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2018 Recognizing the 'Learned Lady' in the English Upper Class, 1750-1860 Kimberly A. Kent
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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
RECOGNIZING THE ‘LEARNED LADY’ IN THE ENGLISH UPPER CLASS, 1750-1860
By
KIMBERLY A. KENT
A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
2018
Kimberly Kent defended this thesis on April 18, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Charles Upchurch Professor Directing Thesis
George Williamson Committee Member
Suzanne Sinke Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
This work is dedicated to my mentor, Professor Charles Upchurch, for his unwavering patience, faith and support throughout this project. It is also dedicated to my mother, for showing me that there is no more powerful force in the world than a woman in control of her own destiny.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would also like to acknowledge the amazing staff at The Lewis Walpole Library archive in Farmington, CT and The Yale University Center for British Art in New Haven, CT. This project would not have been possible without the guidance and resources provided by these institutions. I would further like to acknowledge the efforts of my committee, my peer reviewers and everyone at Florida State University’s Department of History.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2: Anne Lister: Land, Love and ‘Learned Ladies’ ...... 18 Chapter 3: Mary Berry: ‘Learned Lady’ or ‘Lion-Hunter’ ...... 42 Chapter 4: Anne Damer: Private Spheres and Public Agency within England’s Upper Class...... 74 Chapter 5: Conclusion...... 109 References ...... 117 Biographical Sketch ...... 120
v ABSTRACT
Class is one of the most frequently invoked analytic categories used in the study of British history. Yet, as recognized by scholar Eileen Boris, “class as a category of analysis is pervasive, but taken for granted instead of problematized in the field as a whole.”1 This is perhaps especially true in the way that class intersects with questions of gender. Works such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 and Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class have illustrated how English women experienced class differently from their male counterparts in both the Middle and Working classes within this period. However, there is no equivalent body of study which seeks to explore the disparity in privilege and agency amongst upper-class women.2 While elite men were ensured certain standards of agency and privilege, defended by legal systems and patriarchal societal expectations; women within the upper-classes enjoyed no such guarantees or protections. The ‘Learned Lady’ paradigm is a strategy designed to better recognize the way one kind of upper-class woman subverted gendered norms of behavior to exercise agency and privilege, without sacrificing her social respectability.
1 Boris, Eileen. "Class Returns”. Journal of Women's History, Winter 2013, 25, no. 4, 74-87. Pp. 74-75 2 Due to the limited scope of this article, I do not at this time address how this paradigm translates to working and middling class women in this period, though Pamela Sharpe has addressed the economic capacity of working women in her “Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850”. (Basingstoke and New York, 1996). Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall similarly analyze economic topics as they relate to middle class families in their celebrated Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987; revised edn 2002). I hope to take the framework I have established in this work and see how it corresponds to various economic experiences of womanhood at some point in the future. vi CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity, Anna Clark recognized that “Her
[Lister’s] money afforded her the eccentricity of spinsterhood and the opportunity to educate
herself in the classics and travel abroad.”3 She is one of several scholars that have explored the
unique autonomy that Yorkshire Heiress Anne Lister enjoyed throughout her life. In these
explorations, Lister’s privilege and agency is logically credited to her class and position within
the upper-class.4The presumption is problematized by the experiences of countless women within Victorian England who shared Lister’s class status but who did not share her unique level
of autonomy, agency and privilege. This is one example of problems that can potentially arise
from assumed commonality in female class experiences. In her acknowledgement that it was
Lister’s money, and not merely her class, which facilitated her given “eccentricities”, Anna Clark
alludes to a more complex explanation for the agency Lister enjoyed. She also points to one of
the many circumstances that alter the way women experienced upper-class status in 18th and 19th
century England.
The complicated relationship between class and gender is almost as old as the field of feminist
theory itself. Since the 1970s such feminist thinkers as Marilyn Waring and Selma James have
attempted to define class in a way that includes due consideration of sexual difference. The field
of British history has proven central to the symbiotic evolution of class and gender.
3Clark, Anna. "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity." Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 1 (1996): 23-50. Pp. 24. 4 For one example see: Steinbach, Susie. 2004. Women in England 1760-1914: a social history. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 78. [See also Donoghue, Emma. 2014. Passions between women. London: Bello. Pp. 50] 1 Works such as Gareth Stedman Jone’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class
History 1832-1982 emerged in the 1980s, proposing a different way of seeing the manifestation of class within working-class English culture. Jone’s work challenges strictly Marxist theories of class, reshaping how social class should be approached by scholars by emphasizing the often neglected role of language as a mediator between “class consciousness” and “class experience”5.
Published five years later in 1987, Written by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall , Family
Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850; in part clearly outlines the role of rigid gender definitions in shaping societal norms within the English Middle classes.6
While the author’s only make passing mention of what they call the “tensions of class and gender alliance,”7 they successfully convey one of the foundational claims of this argument: that English women and men in the eighteenth and nineteenth century experienced the “theatre of class and gender”8 in functionally different ways. In confronting issues of gender with corresponding issues of class, Davidoff and Hall successfully integrated gender and sexuality into the history of the English Middle Class within this period.
A similar tactic is used in The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the
British Working Class by Anna Clark which establishes gender conflict as an operational force within considerations of plebian culture and community. Clark’s work illustrates how the shifting nature of gender difference and interaction directly shaped plebian culture within the 19th century English working class. Her work further recognized the way class experience was impacted by such variables as female employment, religious ideology and radical notions of
5 Jones, Gareth Stedman. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 6 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 400-405. 7 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 407. 8 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 415. 2 fraternity. The work of Davidoff and Hall as well as Clark reinforces the claim that class in
England within this period is a strictly gendered category; regardless of the class level in
question.
In her most recent work, The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Scott cites Gayle Rubin’s
The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex when she describes “Sex” as the
division of physical bodies into male and female types and “Gender” as the social or cultural
assignment of roles that established reality. The argument that class is a “gendered” category of
analysis is based upon these definitions and Scott’s ultimate conclusion that “Gender meant that
the limits placed on women were not physical, but social and historical.”9 When considering the
parameters of sexual difference, Judith Butler offers this definition, “Sexual difference is the site
where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed,
where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered.”10 Looking
at England from 1750-1860, it is clear that biological sexual difference manifested in culturally
systemic gendered disparity in every aspect of lived experience; and class was no exception.
While the existing historiography densely reflects this at the working-class and middle-class level, class experiences within the upper-class in this same period have not explored to the same extent.
Within the upper-class, a standard of male agency and privilege was protected by a combination of legal systems and societal infrastructures which ensured a level of universality in the way men experienced their class position. Similarly, men could expect a certain level of economic security and independence based on their class,11 based on their access to wealth, their
9 Scott, Joan Wallach. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. 3. 10 Scott, Joan. Pp. 16. 11 For more on this see Making Men: The Formation of Elite Male Identities in England c. 1660-1900: A Sourcebook. Edited by Mark Rothery and Henry French (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). 3 access to education and other professional opportunities. While women in this period had some
legal protections, the privileges and agency associated with their class were not prescribed nor
protected to the same degree as their male counterparts.
Scholars such as Amy Louise Erickson have explored in particular how marital property law
(in the forms of coverture and guardianship) historically limited and dictated how women access
economic resources. She illustrates how the English husband ‘covered’ his wife’s legal identity,
“and therefore took ownership of all but her freehold property-which in most cases was all of her
property.”12 While legal contracts, trusts, bonds, and other instruments of financial protection
could be used to protect a woman’s property; “written instruments which are designed to serve
so many different functions, and which have to deal with a wide variety of property types
(movable goods, leases, freehold land, copyhold land), had to be quite complex.”13 Boris argues
that scholars should “consider property as an indicator of class;”14and as Erickson explains, the
legal infrastructure within England created an environment that was so imbalanced in its favor of
male property ownership that it necessitated individual arrangements for any woman that could
afford them.15 “Legal recognition,” Parveen Adams and Jeffrey Minson have noted,
“...recognizes the things that correspond to the definition it constructs.”16 In considering property
an indicator of class in tandem with the disparity in male and female legal recognition; it
becomes not only logical but necessary to define class as a strictly gendered category of analysis
within this period.17
12 Erickson, Amy Louise. "Coverture and Capitalism." History Workshop Journal, no. 59 (2005): 1-16. Pp. 4. 13 Erickson, Amy Louise. Pp. 5 14 Boris, Eileen. Pp. 76. 15 See also Erickson, Women and Property, pp. 28, 169-71, or Erickson, Property and Widowhood in England 1680- 1840’, in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (Harlow, 1999, pp. 152-4) 16 Scott, Joan. Pp. 9. 17 Examples of very good economic histories which nonetheless fail to do this and take marriage or women’s role in marriage for granted without gendered analysis include Keith Wrightson, Early Necessities: Economic Lives in 4 While it is true that unmarried and widowed women in England were considered legal
individuals,18 these ‘single-women’ faced their own set of economic and proprietary limitations; and as with their married counterparts, experienced class inherently differently from men of this period. In ‘Gender in English Society: 1650-1850; The Emergence of Separate Spheres?’ Robert
Shoemaker argues that despite their equivalent legal status, unmarried women generally faced a far more difficult life than unmarried men. These difficulties derived from two main sources: economic and social.
