Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity

Abstract

Dr John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters was easily the best-selling female conduct book of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in Britain and America. First published posthumously in March 1774, the work was an immediate and enduring success, selling 6000 copies between 1774 and 1776 alone,² and running through scores of reprints well into the nineteenth century, with an edition published as late as 1877. It was frequently excerpted in periodicals and miscellanies, was often published alongside Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), and sometimes served as a companion piece to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son (1774). The Legacy also ran through dozens of American editions and was translated into French, Italian and Russian. It is little wonder, then, that the London-based (but Scottish-born) printer William Strahan might view the success of the work as something of a standard, against which it would be unreasonable to hold everything that he and his partners published: commenting on the disappointing sales of another book, Strahan reminded his Edinburgh partner William Creech that, ‘We cannot expect everything to fly like Gregory’s Legacy’.³ Nor is it surprising, given this enormous popularity, that the Legacy is now seen as the paradigmatic eighteenth-century female conduct book: Gregory is frequently mentioned in passing as a typical eighteenth-century moralist, while his Legacy is often cited briefly or parenthetically as an obvious example of the period’s conventional pieties surrounding women and gender.

Professor [Adam] Ferguson told me that he was present the second time Dr. Gregory attended the Poker [Club], when, enlarging on his favourite topic, the superiority of the female sex, he was so laughed at and run down that he never returned.

(Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805 ¹)