compelling evidence that Scott’s authorial identity never became widely known in her lifetime and that it was nearly forgotten by late eighteenth-century critics (Professionalization, 92). In either case, my argument involves the extent to which Scott’s sense of a double audience inflects the treatment of friendship and other stylistic features of this novel.
- 17.
See Chapter 2, 41–42.
- 18.
See Trolander and Tenger, Sociable Criticism. The authors discuss the importance of friendship and sociability in the manuscript practices of Ben Jonson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Dryden, as well as in early print criticism and periodical literature.
- 19.
See Chapter 2, 31–34.
- 20.
Ben Jonson, “To His Honoured Friend, Mr. John Selden, Health” in John Selden, Titles of Honor (London: W. Stansby for J. Helme, 1614), Br–B2v.
- 21.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4.
- 22.
Richardson, Pamela, 506.
- 23.
Richardson, Pamela, 507.
- 24.
While Richardson temporarily removed these letters from later editions of Pamela, he generally persisted in his advertising tactics in spite of Shamela’s ridicule. He includes anonymous praise from Thomas Edwards and John Duncombe in the fourth edition of Richardson’s Clarissa, and an initialed dedicatory poem by Edwards in the second edition of Sir Charles Grandison. These poems praise Richardson’s genius as an author, though still refrain from naming him outright. To be sure, Edward’s poems are not meant to function as a preface, and consequently they seem even more of an indulgence for Richardson. As Augustan odes addressed directly to Richardson, Edwards does not acknowledge the wider public or attempt to justify these lofty sentiments. Although titled “To the Author of Clarissa,” Duncombe addresses himself implicitly to the public, praising Richardson’s accomplishments highly and suggesting finally that even Plato would have approved of the novel. While these pieces do not foreground their author’s relationship with Richardson, Thomas Edwards’s initials might have been recognizable by anyone familiar with Richardson’s circle. Collectively, the materials in Pamela and Clarissa reflect the benefit of having strong recommendations included within the book itself. Indicative of the way novels very early on coincide with the waning influence of patronage, these advertisements invert the obsequious tone employed by authors toward their patrons in dedicatory letters, making novelists themselves the subject of veneration. See Clarissa. Or, the history of a young lady: comprehending the most important concerns of private life. In seven volumes. To each of which is added, a table of Contents. The fourth edition. In which many passages and some letters are restored from the original manuscripts. And to which is added, an ample collection of such of the Moral and Instructive sentiments interspersed throughout the Work, as may be presumed to be of general Use and Service… Vol. Volume 1. London, M.DCC.LI. [1751]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Grinnell College. 29 July 2016 http://find.galegroup.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=grin67026&tabID=T001&docId=CW3309455633&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Gale Document Number: CW3309455633; Clarissa. Or, the history of a young lady: comprehending the most important concerns of private life. In seven volumes. To each of which is added, a table of Contents. The fourth edition. In which many passages and some letters are restored from the original manuscripts. And to which is added, an ample collection of such of the Moral and Instructive sentiments interspersed throughout the Work, as may be presumed to be of general Use and Service.… Vol. Volume 7. London, M.DCC.LI. [1751]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Grinnell College. 29 July 2016 http://find.galegroup.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=grin67026&tabID=T001&docId=CW3309957565&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Gale Document Number: CW3309957565;
The history of Sir Charles Grandison. In a series of letters published from the originals, by the editor of Pamela and Clarissa. In six volumes. To the Last of which is added, An Historical and Characteristical Index. As also, A Brief History, authenticated by Original Letters, of the Treatment which the Editor has met with from certain Booksellers and Printers in Dublin. Including Observations on Mr. Faulkner’s Defence of Himself, published in his Irish News-Paper of Nov. 3. 1753. Vol. I. Vol. Volume 1. [The second edition]. London, [1753]- M.DCC.LIV. [1754]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Grinnell College. 29 July 2016 http://find.galegroup.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=grin67026&tabID=T001&docId=CW3314072150&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Gale Document Number: CW3314072150.
- 25.