The socio-economic position of ‘single-women’ women varied considerably, even within those identified as upper-class.19 This is due in part to the lack of economic opportunities that
existed for women in this period. Judith Bennett and Amy Froide’s Singlewomen in the
European Past, 1250-1800 argues that this inherent economic disadvantage might have played a
role in what Adrienne Rich has called “compulsory heterosexuality.”20 For upper-class women
Early Modern Britain, New Haven CT, 2000 and John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650-1950, Oxford, 1994. [Erickson, Amy Louise. Footnote 7] 18 England was unique in considering unmarried adult woman (either never married or widowed) as legal individuals. There was no distinction in legal status between a man and a woman without a husband. “In the rest of Europe, influenced by roman civil law, an unmarried adult woman was widely supposed to be legally represented by a male guardian, usually a kinsmen, just as a married woman was represented by her husband.” (Erickson, Amy Louise. Pp. 8) though the nature of guardianships drastically varied, the legal necessity of appointing a male guardian would complicate any attempt to broaden the scope of this work outside of England. Thus, the subjects of this work are all gentlewomen within England in the 18th and 19th century. 19 As explored within Judith Bennett and Amy Froide. Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. And Amy M. Froide, ‘Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewomen of Early Modern England, Local Population Studies 68, spring 2002, pp. 27-41; ‘single-women’ were most often found among the very poor and the very rich. The experiences of poor ‘single-women’, many of whom did not have friends and relatives capable of supporting them, were drastically different from the experiences of women in the upper-class. Some even forced to survive by way of petty crime or prostitution (Bennett and Froide, Pp. 7). For this reason, class played a central role in shaping not only “whether she might remain single but also, if single, the kind of life she might expect to lead.” (Bennett and Froide, Pp.7). It is impossible to make any direct comparisons between the two groups without venturing from the intended scope of this work. For this reason, this project focuses exclusively on the economic and social pressure to wed faced by the upper-class women who are the primary subjects of this work. 20 Judith Bennett and Amy Froide. Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 1-37 (Chapter 1: “A Singular Past” by the editors), Pp. 7. [See Also: Pamela Sharpe, “Dealing with Love: the ambiguous Independence of Spinsters in early modern England”, Gender and History 11:2, 1999, pp. 209-32] 5 who did not want to rely on the generosity of male relatives, marriage was often their best (and
only) financial option. As a rule, unmarried women had “fewer economic resources”21 and were more often than not “poorer than their married sisters, often living in marginal circumstances and often without descendants”22 who would ultimately care for them in old age. Bennett and Froide
cite this second point as one likely reason why ‘single-women’ were more common in poor
households than in rich ones. Within elite households, “families valued reproductive capacities
over their productive abilities.23
Societal expectations thus played a key role in pressuring upper-class women to surrender their legal identities to the bonds of matrimony; even among those women who came from families with the financial ability to provide for them. As was the case for less privileged women, the respectable expectations of aristocratic women cast them in the roles of wives, mothers and housekeepers.24 While men largely cultivated their status and respectability in the
public sphere, “women’s social roles were to a much greater extent defined in terms of their
family responsibilities.”25 Women’s class status was derived from familial position, far more so
then personally cultivated traits of education or skills26 and was solidified largely through
marriage. For this reason, societal expectations are as integral to legal and economic disparities
when considering the necessity for gendered class analysis within the upper-classes of 18th and
19th century England.
21 Shoemaker, Robert Brink. Gender in English society: 1650-1850; the emergence of separate spheres? London: Longman, 1998. Pp. 143. 22 Bennett and Froide. Pp. 3. 23 Bennett and Froide. Pp. 6. 24 Steinbach, Susie. Women in England 1760-1914: A Social History. Orion Publishing Co (London, 2005), Pp. 80. 25 Shoemaker, Robert. Pp. 143 26 Boris, Eileen. Pp. 77. 6 Bennett and Froide affirm that “as a rule, women were-compared to men of their class or
status- disadvantaged.”27 Further, because the privileges and agency associated with their class
were not strictly prescribed nor protected to the same degree as their male counterparts; upper-
class women in 18th and 19th century England were to varied extents responsible for envisioning
and defending their own class experience. This is not to suggest that women necessarily acted
deliberately or even consciously. Rather, it suggests that in order to gender class, one also has to
recognize the diversity that exists within female class experiences; in part by approaching female
class experience as a spectrum rather than as a uniform analytical category. Joan Scott argues
that “commonality among women does not preexist its invocation but rather that it is secured by
fantasies that enable them to transcend history and difference.”28The universalizing category of
‘aristocratic Victorian female’ is among these fantasies of commonality, unsupported and often
contradicted by the material evidence that presents itself.
This brings us back to the puzzling case of Yorkshire Heiress Anne Lister. Lister’s agency,
privilege and (most frequently) sexual autonomy is widely credited to her status as a
gentlewoman. However, she is also so frequently the topic of British gender scholarship
precisely because of how unusual her level of privilege and agency29 were, even within her own
class. Recognizing how Anne Lister saw her own agency, as well as that enjoyed by “learned
ladies like [myself] her,”30 is the central goal of establishing the ‘Learned Lady’ paradigm that serves as the central thread of this thesis.
27 Bennett and Froide. Pp. 14. 28 Scott, Joan. Pp. 49 29 Clark, Anna. Anne Lister’s Construction… [See also Lister, Anne, and Jill Liddington. 1998. Female fortune: land, gender, and authority ; the Anne Lister diaries and other writings, 1833-36. London: Rivers Oram Press.] 30Lister, Anne.28 February 1823 [Cited from Lister, Anne, and Helena Whitbread. 1992. I know my own heart: the diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840. New York: New York Univ. Press. Pp. 237] 7 The ‘Learned Lady’ paradigm is an analytic tool used to isolate, describe and enable identification of one of the diverse ways that women within Victorian England experienced class within the 18th and 19th centuries. The basis of the Learned Lady identification begins with a fixed set of commonalities. Attempting to isolate exceptional from normative experiences of elite
Victorian women is to a certain extent treading on new ground. As scholars such as Susie
Steinbach have observed, upper-class women have only recently become serious subjects of historical inquiry.31 Steinbach’s book Women in England: 1760-1914, A Social History, suggests that the position of upper-class women afforded them unique opportunities for “political, social, and economic action,”32 making them a worthy point of scholastic consideration.
The trope of the “exceptional woman”33 has frequently been used to account for women who push back against an excepted standard definition of female class experience. Rather than simply writing off outlying experiences as “exceptional”, the Learned Lady paradigm seeks to understand the underlying source of their unusual privilege and agency. There are six key criteria which make up the Learned Lady paradigm: a.) using social capital for personal rather than familial advancement, b.) access to privacy, c.) economic independence, d.) control over personal movement and travel, e.) control of romantic desire and f.) a classical/intellectual education. In placing the material experiences of women who share these criteria in conversation with each other, rather than comparing them to women based solely on their class, we realize that they are not an ‘exception’ at all, but rather suggestive of a different set of rules.
The first criteria is consequent of the previously made conclusion that women in this period respond to the inherent disadvantage of their gender in relation to their class experience. As
31 Steinbach, Susie. Pp. 78 32 Ibid. 33 Cucullu, Lois. "Exceptional Women, Expert Culture, and the Academy." Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 27-54. 8 previously established, female class experience was shaped in great part by societal expectations
and respectability. As outlined in Susan Kingsley Kent’s book Gender and Power in Britain,
1640-1990; the concept of virtue was central to 18th and 19th century political and moral
ideology. Women took a particular role within this ideology, perceived by many in the period as
cultivators of morality.34 While the active performance of separate spheres ideology was most
prominent within the middling classes, perceived attacks on this existing social order posed a
“far greater threat to the elites.”35 As scholars such as Susie Steinbach have observed, active
participation in society was one of the main ways that aristocratic women could exercise agency
within the ‘public sphere’36. However, within elite social networks, women faced significant
pressure to maintain an image of normative female respectability. In order to subvert these
standards of respectability while maintaining their place within elite society, Learned Ladies
consciously exploited (to varying degrees of success) a resource referred to throughout this work
as ‘social capital.’
