David Prashker's Book Of Days: July 23

1719

Blue-Stocking Day

and I could place this on any one of several dates, for any one of the several major participants, and many others less well-known, but it was at Fanny Boscawen's salon that they first met, and continued meeting regularly for many years, and today is Fanny's birthday.

Frances Evelyn Glanville on the birth certificate, Frances Boscawen on the marriage certificate, and a totally unfair start in life, partly because her dad did the most unusual and took his wife's name when he got married, even obtaining an act of Parliament to enable that; but also through her mother, who died giving birth to her, but left her her name, and her family connection to one of the great diarists of English literature, her great-uncle John Evelyn.

It was John Evelyn's grandson, also named John Evelyn, and his wife Mary Boscawen, who brought her up; Mary's brother Captain Edward Boscawen of HMS Dreadnought would become Fanny's husband in 1742, renting a London pad at 14 South Audley Street, and purchasing a rather grander mansion called Hatchland Park, near Guildford in Surrey; though not yet grand enough; when hubby was called back to naval duties - he eventually made it to Admiral and is remembered for his victories at the Siege of Louisburg in 1758 and the Battle of Lagos in 1759 - she brought in Robert Adam, first to set the house as a model of upper middle class chic, then to make a tomb for Edward when he was suddenly taken by typhoid fever in 1761.

But living there without him was simply not an option; she sold Hatchlands and moved to the London pad, where her salon included all the women to whom the name "Blue Stockings" was originally applied: Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey, Fanny Burney and Frances Reynolds; and the men occidented that way as well, like Dr Johnson and Frances Reynolds' brother Joshua. Hannah More decribed the tone of those occasions in her poem "The Bas Bleu or Conversation":

Long was society o’er-run
By whist, that desolating Hun;
Long did quadrille despotic sit,
That Vandal of colloquial wit;
And conversation’s setting light
Lay half-obscured in Gothic night.
At length the mental shades decline,
Colloquial wit begins to shine;
Genius prevails, and conversation
Emerges into reformation.
The vanquish'd triple crown to you,
Boscawen sage, bright Montagu,
Divided, fell; - your cares in haste
Rescued the ravag'd realms of Taste

So we are talking about a group of society women who found whist boring and crochet tedious, preferring to engage their minds in literary and political discussions, though art, history, architecture and philosophy were not excluded on the grounds that they were principally male activities. The men, of course, had long been free to do this, while the women drank tea and discussed other people’s love affairs in another room. But these were not the sort of women to succumb to that sort of chauvinistic down-grading, and so they re-up-graded it. To day we would call it a “Meet-Up Group”; in the second half of the 18th century it was known by the name of the Salon in which they were separated from the men, and it didn’t take long for the mechitsah to be removed.
They met (notice that I have dumped the silky grey font in favour of the woolly blue; I shall explain why in a moment), starting in the the 1750s, in the London homes of three fashionable hostesses: Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and Frances Boscawen. Guests included anyone who had something worthwhile to contribute, which meant, on the women’s side, such celebrated dames-de-cervaux as the scholar and classical translator Elizabeth Carter, the novelist Fanny Burney, the writer and dramatist Hannah More (a close personal friend of William Wilberforce so you can imagine the political agenda), and the artist Frances Reynolds; and on the men’s side the critic and writer Samuel Johnson, politician Horace Walpole (why didn’t he host them at Strawberry Hill?), philosopher Edmund Burke, and Frances Reynolds’ brother Sir Joshua. Inter alia (that’s Latin for entre autres).
And why Blue Stockings? Fashion at that time put men of the gentry in grey silk stockings. But one afternoon, when the salon was being hosted at Elizabeth Montagu's, the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet was guest speaker, but he arrived straight from the potting shed, where blue woollen stockings, the denim jeans of his day, were expected of those not yet in senior management. The ladies were delighted at the breaking of convention - it was, after all, what their salons epitomised. Someone made a joke about it; someone else reported the amusing incident to someone else afterwards; and soon enough the name went viral, as a way of derogating pseudo-cultural and psuedo-intellectual women who had failed to understand their proper place in life.
The painting at the top of the page is Richard Samuel's 1779 masterpiece “The Nine Living Muses”; only one of these was also a hostess, but all nine were clearly the sort to get 9 A* GCSEs today, and then take 5 A-levels: left-to-right Elizabeth Carter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Angelika Kauffman, Elizabeth Linley (Sheridan), Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah More, and Charlotte Lennox.

Nor did they restrict themselves to the idle chatter of cultural and intellectual elitist snobbery; almost every one of them also wrote, editing women’s journals, publishing advice books, poetry, literary and historical criticism, and even that earn-quick of the materialist classes, novels. And yes, intellectual women at that time may have come from narrow social circles, but by definition they do not have narrow minds, and it took little time before discussion of Greek drama or Italian poetry metamorphosed into discussion of the inferno that was the social environment of far too many of their fellow men and women. By the 1770s what started in London had found venues throughout the land, and by the 1780s the bluestockings were proselytising for the development of both charitable and educational institutions.