These prefaces are a combination of applause and the kind of extended discourse on genre that one finds in the prefaces to Henry’s own novels. Henry’s prefaces for Sarah’s works include his signed one for the second edition of Adventures of David Simple and one for the Familiar Letters between the Principle Characters in David Simple, unsigned but “Written By A Friend of the Author” with strong signals as to the author’s identity. Jane Collier offers an anonymous preface “Written by a Female Friend of the Author” for Volume the Last. Both Henry Fielding and Collier take a confrontational tone with Sarah Fielding’s prospective readers, the former addressing prejudices against female authors, the latter addressing the age’s superficial taste for novelty. Collier does not so much resist the value of novelty itself, but attempts to pitch the value of Volume the Last by equating true novelty not with new characters but with the placement of familiar characters in new circumstances. In all of these cases, Sarah Fielding trades on the benefit of having an intermediary do the work of advertising the value of her fictions relative to the classical canon and contemporary marketplace. See Henry Fielding, Preface to The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding, ed. Malcolm Kelsall, 3–8; Familiar letters between the principal characters in David Simple, and some others. To which is added, A vision. By the author of David Simple. In two volumes…Vol. Volume 1. London, 1747. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Grinnell College. 29 July 2016 http://find.galegroup.com.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=grin67026&tabID=T001&docId=CW3312268662&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Gale Document Number: CW3312268662; Jane Collier, preface to The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (1745; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 309–311.
- 26.
Silver suggests that many influential eighteenth-century intellectuals (including Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume) relegate friendship ties to the private sphere as a means of keeping them free from the logic of exchange that dominates the political and commercial sphere, while, conversely, keeping theories of commerce free from the messy and imprecise qualities of personal affections. See Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society,” 1479. Vanessa Smith explores this phenomenon in her analysis of the way eighteenth-century Oceanic encounters exposed European anxieties about mixing commerce and friendship. See Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (New York: Cambridge University, 2010), 104–139.
- 27.
Henry Fielding, Preface to Familiar letters, Gale Document Number: CW3312268671. The question of Henry Fielding’s “credit” with the public has a new dimension, given the way Sarah Fielding had made a public matter of her own financial distress in the Preface to the Adventures.
- 28.
Alan B. Howes, ed. Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 73. Hereafter cited as CH.
- 29.
Seeking David Garrick’s endorsement, Sterne reached out to the actor through a mutual friend, Catherine Fourmantel. Ventriloquizing his proxy, Sterne wrote to Garrick in a letter for her to copy: “You must understand, He [Sterne] is a kind & generous friend of mine whom Providence has attached to me in this part of the world where I came a stranger—& I could not think how I could make a better return than by endeavoring to make a friend to him & his Performance” (CH, 45). See Chapter 6 for a more in-depth discussion of this tactic.
- 30.
This statement from the Sterne biographer diverges slightly from my focus here on “advertisements” published within the very books being praised, though it evinces attitudes that would have shaped perceptions of such advertisements. To be sure, there is also a much larger world of authors publicly praising those with whom they have personal relationships or share a commercial connection. Given Richardson’s established position in the publishing world, all public venerations of his genius might be suspected of ulterior motives. Beyond Richardson, one might also consider Henry Fielding’s praise for Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote in the Covent-Garden Journal (no. 24), a journal officially printed and sold by Ann Dodd. As Martin C. Battestin speculates, “That Millar was the actual publisher seems clear from the fact that the paper carried no fewer than 159 advertisements for his books,” including many, like The Female Quixote, that Fielding singled out for favorable reviews. Without suggesting that Fielding himself “puffed” works he did not actually favor, at the very least, we might acknowledge that his secondary interest in aiding the commercial interests of his friend and publisher Millar posed a conflict of interest in his review of certain books, including Lennox’s novel. Following the publication of this review, Fielding seems to have befriended Lennox to some extent. See Martin C. Battestin with Ruth Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge: London and New York, 1989), 542–543, 584. For a discussion of Fielding’s review, see Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: an Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters (Archon Books, 1969) 94–74. For a discussion of Lennox publicly returning the favor, see Small’s discussion of Lennox’s Henrietta (Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, 135).
