Abstract
The salon represented an important example of associational life in the long eighteenth century as a mixed-gender voluntary gathering of social elites. Within the salons, it was women who generally presided over the polite, intellectual conversation that took place within fashionable settings. Originating in seventeenth-century France, the literary salon was subsequently warmly embraced by hostesses in Ireland and Britain. Salons indeed flourished across Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century, particularly in the metropolitan cities of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, but also in provincial areas. These salons offered extensive networks of intellectual affiliation and the participants certainly held cosmopolitan ambitions, with cultural links between the salons maintained through travel and epistolary communication. This book offers the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France. Accordingly, it provides a fresh comparative approach to the salon’s evolution across three countries and reveals the cultural transfers that took place between them.
A kind of academy of beaux esprits, gallantry, virtue and science in Paris, for all these things complement each other marvellously, as well as being the meeting place of all those who were the most distinguished both in status and merit, a tribunal where you had to make an impression and whose opinion had a great weight in the world.1 Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), on the salon
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Notes
Ute Brandes, “Salons,” The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 471.
Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary… vol. 2 (London, 1782) 81.
Siobhân Kilfeather, “The Profession of Letters, 1700–1810,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, vol. 5, ed. Angela Bourke et al. (Cork: Cork UP, 2002) 776.
See for example, James Kelly and Martyn Powell, eds., Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010).
Markman Ellis, “Coffee-Women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 27–52.
Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800, The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: OUP, 2002) 204.
Toby Barnard, “‘Grand Metropolis’ or ‘The Anus of the World’? The Cultural Life of Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” in Two Capitals. London and Dublin 1500–1840, ed. Peter Clark and Raymond Gillespie (Oxford: OUP, 2001) 191. There are, however, important exceptions, such as the significant work carried out by Lady Arabella Denny with regards to the Dublin Foundling Hospital and Magdalen asylum, see
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) 30.
For discussion of the “problem of orders” and an understanding of the different members of elite society including peers, aristocrats, and gentry, see Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland, The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004), and
Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011).
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: HarperCollins, 1997) 34; 37. Of course, there were also aristocratic clubs and societies in existence, the most famous perhaps being the Kit Cat Club (c. 1696–1720), “It included many of the powerful Whig grandees of taste and no fewer than ten of its members were dukes,” Brewer 41.
Chauncey Brewster Tinker, The Salon and English Letters: Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society in the age of Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1915) 223.
David Hume, Essays Moral Political and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller, Revised Ed. (Indianapolis, Liberty Classics, 1987) 271.
Barbauld, quoted in Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867 (Oxford: OUP, 2007) 19.
Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason From Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 106.
E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation Trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005) xiv.
Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century, Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford: OUP, 2011) 112.
Amanda Vickery and John Styles, eds., Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven: The Yale Centre for British Art, 2006) 285.
Vickery’s Behind Closed Doors, at Home in Georgian England (2009), is also very useful in relation to British material culture, as is such collaborative work as
Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant’s Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance (2006).
As Patrick Walsh has noted, “Some of this neglect can be attributed to postcolonial political and cultural concerns which have pushed the study of country houses to the margins of Irish historiography except where they dealt with the break-up of the great estates during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.” Patrick Walsh, “William Conolly and Castletown,” in The Irish Country House, Its Past Present and Future, ed. Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgway (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011) 25.
Le Trésor de la Langue Française dates its first use in this manner to 1793, but Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h has traced that use to 1783 after discovering the term in volume VI of Tableau de Paris. Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h, L’Esprit de société: cercles et “salons” parisiens au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Garnier, 2000) 450.
The OED suggests Frances Burney’s reference to “the conversazione” in 1782 as one of the first examples of the entrance of the term into English but there are many examples of earlier usage, including the following from Hannah More: “I was engaged at Mrs Boscawen’s to meet by appointment a party. It was a conversazione, but composed of rather too many people…” (1776), Hannah More, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More ed. William Roberts, vol. 1 (London, 1834) 92, while Thomas Gray mentions them as early as 1739 in a letter to Richard West, where he refers to “the Marquise de Cavaillac’s Conversazione,”
Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, vol. 2 (London, 1835) 70.
Mâire Kennedy, “Readership in French: The Irish Experience” in Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700–1800, ed. Graham Gargett and Geraldine Sheridan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) 14.
Elizabeth Carter A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770… (London, 1808) 374; 177.
Stefanie Stockhorst, ed. Cultural Transfer through Translation, The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by means of Translation (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010) 20.
Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski, eds. Cultural Transfers, France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: SVEC, 2010) 4.
Emma Major, “Femininity and National Identity: Elizabeth Montagu’s Trip to France,” ELH 72 (2005): 901–918.
Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development, and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Field Day Press, 1996) 17.
Andrew Carpenter, “Poetry in English, 1690–1800: From the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union,” Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).
Emily Fitzgerald, “Duchess of Leinster,” in Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (1731–1814), ed. Brian Fitzgerald, vol. 3 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1949–1957) 379.
Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 135.
Toby Barnard, “Reading in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Pleasures,” in The Experience of Reading, ed. Mâire Kennedy and Bernadette Cunningham (Dublin: Rare Books Group, 1999) 65.
Mark Purcell, The Big House Library in Ireland, Books in Ulster Country Houses (Swindon: The National Trust, 2011) 13.
Anthony Malcolmson, The Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland (Belfast: Ulster History Foundation, 2006) 122.
Granard Papers, T3765/N/2; Ross Balfour, ed., The Library of Mrs Elizabeth Uesey (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Robinson, 1926).
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Prendergast, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Literary Salons Across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137512710_1
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