I shall write about all of the named Blue-Stockings... eventually... though you can find Fanny Burney already live on June 13, and Elizabeth Montagu on Oct 2

The third of the hostesses - and some would make the claim that she not Fanny Boscawen was the one who started it, was Elizabeth Vezey. Irish by birth, dad a bishop, first husband William Handcock MP, divorced; 2nd husband her cousin Agmondesham Vesey (or possibly Vessey in both cases), likewise an MP and later accountant-general of Ireland, so she moved between the two worlds constantly. Known known to her friends as the 'Sylph', because of her girlish figure, flirtatious wit and elusive spirit; she was the dedicatee of Hannah More's "Bas Bleu" poem

And then the non-hostesses:

Frances Reynolds first, born June 6 1729, 6 years younger than painter-brother Joshua, and herself a painter - she specialised in miniatures, genre pieces, portraits, and history paintings. She also wrote, leaving behind a treatise on aesthetics, numerous essays, a substantial diary, and a memoir of Samuel Johnson which only found its way into print some years after her death, in November 1807. She was also a poet, though only one is known to have been published. At least six portraits of her can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery website (here), four of them by Samuel William Reynolds who, despite having the same name, and basing his style on that of Joshua, was not in fact a relative. A number of her paintings, including a splendid one of Hannah More that now hangs in the Bristol museum, can be found here.

and speaking of Hannah More, she was born at Fishponds, near Bristol, one of five daughters of a schoolmaster, and gained early fame in London as a playwright... In 1787 she met William Wilberforce, with whom she shared a passionate opposition to the slave trade. She became one of his most important supporters, writing her poem "Slavery" as part of his campaign to achieve abolition and joining the campaigning group known as the Clapham Sect... But the respect like the support was mutual; visiting her at her home near Wrington, he witnessed a level of poverty beyond anything he hjad ever experienced, and encouraged her to set up a school in Cheddar where poor children could be taught to read; so sucessful was it, despite the fierce opposition from local farmers and clergy, for both of whom human illiteracy is a positive advantage, she and her sisters went on to establish similar schools throughout the Mendip villages, while her sisters also held evening classes for adults and set up women’s friendly societies such as the Cheddar Female Club.

Both Hannah and Wilberforce died in 1833, surviving just long enough to know that the act abolishing slavery in the British empire had finally been passed. She was buried next to her sisters in the churchyard at Wrington, not far from their old home at Barley Wood. The lengthy line-up of Mendip children who followed her to her grave ended only when the bell rang to go back to lessons.

Next, Anna Laetitia Aikin - Barbauld was her married name; born June 20 1743; died March 9 1825, she was, and all at the same time, a poet, an essayist, a literary critic, an editor, the authoress of children's literature, and a campaigning slavery abolitionist - see June 17 for more on that. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings, she actually turned down Elizabeth Montagu's original invitation, unwilling to be associated with women from the class that earned most of its wealth through slavery; but then realised that these were women of a different mentality, and that she could achieve rather more by being with them than apart from them... interesting wesbite to find her on here; a poem and a massive bio here; still more poems here, of which I would recommend her poem for William Wilberforce "On The Rejection Of The Bill For Abolishing The Slave Trade, 1791" as a logical starting-point.

Elizabeth (Eliza) Carter (born December 16 1717; died February 19 1806): poetry and prose, contemporary and classical; translations from multiple languages (she knew Latin, Greek and Hebrew about equally, and studied French, German, Portuguese and Arabic as well); easier just to describe her as a polymath. Mostly she is remembered for her rather lively poetry, published in two books: “Poems upon Particular Occasions” in 1738, and “Poems on Several Occasions” in 1762; and for her much more stoical translation of the 2nd-century "Discourses of Epictetus", published in 1758. Well women have to do something to fill up the empty time between art meet-up groups and musical recitals.

Read her translation of Epictetus here; or a minorly emended version here; or Higginson’s version “based on” her translation here; or Percy Ewing Matheson’s 1916 translation here; but all admitted that hers was still the closest to definitive).

More bio and poems here and here, and a very witty piece of "Dialogue" here; a complete bibliography here; several of those poems in French translation here

And just to prove (see the "Dialogue" poem) that she had a mind that travelled, her translation of an Italian explanation of Isaac Newton's theory of light and colours here.

Next, Catharine Sawbridge, later Graham, but she is remembered by her first married-name, as Macaulay, and as the author of one of the finest works of English history... but wait a moment, wasn't that Thomas Macaulay? Well, yes, he wrote one too, Thomas Babington Macaulay in full; he published his in 1848 (click here to read it), a full eighty years after her "History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line" came out, in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783 - was his title a steal from hers, or simply a homage to her? Probably both. And yes, he was a descendant of the same family.

She was born in Kent on March 23 1731, her parents comfortably-off land-owners whose ancestors had been Warwickshire yeomanry. She was educated privately at home, by a governess by the name of Elizabeth Carter - yes, her, immediately above on this page - which I guess is the female equivalent of Alexander of Macedon having Aristotle for his tutor. In 1760 she married a Scottish physician, Dr. George Macaulay, moved with him to London, had her only child, Catharine Sophia (George died in 1766), found her governess again by invitation to one of the Blue-Stocking salons, and began her decidedly English Whig Republican history of England, arguing that the English Civil War was a result of the struggle of the common people to retain their liberties against the monarchy, but simultaneously describing Oliver Cromwell as a tyrant, and insisting that:

“Of all the various models of republics, which have been exhibited for the instruction of mankind, it is only the democratical system, rightly balanced, which can secure the virtue, liberty, and happiness of society”

No surprise then that she was a supporter of both the American and French revolutions, and wrote a vitriolic response to fellow salonista Edmund Burke when he attacked the latter: you can read her “Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London: C. Dilly, 1790)” here.

Alas I am unable to find a free online copy of her "History" - but you can buy the complete 8-volumes here for a mere US$2,396.80 (plus US$4.11 for shipping to the UK)

Amber pages

1892: Lij Tafari Makonnen, the future Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia and Messiah of Ras Tafari, born today.

1952: Coup in Egypt by "The Free Officers", as they called themselves, basically a bunch of power-hungry people who had used the military as their means of promoting themselves to power, and the tradional methodologies of Nationalism to achieve it. In place of King Farouk 1, that most Bolivarian of Buonapartes Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.