Urban economist Jane Jacobs first used the term ‘Social Capital’, defining it as “A continuity of people who have forged networks37.” Sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community, takes Jacobs initial definition a step further,
describing social capital as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and social
trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit38.” Economic theorists such as Dr. Shi-Ling Hsu have taken up these definitions, constructing the current prevailing theory that at the macro level, “social capital enhances economic productivity without consciously
34 Kent, Susan Kingsley. 2014. Gender and power in Britain: 1640-1990. Abingdon: Routledge. Pp. 71. 35 Kent, Pp. 135. 36 Steinbach, Susie. Pp. 88. 37 Hsu, Shi-Ling. “Inefficient Inequality”. Indian Journal of Law and Social Equality. Volume 5, Issue 1. Pp. 22, footnote 138. (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Pp. 138. 38 Robert D. Putnam, An Interview with Robert Putnam, 6 J. Democracy 65, 67 (1995) Cited from Hsu, Shi-Ling, Pp. 23. 9 having economic productivity as its goal.”39He observes that within the micro level (i.e.
individual experiences of social capital) that there is considerable consensus within the field of
economics that “motives for social interactions are not in most cases economic”, and that while
people can benefit economically from joining networks, they “do not, in many cases, join
networks for that purpose.”40
Simply put, social capital is based on relationships within tight-knit communities built on a
shared interest isolated within itself by a shared set of standards for normative behavior. When
economists deal with social capital, they are essentially attempting to quantify the benefit gained
through a sense of “belonging”. For Learned Ladies operating within social networks that
dictated the standards of respectable female behavior allowed them to in turn subvert these
standards without openly disrupting them. In this way, they were able to act outside of the
normative boundaries of their gender without being seen as other and thus threatening.41
These women also used access to privacy in order to maintain their public status while subverting normative boundaries of female respectability. It is first important to demonstrate that privacy was by no means a universal privilege of upper-class women. Anna Clark’s Scandal:
The Sexual Politics of The British Constitution skillfully argues that in the eighteenth century, privacy was overwhelmingly a privilege reserved for men. Clark uses the duel example of John
Wilkes and Catherine Macaulay. While Wilkes and his supporters asserted that his own private
life had nothing to do with his political service; Wilkes attempts to discredit Macaulay by spread
sexual rumors from her private life. By contrasting the ability of Wilkes and Macaulay to
39 Hsu, Shi-Ling. Pp. 24 40 Hsu, Shi-Ling. Pp. 24, footnote 151 41 See also, Elaine Chalus, “Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political world of Late Eighteenth Century England”. Historical Journal 43.3 (2000), Pp. 669. 10 manipulate and defeat their combating scandals,” Anna Clark illustrates how “radical definitions
of privacy failed to protect women.”42
In The Gentleman’s Daughter, author Amanda Vickery illustrates that female privacy was
just as limited in the so-called “private sphere”43 as it was on the field of public discourse.
Rather, she suggests that female privacy was relegated strictly to her bedchambers. Philippa
Tristram’s Living Space in Fact and Fiction similarly argues that the Victorian great house was
made up of highly gendered spaces, with spaces of privacy being dominantly masculine. In
contrast, female spaces such as the salon or dinner table were spaces for social performance and
thus necessitated a woman’s constant respectable behavior; even within her own home44. As the chapters of this work will explore, the unique level of privacy enjoyed by Learned Ladies was instrumental to their ability to act outside norms of female respectability without jeopardizing their position within elite society.
As previously shown, lack of economic resources and opportunity were often a central factor in limited female autonomy even within the elite classes of English society. One way that this agency has been recently considered is through renewed interest in evidence of upper-class female participation in English politics45. While often lauded as an example of upper-class female public action within this period, Anna Clark argues that there remains a question of influence versus independence. Put another way, that the presence of most upper-class women in
politics was merely another manifestation of contemporary ideology that endorsed aristocratic
influence over political affairs. “Because elite women’s political activities derived from this
42 Clark, Anna. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. 19 43 Cited from William, Stafford. “The Gender of the Place: Building and Landscape in Women-Authored Texts in England of the 1790s”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 305-318. Pp. 306. 44 Tristram, Philippa. Living Space in Fact and Fiction. Routledge. 1989. Pp. 59. 45 Clark, Anna. Scandal. Pp. 52. 11 influence, it did not cause scandal for most of the century.”46 However, this assessment does not account for those women, like the “Learned Ladies”, who enjoyed the economic independence required to pursue political activities on their own behalf. As later chapters will show, two primary subjects of this work: Anne Lister and Anne Seymour Damer, successfully engage in the public sphere of politics of their own volition and with their own economic resources; and yet manage to avoid the level of personal ‘scandal’ that Clark describes.
Nonetheless Clark’s assessment illustrates a separate factor that impacts how women experienced agency and privilege within the English aristocracy. As Clark recognizes, financial incentive was integral to aristocratic influence over British voters. It is a natural conclusion, then, to consider fiscal independence when attempting to understand the political influence exerted by women in this period. Are the “great women”47 Clark describes wearing the colors of their parties and organizing events in support of political candidates acting of their own political agency and ideals, or are they acting only with the approval of or on behalf of the male who holds their purse strings? This points to the importance of creating a clear distinction between class and economic independence. As explored earlier in this work, women often had very little control over the wealth of husbands or fathers unless this control was specifically contracted to them. Thus, a woman could come from one of the wealthiest and highest-ranked families in the country and have no money under her own control.
The distinction between class and economic independence is important to understanding how this third criteria impacted a “Learned Ladies” ability to act with unique agency and privilege.
As discussed previously, scholars such as Bennett and Froide have recognized that ‘single- women’ were more common in poor households than in rich ones; largely due to the social
46 Clark, Anna. Scandal. Pp. 54. 47 Ibid. 12 expectations which existed within most elite families. As evidenced in the experiences of
Learned Ladies Anne Damer and Anne Lister, economic independence was an integral part of their ability subvert these expectations; leaving them able to shape the lives they desired as happily unmarried and childless women. Separating economic independence from class is central to understanding the agency enjoyed by Anne Damer; who was a widow. As observed by Robert
Shoemaker, “Generally, those [widows] most likely to stay single were the rich and the poor; the former because they could afford to and the latter because their poverty rendered them undesirable for marriage.”48As Chapter 3 will explore, Damer’s class position was unchanged by the death of her husband. However, the same cannot be said of her financial position, which deteriorated significantly as a result. Despite this, her resolve to live within her own independent means allowed her to avoid remarriage as well as the unwanted influence of male family members.
Economic independence was also central to how these women exercised freedom in their travel and movement. However, as later chapters will show, it was not the only factor that contributed to the unique freedom these women possessed to go where they pleased. Mary Berry was able to control her own movement in large part due to her skilled navigation of social networks. In Chapter 3’s exploration of the largely unrecognized agency Berry exercised within her well-known relationship with Horace Walpole, Lord of Offord; it becomes clear that Social capital is integral to Berry’s ability to travel freely. Of course, it is equally important to recognize that most upper-class women frequently traveled for a variety of reasons. As in the case of political activities, the distinction of class experience stems from the question of independence vs. influence. As each of the chapters of this work demonstrate, the women in this thesis held
48 Shoemaker, Robert. Pp. 138. 13 personal authority over their own movement and travel; which they pursued not only for
socialization and entertainment; but also, as a source of social capital, privacy and romantic
freedom.
Another space where ‘Learned Ladies’ enjoyed dominant authority was in their pursuit of
romantic desire. The most obvious example of this is likely the case of Anne Lister, who’s
numerous passionate same-sex relationships have been well documented both by modern
scholarship and in the pages of her own journals.49As discussed previously, a combination of
social and economic pressures pushed many upper-class women into the normative track of heterosexual marriage.
The final criteria considered within the Learned Lady Paradigm is their shared pursuit of classical, intellectual and it can be argued ‘masculine’ educations. This is not to say education was itself unique to women within the Learned Lady paradigm, as scholars have recognized “the status of the family, the interest of an educated father, the presence of brothers who were being educated” are all factors that could make it possible for English girls to obtain “a careful, sometimes even a solid, education.”50 However, as illustrated in the experiences of women like
Anne Lister, the possession of a more serious intellectual education continued to be an anomaly
amongst upper-class women well into the 19th century.