- 31.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Selections from the Logic of Practice,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (London: Routledge, 1997), 198. See also Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 183.
- 32.
For a different application of Bourdieu’s concepts to representations of generosity in the novel, see Julie McGonegal, “The Tyranny of Gift Giving: The Politics of Generosity in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.3 (2007): 291–306. McGonegal contends that “Scott’s texts themselves are the products of a symbolic labour that, by contributing to the maintenance of collective misrecognition, transforms interested relations into elective relations of reciprocity” (306). McGonegal does not consider how Bourdieu’s theory applies to the way Scott frames the novel with expressions of amity. While McGonegal finds glimmers of resistance to the logic of symbolic capital in Scott’s novel, the irony I find in this passage suggests that Millenium Hall’s critique of patriarchy, symbolic capital, and misrecognition is more consistent and pointed.
- 33.
Samuel Richardson’s mid-century novels, for instance, warn readers by depicting how frequently letters end up in the hands of unintended audiences, while they also provide various instances of writers taking stock of audience reactions beyond that of their intended addressees.
- 34.
Scott recalls these mixed motives again at the novel’s conclusion, where the narrator notes: “you may think I have been too prolix in my account of this society; but the pleasure I find in recollection is such, that I could not restrain my pen within moderate bounds. If what I have described, may tempt any one to go and do likewise, I shall think myself fortunate in communicating it” (249).
- 35.
This gesture interestingly reverses the power dynamic inherent in literary patronage, a system considerably eroded by 1762. As the writer is the one with greater social “Consequence,” this appeal to the publisher’s judgment figures the increasing dependence of a gentleman on the power of the professional class to address a large public.
- 36.
James Cruise, “A House Divided: Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 35.3 (1995): 555.
- 37.
See Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 61; Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 140–141.
- 38.
Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 107.
- 39.
Gary Kelly, “Sarah Scott, Bluestocking Feminism, and Millenium Hall,” Introduction to A Description of Millenium Hall (Ontario: Broadview, 1995), 26.
- 40.
See Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel. McKeon’s influential dialectic theory of the early English novel accounts for forms of virtue rooted in either romance notions of birth or the individual’s ability to accumulate wealth and status in the marketplace.
- 41.
This perspective parallels theories of labor (in works by Edmund Burke and Adam Smith) that address fears of national decay brought on by an infusion of luxuries as a consequence of trade and market economies. For a historical account of this fear, see E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History; John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977).
- 42.
In addition to Hobbes and Mandeville, I am thinking of the tradition that includes Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755).
- 43.
Consider for instance Richardson’s more ambivalent depiction of female learning in Sir Charles Grandison, specifically the scene in which Harriet Byron publicly debates with Mr Walden. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 47–59.
- 44.
For a related reading, see George Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 88–102. Haggerty views this tension as a fear of lesbianism, seeing in Mr Morgan’s ban on friendship a “homophobia inherent to patriarchal narrative” (Unnatural Affections, 99).
- 45.
Johns, Women’s Utopias, 101.
- 46.
Sarah Scott, The History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden (1761), quoted in Johns, Women’s Utopias, 101.
- 47.
Bourdieu, “Selections,” 198.
- 48.
Johanna M. Smith, “Philanthropic Community in Millenium Hall and the York Ladies Committee,” The Eighteenth Century 36.3 (1995): 269.
- 49.
Alworth is left to focus on his children’s education and learns to tolerate his wife’s vanity, while Mrs Trentham, at Mrs Maynard’s suggestion, comes to visit and eventually reside at Millenium Hall. Harriot and Alworth are further united by the agreement that she will dictate the education of his daughter. Their conversation by letter over the child’s upbringing turns their bond into a metaphorical family constellation, or, rather, a parody of the companionate marriage ideal, in that friendship seems possible between the sexes only when they live apart.
- 50.
Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 39.
- 51.
See McGonegal, “The Tyranny of Gift Giving,” 293; Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 40; Morton, “A Most Sensible Oeconomy,” 204.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mangano, B. (2017). Institutions of Friendship; or, Anonymous Authorship and Political Economy in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall . In: Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48694-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48695-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)