Yet it is important to recognize the distinct rise in respectable female intellectualism that
emerged within this period51, perhaps best represented by such salon groups as The
Bluestockings as well as female writers such as Hannah Moore and Elizabeth Montagu. Montagu
49 See: Castle, Terry. "The Pursuit of Love." The Women's Review of Books 6, no. 4 (1989): 6-7. 50 Myers, Pp. 16. 51 O'Brien, Karen. 2010. Women and enlightenment in eighteenth century Britain. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press.
14 and other women within what is referred to as the ‘first-wave’ of Bluestockings were known “for
their careful orchestration of social space.”52An orchestration that was central to the salon culture
that served as the center of respectable upper-class female intellectualism within this period.
However, the heart of the education advocated for by the bluestocking circle was a determination
“to combine their learning with virtue; a term which covers such traits as chastity for single women, fidelity for married ones, and Christian Piety.”53 This dedication to traditional standards
of female morality were equally embodied by Hannah More in her work as “an Evangelical
conservative reformer.”54
The Bluestocking group was built on the shared ideology that learning was an instrument to inform female virtue. As later chapters will explore, Learned Ladies used their learning frequently to subvert such normative female behaviors. Thus, Bluestocking membership should not be seen as an indication of the paradigm outlined in this work.
In stark contrast with the intellectual virtue and respectability of the Bluestocking group are the more radical female intellectuals of the period, most famously Catherine Macaulay and
Wollstonecraft. These women openly embraced the shifting moral landscape scholarship traditionally associated with the start of the 19th century. They each greeted the French revolution
with enthusiasm and spoke openly about women’s rights. Scholars such as Anna Clark have
explored Macaulay’s unique expression of female agency, which she exercised even as she
herself frequently spoke out against the influence wielded by aristocratic and royal women.55
52 Eger, Elizabeth, and Lucy Peltz. Brilliant women: 18th-century bluestockings. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008. Pp. 22. 53 Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The bluestocking circle: women, friendship, and the life of the mind in Eighteenth-century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. 2. 54 Eger and Peltz, Pp. 18. 55 Clark, Anna. Scandal. Pp. 22. [In addition to her opinions denouncing royal women meddling in politics, Macaulay also openly spoke out against female property ownership; which, as discussed in this work and others, served as a major source of female agency within the English aristocracy.] 15 Wollstonecraft’s writings, including her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:
with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), were more in line with what might be
considered ‘proto-feminism’, raising questions of female agency in the public sphere as well as
the “nature of their rights56” both as women and citizens. Despite their political differences,
Wollstonecraft shared with Macaulay an unusual level of public female agency. However, unlike
our Learned Ladies- who used a combination of social and economic resources to quietly subvert
standards of normative female behavior while maintaining their social capital and respectability-
both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft were known for their transgressive behaviors and particularly
their “unconventional sex lives”57. The chronically “troubled reputations”58 of these two women,
as well as their seeming lack of interest in maintaining their own social respectability,
irrevocably separate their experiences of female class from that of Anne Lister, Mary Berry and
Anne Damer, despite their shared intellectualism.
The women outlined in this thesis were not bound by an ideology of normative female virtue
shared by the Bluestocking group. Nor did they openly reject boundaries of propriety in the same
way as radical female intellectuals in the period. Rather, ‘Learned Ladies’ did their best to
maintain their reputations as respectable upper-class women. It was through a combination of privacy, economic and social resources that these women exercised agency in ways that often fell outside normative standards of female behavior without openly pushing against them. As later chapters will explore, the subjects of this work used intellectual education as a means of self-discovery, to increase social capital and even as a means of professional development.
56 Eger and Peltz, Pp. 53. 57 Eger and Peltz, Pp. 18. 58 Ibid. 16 The ‘Learned Lady’ paradigm shared by Anne Damer, Anne Lister, and Mary Berry- provides clearer and more nuanced apparatus for analyzing the degree of privilege enjoyed by these women. By rejecting ‘fantasies’ of presumed female commonality based on notions of universal class experience and instead finding commonalities within a strict set of criteria, historians might better perceive how individual women actually experienced privileges associated with their class status.
17 CHAPTER 2
ANNE LISTER: LAND, LOVE AND “LEARNED LADIES”
Yorkshire Heiress Anne Lister is considered most frequently in modern scholarship through
the lens of her unique sexual agency and identity, motivated by the passionate desire she felt
towards other women. As explored in the introduction of this work, female class distinction was
in no way synonymous with the level of privilege Lister enjoyed. However, it is commonly
accepted throughout the existing body of Lister scholarship that her unique sexual agency and
other masculine privileges should be credited predominantly to her societal position as a landed
heiress in a small town that still revered her old family name.59
Yet even the earlier scholars of the Lister journals such as Muriel Green has recognized that
Anne was considered “rather masculine in her time…Her mode of dress, her masculinity, and her
rather eccentric behavior…earned her the name ‘Gentleman Jack’ among the populace.”60 Even amongst the Victorian upper-class, Lister was anomaly in her access to intellectual education, freedom to pursue her unorthodox romantic desires, and in her ability to forgo marriage and other normative female duties without ever relinquishing her status or her respectability. This cannot be credited purely to her class position, as shown throughout the pages of her extensive journals, her interest in cultivating her own upper class “importance”61 was consistently thwarted by her own disinterest in finding a place within the social circles of Halifax. In fact, the level of public freedom and importance Lister enjoyed frequently fell short of the “impunity”62 she
59 See Liddington, Jill. Female fortune: Land, Gender, and Authority: the Anne Lister diaries and other writings, 1833-36. (Rivers Oram Press, 1998) 60 Muriel Green (ed. 1992) Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters (1800-1840)(Sussex: Book Guild), Pp. 17. 61 Liddington, Jill. 62 Lister, Anne. No Priest but Love: Excerpts from the Diaries of Anne Lister, 1824-1826. Ed. Helena Whitbread. Washington Square, NY: New York UP, 1992. Print. 18 sought to reach throughout her life; both within her town of Halifax and within the broader social
networks in London.
By considering Lister through the paradigm of a “Learned Lady”, rather than presuming
commonality within Victorian upper-class female experiences of class, the complex nature of her
public and private autonomy becomes clearer. While social position was not irrelevant to Lister’s
class experience, it ultimately played a small role in Anne Lister’s unique agency and freedom.
Lister gained much of her private and public agency through economic independence, fostered in
equal parts in the social manipulation of her position as landlord at Shibden Hall and through the
considerable expansion of her family’s coal-mining endeavors that she would orchestrate in the years following her Uncle’s death. Equally important to Lister’s unique privilege and agency was the rare level of privacy she enjoyed; both within the safety of Shibden Hall and through her
travels in the more socially hospitable circles of Europe.
As outlined in the introduction of this work, the Learned Lady paradigm is based in six key
commonalities in how our Victorian female subjects experience class: 1. A classical education, 2.
access to privacy, 3. full economic independence, 4. Personal authority regarding their own
movement and travel, 5. Personal authority regarding their own pursuit of romantic desire and 6.
using social capital for personal rather than familial advancement. With her richly intellectual
education, life-long agency within travel and movement, agency within romantic desire, and
economic independence- Anne Lister is perhaps the most emblematic of the paradigm explored
in this work. She is in fact the source of the term itself, when she proclaims to a friend that she
“does not like learned ladies [like herself]”, acknowledging her preference for the sort of “girlish
creatures.”63 This is one of the many ways that Anne sets herself apart from what she perceives
63 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest…Pp. 76. 19 to as normative Victorian womanhood. However, she somehow never reaches the level of importance and public security enjoyed by her counterparts. A stark contrast can be made between Lister and Mary Berry. Berry, despite middling birth and little guaranteed economic security, would go on to thrive in the very groups Lister was denied full entry. As shown more fully in chapter three, Berry would secure for herself a great deal of public agency through her mastery of these groups.
It is thus the sixth factor, concerning social capital, that is particularly important to consider in understanding how Anne Lister exercised agency as a Learned Lady. For working within the
Learned Ladies paradigm, I consider social capital largely in the same way it is approached in the field of Economics; wherein connections between individuals and networks are considered in equal terms with more traditional financial assets.64 As outlined more extensively in the introductory chapter of this work, social capital is one factor that shapes diverse female experiences within their class; with some women being more conscious of this than others. The women explored in this project as Learned Ladies are among those who consciously use social capital to facilitate greater public and private agency on their own behalf. Not unlike other women within this paradigm, Lister uses extensive travel to the service of her own private agency. Her love for travel served her public agency as well, illustrating an alternative example of how Learned Ladies curated and manipulated social capital.
Evidence of her extensive journeys has long lead Lister to be celebrated as an accomplished female traveler, described in her obituary as resembling “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady
Hester Stanhope.” The Halifax Guardian went on to remember the lady of Shibden Hall as “like
64 For more on this, please see the dedicated section in the Introductory chapter of this Thesis. 20 those celebrated women…exploring Europe [and then] she extended her researches to those
Oriental regions…”65
While her passion for travel is traditionally accredited to her academic curiosity, there is an argument to be made that this is only one part of her motivation for spending so much of her adult life traversing the globe. In Halifax, in London, and abroad; Anne Lister illustrates an unorthodox but effective means of retaining the respectability afforded by social capital, even while remaining largely on the sidelines of fashionable society.
Anne Lister and Halifax
The agency enjoyed by Anne Lister regarding her uniquely self-actualized pursuit of same-
sex desire has been well covered by various scholars, particularly in the period following the
inheritance of her familial estate at Shibden Hall. Anna Clark has acknowledged the central role
Lister’s economic independence play in enabling this agency. “Since she became a landowner,
even her neighbors, who may have expressed hostility toward her masculinity, had to
acknowledge her economic and political power.”66
Equally important and less explored is the privacy Lister enjoyed as the head of her own
estate and household. Her early journals are littered with declarations of her desire to share a
home and life with the partner of her choosing.67 In her inheritance and management of her
familial estate, Lister had the unique opportunity to directly control the design of her
environment with this purpose in mind. This is a rare experience of privacy for an upper-class woman to possess within the Victorian period. The elite woman’s house was not a private
65 The Halifax Guardian, 31st October 1840. 66 Clark, Anna. “Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity”. Pp 40 67 Lister, Anne, and Helena Whitbread. 1992. I know my own heart: the diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840. New York: New York University Press. 21 sphere, but rather a generally public space.68 Her close involvement in the renovation and redesigning of her home at Shibden Hall provided her with the ability to “consciously create an environment that would not only strengthen her social position within the community, but also offer a site for the exploration of her sexuality.”69
While women’s space was traditionally public in nature, designed to place women on display;
in her renovations of Shibden Hall, Lister rejected these conventions and gave herself a unique
command over both public and private spaces within her estate. In the 18th and 19th centuries,
domestic architecture of the gentry seldom resulted in a great degree of privacy for women.
Rather, a woman’s dressing room was traditionally “on the parade floor, open and accessible to
visitors and forming part of the public circuit, while the lord of the house had a separate and
therefore private set of rooms on an upper floor.”70 Within Lister’s Shibden Hall, changes
included an underground passage which allowed housemaids to avoid her bedchambers were
affected with the intention of securing her own masculine privacy. Her redesign and expansion
of Shibden Hall not only asserted her place as the mistress of the estate, it also gave her a site in
which to carry on her sexual relationships without fear.
However, the security she enjoyed within her own private space did not carry out into the
town itself. Scholars of the Lister diaries, such as Muriel Green, have noted Lister’s status as
something of an outsider in the community of Halifax. She was considered by many of the
townsfolk as being “Rather masculine in her time, when women were content to sit at home and
mildly accept all the new ideas, without thinking of helping to put them into practice. Her mode
68 William, Stafford. “The Gender of the Place: Building and Landscape in Women-Authored Texts in England of the 1790s”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 305-318. Pp. 308. 69 Rowanchild, Anira. “Everything Done for Effect: Georgic, Gothic, and Picturesque in Anne Lister’s Self- Production.” (Taylor and Francis, 2006). Pp. 89. 70 Rowanchild, Pp. 94. 22 of dress, her masculinity, her rather eccentric nature amused her friends and earned her the name
‘Gentleman Jack’ amongst the populace.” 71
As Halifax friends matured and married off, she became increasingly the “butt of anonymous but pointed baiting; at one point even, a joke advertisement for a husband was placed in the local newspaper.”72 She was regularly met with calls from Halifax townspeople, asking her “Does your cock stand?” Rather than respond to these societal ramifications by softening the more masculine aspects of her appearance or making any other efforts to better conceal her sexual identity, Lister instead continued her pursuit of “more importance, so that [she might] do with impunity what [she] could not do now.”73
However, the “importance” that Anne Lister sought to create between herself and the townspeople of Halifax came at a certain social cost. As we see in Chapter 4 of this work,
Learned Ladies such as Anne Damer were able to largely avoid many of the public effects of personal scandal (in Damer’s case, her separation and her husband’s subsequent suicide) through the protection of carefully cultivated social networks and capital. Even before coming into her inheritance, Anne Lister had systematically isolated herself from the social circles within
Halifax. In one journal entry in 1817, we see that this isolation began early in Lister’s time at
Shibden Hall and was well-noted by the people of Halifax:
My uncle and aunt drank tea at Mrs. Prescott’s to meet a large party. My father and I staid home. Indeed, I was not asked, I suppose from it being known that I decline parties. At all events, they ought to have given me the option of refusing…My uncle and aunt got home a little after ten. Neither Mrs nor Miss Prescott made an inquiry after me that probably their not inviting me was an intentional omission, and indeed, I know not what for.74
71 Orr, Dannielle. "“I Tell Myself to Myself”: Homosexual Agency in the Journals of Anne Lister (1791-1840)." Women's Writing 11, no. 2 (2004): 201-22. Pp. 208. 72 Liddington, Female Fortunes. Pp. 18 73 Lister, Diaries, 1835. [Cited From Whitbread, Helena. No Priest. Pp. 203] 74 The Diaries of Anne Lister, Monday 16 July [Halifax] 1817 (Whitbread, Helena. I Know My Own Heart. Pg. 11) 23 This passage illustrates first that the young heiress’s self-declared ‘snobbery’75 towards
Halifax society was already noted by those whose invitations she made habit of rejecting; and second that she had no intention of responding to any subtle cues that she might change her behavior. Rather, the time she became the mistress of Shibden Hall, Lister had become firm in her belief that “One can hardly carry oneself too high or keep people at too great a distance.”76
Her attitude was reinforced by the reality that modernity was taking hold in the town of Halifax;
where the bulk of fashionable society was now made up of a small number of families who had
come into their fortunes with the rise of the industrial revolution.77
The new Halifax elite was the product of a new kind of wealth, different from the landed gentry that Lister counted herself among. Mentions of this “motley set”78 in Lister’s journals
illustrate her disinterest in assimilating with what she felt was a diluted form of society, stating at
one point that their “vulgarity gravifies and sickens me more than ever.”79
In closing herself off and setting herself as decidedly ‘other’ from the most powerful social
forces in her community, she opened herself up to a great deal of societal scrutiny and criticism,
which would follow her for the duration of her public adult life. Understanding the divide
between Anne Lister and the other powerful families of Halifax is an important consideration;
one that complicates the existing narrative which credits her unique agency to her station within
the town she called her home.
This is not to say that Anne Lister did not enjoy an elevated level of social privilege within
the town, both before and after her inheritance. Her ability freely pursue both her academic and
75 Ibid. 76 Whitbread, Helena. I know my Own Heart, Pp. 48. 77 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest but Love. Pp. 96. 78 The Diaries of Anne Lister, Friday 3rd December 1819 (Whitbread, Helena. No Priest But Love. Pp. 97) 79 The Diaries of Anne Lister, Monday 18th April 1825 (Whitbread, Helena. No Priest But Love. Pp. 99) 24 sexual educations can be largely credited to the freedom she enjoyed under the guardianship of her Uncle and Aunt in the town of Halifax.80 It was this education that served to set her apart from many of the “sweet, interesting creatures” she would take to bed through the course of her life, all of whom seemed to struggle with the moral soundness of their same-sex desire.
At age of twenty-three she begins the most passionate affair of her life, with Yorkshire doctor’s daughter Marianna Belcombe. In response to Marianna’s concerns of the “unnatural” quality of their relationship, Anne “observed upon my conduct and feelings being surely natural to me inasmuch as they were not taught, not fictitious but instinctive.”81This confidence was in part a result of her in-depth exploration of her sexual nature, which was a central goal of her zealous self-education. Anne Lister particularly relied on the classics and romantic writers. “On the most basic level, these provided her with the names and concepts for her desires, unavailable to most women of her time.”82 This inaccessibility stems from the fact that the explicitly homosexual versions of these texts were only available in Latin and Greek, with English translations often censored to the point of heteronormativity. “Much of her search for lesbianism involved reading between the lines for subtle hints of desire between women and imaginatively reworking heterosexual sources to fit lesbian relationships.”83 In this way, the classics provided a
“hidden, subterranean circuit of sexuality” which was largely inaccessible to women within this period.84
A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid written by Nicolas Courier in 1659, became famous in its previous French and Latin versions as a popular and graphic portrayal of
80 This is outlined most compellingly in Anna Clarks, ‘Anne Lister: Construction of Lesbian Identity.’ 81 Clark, Anna. "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity." Pp. 24 82 Clark, Construction of Lesbian Identity. Pp. 32 83 Clark, Construction of Lesbian Identity, Pp. 31 84 Clark, Construction of Lesbian Identity, Pp. 31. 25 lesbian sex. However, the English, and therefore more widely accessible, version of this work is
gutted of all sexual encounters that are not heterosexual and any mention of lesbian sex is
reduced to sisterly explorations and depictions of manual stimulation using hands and fingers are
painted as uncomfortable and silly. Highly educated women (like Lister) would have access and
ability to read Courier’s depiction of ecstatic and enthusiastic lesbian sex, wherein at one point
the main character refuses to cease the act of lovemaking until she is “dying of pleasure” at the
hands of her female lover.85 Even Lister herself had to summon all her relatively considerable
scholarly and financial resources to track down certain volumes, read in French and Latin to find
any references to sexuality between women.86
Lister seems to understand her unique access to the privilege of her academic scholarship, writing in May of 1824 that “Ladies, in general, have neither time nor opportunity to compete with men of college or liberal education.” She recalls that Elizabeth Brown, an early romantic interest of hers, is required to read ‘by stealth’ as her mother did not like to see her daughter
“poring over books.”87 This illustrates that class alone is an insufficient explanation for Lister’s
unique access to an intellectual education. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, women were
becoming increasingly active cultural producers and consumers, however their access to and
influence within economic, political and intellectual communities was still overwhelmingly
circumscribed by male power and authority.88
The way Lister’s friend Ms. Brown experienced upper-class privilege reinforces the idea that there is an unacknowledged diversity within upper class female experiences of agency. It further
85 Donoghue, Passions between Women, Pp. 198. 86 Clark, Construction of Lesbian Identity, Pp. 38. 87 Lister, Diaries (September 1818). 88 Valladares, Susan. "Teaching Guide For: Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen." Literature Compass 10, no. 11 (2013): 869-70. doi:10.1111/lic3.12110., 869 26 illustrates that female education in this period was still largely geared towards preparation for later occupations as wives and mothers. Even Anne’s private tutor, Mr. Knight suggested in 1818 that she abandon her scholarly efforts for endeavors more suited to a woman of her status89.
It is also important to recognize that as Anne’s economic condition improved, so did her access to the intellectual education she desired for herself. An example of this comes in 1826, with the “financial emancipation” she experienced in the wake of her Uncles’ death, when she purchased a complete set of Byron’s works which she had wanted for quite some time.90 This example reinforces the distinction between class and economic independence. As outlined in the introductory chapter of this work, economic independence greatly impacts how women of all classes experience wealth and agency. Though the death of her Uncle did not change Anne
Lister’s class, it did change the way she experienced the respectable boundaries of upper class femininity.
On the surface, Anne Lister worked consciously to portray herself as a respectable woman of the gentry. Yet as the oldest daughter of a retired captain turned gentleman farmer, the natural trajectory of Anne Lister’s life would have been that of genteel wife and mother. As discussed by scholars such as Judith Bennett and Amy M. Froide, Victorian ‘singlewomen’ like Anne Lister have been a neglected topic of scholastic research but have the potential to provide a great deal of insight into how economic independence affected female class experience within this period.
Many have credited Lister’s ability to avoid the ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ faced by many women of this period to her class position, stating that “Because she belonged to an old family, albeit one which was rather obscure and reduced, she faced fewer constraints on her behavior than she would have as a daughter of a father engaged in commercial or industrial
89 Lister, Diaries. (May 1818) 90 Lister, Diaries. (October 1822) 27 occupations.”91 This is no doubt true to some extent. However, as we see in her interactions with
other women, the confidence and knowledge to pursue her desires is a rarity even within her
same class, as is her ability to pursue her same-sex desires with the brazenness she demonstrates.
This is due primarily to her economic independence, which allowed her to fully manipulate
the legal ambiguity enjoyed by unmarried English women, who “could sell goods, contract debts,
loan money, transfer land, and otherwise manage their affairs as they best saw fit.”92 Because her inheritance allowed her to maintain her legal identity and economic autonomy, Lister likely had it easier than many other ‘singlewomen’ within this period. She was among those “wealthy heiresses who controlled their own destinies” and who ergo were “better able than other women to forego marriage.”93 Economic independence is thus a key factor in understanding Anne’s
unique experience of upper-class agency, particularly as she enjoyed it following the death of her
Uncle. She perhaps articulates this change most clearly in an entry made Monday April 3, 1826,
where she says, “It is my birthday and I have completed my thirty fifth year, I am my own
master.”94
Anne Lister in London
Anne Lister would find that her inheritance alone would not satisfy her hopes to rise into the
higher social networks she felt she belonged. Her attitude towards the ‘new money’ families of
Halifax did not improve following her Uncle’s death. One entry illustrates the stubbornness of
91 Clark, Construction of Lesbian Identity…Pp. 29 92 Bennett and Froide, Pp. 14. [See also Amy M. Froide, “Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewoman of Early Modern England”, Local Population Studies 68, spring 2002, pp. 27-41.] 93 Bennett and Froide, Pp. 6. 94 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest. Pp.168. 28 Anne’s attitude towards society in the town, and her desire to keep her family far above such
trivial matters. She writes:
[Anne’s sister] Marian, had a long and foolish talk with Tib, said she was eight and twenty and had never been at an Assembly and never had any society. She was stupefied to death, most go out more-should like to go to the assemblies here, with Mr Rawson, for instance, but I did not wish it. It was hard on her, my aunt and I were laughed at for our pride…I explained, said I always planned to bring Marian into proper society if she would wait patiently. She would be impolite not to wait now. Associating with those I would not would be foolish. It was not my fault she had no society. I could not help it. It was my father-had thrown himself and his children out of it [society] and all I had, I owed to myself.95
It is unclear whether Anne Lister ever made good on her promise to bring her sister into
“proper” society, only that she felt that the town where they lived was unworthy of her time and
attention. While she remained friendly with the Rawsons and the Saltmarshes, old families like
the Listers who owned one of the town’s mills, she continued to detest the owners of the large
factors built by industrialists like James Akroyd and John Holdsworth. Anne would watch the
growth of this new wealth with disdain, at one-point lamenting that “the affairs of the town are now quite in the hands of second-rate people.”96
It makes sense then, that a young woman of a good name, independent means and social
aspirations would turn her sights towards the fashionable circles of London. Her first solo visit
would take place en route to Paris in 1826. As part of her sightseeing, Anne had gained
permission from the magistrates at Hatton Gardens’ to see the treadmill at Cold Bath Fields
Prison. While later variations on the invention would be used for grinding food stuffs and other
functional purposes, the Treadmill at Coldbath-Fields was an earlier model constructed
specifically for English prisons beginning in 1818, the brainchild of penal philosophers who saw
95 Lister, Anne. (Monday 27 February, 1826). Pp. 161. 96 Liddington, Jill. Female Fortunes. Pp. 67. 29 hard labor as a corrective activity for convicts. It’s inventor, English engineer Sir William Cubitt,
saw his creation as an aid to “reform stubborn and idle convicts.97” However, the implementation
of the correctional device was not without controversy. Only two years before Anne’s visit,
Thomas Webbe, a surgeon, writes concerning the use of the Tread Mill at Coldbath-Fields
Prison. The letter tells us that it is written in response to an inquiry concerning any “bodily
mischief or inconvenience experienced by the prisoners working on the Tread Mill98”; in the
letter Webbe cites:
…two or three boys slightly sprained ankles; a few nights since a woman miscarried who had worked upon the Mill during the previous day; she made no complaint, nor was it known that she was pregnant, otherwise she would not have been put to that sort of labour…99
In 1862, The Criminal Prisons of London, and Scenes of Prison Life by Henry Mayhew
would include a chapter dedicated to the Tread Mill at Coldbath-Fields Prison, painting a
decidedly bleak depiction of men “grinding air.”100 While nothing strictly illegal or even
scandalous about Anne Lister’s visit to view the Treadmills, as a mechanical device designed to
punish inmates at an active prison, it was likely seen as an unusual point of interest for a
gentlewoman to visit in a round of sightseeing.
Her journals document the embarrassment she feels when her visit is published in the
newspapers, suggesting that she herself knew that her visit was a bit unorthodox. She writes in
97 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-you-wouldnt-want-be-put-treadmill-180964716/ 98 This is one of many letters from numerous prisons saved in Parliamentary Papers, Vol. 19 (House of Commons) entitled Correspondence Respecting The Use of Tread Wheels in Prisons. 99 Letter from Surgeon Thomas Webbe to Gentleman of the Committee, House of Correction, Coldbath-Fields. (January 8th, 1824). 100 Mayhew, Henry. Pp. 333. 30 one entry of Mr. Webb, who worked as the proprietor of the hotel she was staying in and
bringing up to her room…:
…a roast of mutton and a newspaper, asking if I would like to look at it. I casually answered “yes”. He said there was this business at Hatton Gardens in it. He had never thought of it getting into the papers and now it would be in them all. “Ah” said I, “the thought and fear of it struck me last night. I am very sorry for it” …At the moment I felt very terrified and annoyed at the idea of what a quiz it would be against me. Mr. Webb saw this, which was probably more than he expected. I soon, however, grew reconciled, as I always do and told Mr. Webb when he came in again, I could not help laughing at the thing…101
However, despite Anne’s decision to place the embarrassment behind her, it would reemerge when she ran into a set of acquaintances while in Paris:
They [Mr. and Mrs. Park] are going away in a month. I wonder what they would say of me, or if they will call. Somehow, I felt rather annoyed. I always doubt my own importance and if people are not civil in calling, etc. fancy they mean to cut, or not to know, me…102 This entry speaks to a recurring feeling of the anxiety Anne would feel throughout her life’s
attempts to mix in higher society. She seemed to recognize even then that the only way to fix it
was to build the social capital she did not yet possess…
I shall never feel right on this point til I am evidently in good society and rank, with good establishment. It immediately struck me that they had read this treadmill business and I felt annoyed but said to myself, ‘Well, all is for the best’.103
Her journal shows that this is just one example of her consistent embarrassments within the
“proud metropolis of my[her] country”104 Her journals during her time in London repeatedly
101Lister, Anne. (Saturday 28th August 1824. London) Pp. 10 102 Lister, Anne. (Saturday 3rd. October, 1824. Paris) Pp. 25 103 Lister, Anne. (Sunday 3 October, 1824. Paris.) Pp. 24 104 Diaries of Anne Lister (Thursday 26th August 1824. London) 9 31 confide her feelings of embarrassment. On one occasion she writes about her concerns over the state of her clothes. This was a point of contention throughout her journals, as new frocks were regularly budgetarily postponed in favor of books and travel. In her analysis of the Lister journal’s Helena Whitbread observes that “she was constantly the subject of criticism for her shabby and unfashionable wardrobe.”105 Anne Lister sums up her own feelings of inadequacy when faced with the elevated circles she had been so sure she belonged within, saying that she
“felt small and very uncomfortable to see.”106
Lister failed to find connections within the social circles of London, finding exchanges awkward even among women of similar station and making no progress with women who had the ability to improve her social prospects. “Lady Stuart de Rothesay passed me close…did not shake hands with me but did with Lady G[Gordan]. To be sure, the latter held out her hand and I seeing it was not wanted, did not.” Lady Stuart De Rothesay (born Elizabeth Margaret Stuart), was the wife of Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay. She was just the sort of connection
Lister had hoped to make, yet despite Anne’s best efforts, the Baroness took little interest in her.
As Lister writes in her journal, “I observed this to myself. She will never introduce me to people or profit me much by her especial notice in company as things are at present.”107
It seems that in her hopes to be accepted by the group, Anne did her best to give an inflated impression of her own wealth and status. This was part of a long trend of dissatisfaction, fueled by her perceived failure to find a comfortable home in the inflated circles she felt so entitled to.
“For Anne’s new sophisticated friends increased her dissatisfaction...her aristocratic ambitions already outstripped her modest estate income.”108
105 Whitbread, Helena. I Know, Pp. 14. 106 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest. Pp. 46. 107 Brothers, Hazel. Framing the Shibden Hall Portraits: a commission fulfilled by Anne Lister…pp. 115. 108 Liddington, 67. 32 At one point, she confesses to her diary that she “must go and live on bread and water-
whether I shall do so or not is doubtful.”109 While Lister possessed the class status to enter these
circles she lacked the social skills to find a comfortable home within them. She expresses a sense
of embarrassment over her lack of success with the women of fine society, revealing that she had
yet to share her lack of success with Marianna:
I said not a word to M-who thinks my fine people all coleur de rose to me. How little she dreams the truth. If she did would she be pleased? I fancy if I had more money, I could do better, but heaven orders all things rightly.110
While Anne Lister chalks her lack of social success in London to a deficiency in economic resources, this is clearly not the full story. As shown in Chapter 3’s exploration of Mary Berry;
one can find entry into these circles with limited financial resources- but only if they recompense
with a certain level of social competence. As it was, Anne eventually found her own cost of entry
to London’s social circles prohibitively expensive. An entry in her journal in 1832 reads that she
is, “resolved to give up all fine society schemes and planning…I may bury myself somewhere in
comfortable seclusion and study, and then I shall have enough for happiness.”111
Anne Lister Abroad and In Charge
As a Learned Lady, Lister was conscious of the role influential social connections and
importance played in facilitating her own public and private agency. Yet by all accounts she
stood by the decision to abandon her attempts to become a fixture in London society.
Disinterested in curating social capital within the circles of Halifax and unable to find the
necessary connections to reach her desired station of social importance in London, Anne Lister
109 Ibid. 110 Brothers, Hazel. Pp. 136. 111 Lister, Anne. (29 April 1832). 33 began to look outward. Scholars such as Jill Liddington have placed the 1830s as the start of
Anne’s life as a frequent traveler112, naming France in particular as of particular interest to
Lister. She would stay in Paris for long stretches of time, “gaining entre to aristocratic circles she
so keenly craved and searching for a lifelong companion among her wealthy women friends.”113
Economic independence and an absence of familial obligations already afforded her a great amount freedom regarding movement, meaning that Lister was in a unique position to find the social success that had evaded her at home elsewhere. She would regularly visit influential homes across France, Switzerland, and Italy- exhibitions that soon gave way to more adventurous pursuits. Mountaineering became a particular interest of hers and in 1830 she was the first woman to ascend Mount Perdu. She would trump this achievement when in 1838 she became the first man or woman to climb Mount Vignemale. Though little material is freely available concerning what she called her “wild but delightful wanderings”114 scholars of the
Lister diaries have acknowledged that travel enabled her access to circles she had no hope of
entering within England as she “socially-if not financially-entered aristocratic circles in the
1830s as a European traveler.”115
With Lister spending a significant amount of time abroad, she delegated much of the day-to-
day responsibilities of running her estate. However, even when hundreds of miles from Shibden,
she was determined to be kept informed in all aspects of her estate. The choice of James Holt as
the agent for her collieries was a choice made due to his reputation of practicality and
knowledgeability. Through him, Lister learned the basics of the business she had inherited, as
112 Liddington, Pp. 71. 113 Liddington, Jill. “Authority and Mining in an Industrial Landscape: Anne Lister 1791-1840”. History Workshop Journal, No. 42 (Autumn, 1996), Pp. 58-86. Pp. 66. 114 Whitbread, Helena. http://www.annelister.co.uk/annes-travels/ 115 Liddington, Jill. “Authority”. Pp. 71. 34 well as the shifting trends in demand within the local coal market. However, this trust was broken when Holt “rather disingenuously advised Anne that she should not begin [pulling coal from her collieries at] Mytholm till the coals on Swalesmore were done.”116 This process, Holt estimated, would take ten years. It was not lost on Lister that during these ten years, there would only be Holt and Mr. Rawson left to supply the town with coal. Holt had overplayed his hand, presuming that the inexperienced female heiress would take his advice blindly. As it turned out,
Lister had gathered outside local intelligence on her own that showed a rising demand for coal
(rather than the decline Holt had supposedly foreseen). Not to be “fobbed off by male rivals into waiting ten years while they reaped the profit,”117 Lister ultimately rejected Holt’s advice and instead expedited the process of expanding her enterprise. This illustrates that while Lister actively sought the advice of men within the coal industry, she was ultimately in control her own decisions made within her own enterprise.
It was around this time that Anne Lister halted her travels and returned to Halifax, where she would take an increasingly active role in managing her stake in the local coal-trade. Aware of the limitations of the learning curve she faced and having already been targeted for her ignorance,
Lister worked hard to pick the brains of local coal-owners such as Joseph Stocks, who proved a particularly useful source of information. Anne documents his input in her journal:
He sells his at 9d a load or corve [2 cwt] at people’s doors in Halifax, and this additional penny pays for leading [ie transport], for a cart (one horse?) will carry 14 corves [28 cwt] very well from his pits, it all being downhill. The Rawsons sell for 8d…Then the expense, said I, would not be 5d a corve. ‘Oh! Dear no’ what did he think my coals out to be worth an acre?...I then turned to my calculations. If the coal costs 3 ½ d a corve getting and hurrying, the clear gain would be 453.15s per acre….He thought I ought to have 300 per acre for my coal. He calculated it made 100 per acre difference whether the coals were pulled up [vertically] at a pit’s mouth or carried in a horizontal shaft. He said
116 John Lister, HG, LXVII, 30.9 &13.11. 1828. 117 Liddington, Jill. Gender, Authority and Mining. Pp. 67. 35 there had been a report that I meant to sell the coal in the Shibden estate by auction, and had that been the case, he should have been a bidder.118
While local coal owners repeatedly underestimated Anne Lister, she nonetheless maintained her edge over the local competition; particularly Christopher Rawson. She references their ongoing business rivalry on Monday December 24th, 1832: “Mr R- said he was never beaten but by ladies
and I had beaten him. Said I gravely, ‘It is the intellectual part of us that makes a bargain and that
has no sex or ought t[o] have none.”119
Lister’s last comment illustrates that while securing her economic independence was one
motive behind her dedication to business, there was another. For Lister, business was another
avenue through which she could publicly share the intellectual part of herself. This part of her, as she states, was not limited by the boundaries of female respectability, but existed outside the parameters of her sex (or, at least, ‘ought to’.)
In addition to her coal mining business and the management of her estate, there was another tether keeping Anne Lister at Shibden Hall for longer and longer stretches of time; Ann Walker, the daughter of a neighboring Halifax family. When attempting to solidify the match, finances were at the forefront of Lister’s mind. The beginning of their romance articulates this motivation most clearly, “Bordering on love-making in the hut…Our liaison is now established…I am reprovided for and the object of my choice have perhaps three thousand a year or near it- probably two thirds at her own disposal.”120
Throughout her life, Anne would choose financial security over love again and again. As
scholars such as Anna Clark have recognized, by the time Lister met Walker, the latter was not
118 John Lister, HG, LXXXIII, 21.7. 1832. 119 Liddington, Gender Authority and Mining, Pp. 69. 120 Liddington, Female Fortunes. Pp. 70. 36 so much looking for a wife or lover as she was “an equal partner who could match her money,
who could lobby politically her tenants and who could travel with her.” 121 Seeing Ann Walker
as perhaps her best opportunity to secure such a partner for herself, she overtly uses love-making to pressure Walker into solidifying their relationship, capitalizing on the guilt that Walker felt about their physical relationship by hinting, “that our present intercourse without any tie between us must be as wrong as any other transient connection.”122
Lister further solidified their union when drawing up her will in 1836, in which she
bequeaths her entire estate to ‘my friend, Ann Walker’ on the strict condition that if she married,
her claim to the estate ‘shall thenceforth cease…if it the said Ann Walker should have then
departed this life’. “With two York solicitors, Ann Walker now became a trustee-until death or marriage, when the estate would revert to a very distant male Lister relation from Wales, and so to his direct male heirs.”123 This is perhaps one of the most overt demonstrations of Anne
Lister’s unique privilege regarding romantic desire, able to live and legally provide for the
woman of her choosing. This too was afforded to her not strictly by class, but rather through a
combination of economic independence and through the manipulation of her legal status as an
unmarried woman.
While Lister had selected her partner in part because Walker had the financial means to
serve as her travel companion, she soon found that Walker had a nervous disposition unsuited to
and uninterested in extended travel.124Thus, Lister inadvertently found herself in something of a
holding pattern, eager to revisit the greener social pastures she had found abroad but largely
restricted to the town of Halifax. While Anne continued to see herself as largely above local
121 Anna Clark, Anne Lister’s Construction. Pp. 49. 122 Liddington, Female Fortunes. Pp. 70. 123 Liddington, Jill. Female Fortunes. Pp. 49. 124 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest. Pp. 206. 37 society, she did find a passion for using her influence (and Walker’s) to the betterment of her political interests. An avid supporter of the Tory party, Anne detested the growing Whig influence that accompanied the growing industrial society of Halifax. This was yet another way that she experienced agency in a manner that transcended the privilege of class. She was not simply a female canvasser who showed her political support through the color of her dresses, rather she used her status as a landowner to wield real political power within the community.
It is important not to mistake advantage for advocacy. Anne Lister did not hesitate to manipulate existing boundaries to increase her own voice and agency. However, she seemingly had no interest in expanding these freedoms to other women. She openly ridiculed the idea of the female vote at the time of Peterloo in 1819.125 In 1824, while in Paris, she declared to her friend
Ms. Barlow that for ladies, classical education “undrew a curtain better for them to not peep behind126.” While Lister did not consider herself bound by the same parameters of respectability as other women of her station, nothing in her behavior suggests that she thought these parameters should not exist for other women. She enjoyed and heavily utilized the political influence her and
Ann Walker’s property gave her in manners of local politics. One entry on 23rd July 1837 describes her efforts to collect votes for the Tory candidate from Ann Walker’s tenants:
With A (Ann Walker) to Hatter’s street tenant, Hinton, til 2.32, about A’s tenants: John Mallinson, Hartley, and Standeven. If A would be contented to let them split their votes: no! Better give a plumper for Wortley (The blue candidate ie Tory) and then talk about staying. Hinton said he could get twenty votes for 100 pounds. Then, I said, tell some of our committee. I think there are twenty blues who would be glad of the votes.127
125 Clark, Anna. “Construction”. Pp. 48. 126 Whitbread, Helena. No Priest. 19-10. 127 Lister, Anne. Diaries. (23rd July 1837) 38 Another example in the December election of 1832 shows the thought process behind her influence, when one tenant of hers tells her that:
they [Whigs?] had all been at him and some said they would not employ him again if he would not vote their way- but he told them how I wanted him to vote and seeming to care nothing about it but what he thought would oblige me.128
She seems pleased by this response. It also illustrates that in this case, the power Anne holds as a landlord is stronger than that held by the Whig supporters who hire him out. She ends the passage with the assertion that:
It is quite useless to leave such men as he uninfluenced. He knows nothing and cares nothing about it and is likely best satisfied with the idea of pleasing someone he knows.129
Scholars have recognized that as a landowner with fifty or so tenants, Anne Lister had more political influence then most voting men of Halifax.130 Her journals illustrate that she was fully aware of this influence and took a certain pleasure in wielding it to the betterment of her political interests.
Anne suffered a good deal of social ramifications for exercising this power. During the 1835
Halifax borough election, in which Lister was heavily active in her support of the Tory candidate, her political enemies used her relationship with Anne Walker in various attempts to discredit her; even going as far as to place false marriage announcements in the local paper celebrating the union of “Captain Tom Lister of Shibden Hall to Miss Anne Walker.”131Her long history of setting herself above Halifax’s “vulgar” new monied society likely made her an easy
128 Diaries of Anne Lister (Cited in Liddington, Jill. Pp. 69) 129 Ibid. 130 Liddington, Jill. Female Fortunes. Pp. 68. 131 Clark, Anna. Pp. 45. 39 target for such personal attacks. Though it was inarguably true that Anne “enjoyed far more
liberties than the middle-class women whom she so disdained,”132 her lack of social connections
within the town likely impeded her ability to act on these liberties publicly without persecution.
As other scholars have noted, Lister was far more socially powerful among the foreign
aristocratic circles she had integrated herself into in her time abroad. However, Walker’s
aversion to travel had largely limited the pair to short jaunts around England and two brief trips
to Europe. On June 20th, 1839; Lister finally managed to overcome Walker’s resistance and the
two set off for what was to be an extended tour of Russia, Persia and Turkey.
By analyzing the impact of economic independence, privacy and freedom of movement on her class experience, we begin to see a more complicated image of Anne Lister of Halifax than the one presented by earlier historians. More complicated also then the portrait painted by newspaper obituaries upon news of her death in Georgia-at this time one of the far south provinces of Imperial Russia, where she contracted a plague-like fever in the Fall of 1840. The
Halifax Guardian remembered her as resembling “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady
Hester Stanhope.” The Halifax Guardian went on to remember the lady of Shibden Hall as “like these celebrated women, after exploring Europe, she extended her researches to those oriental regions, where her career has been so prematurely terminated.”133 I imagine that Anne would
have been pleased enough by this verdict on her legacy, to be placed among a group of
adventurous and trail-blazing female travelers. It is also true that travel served as a formative
force in her life, allowing her increased public prestige as well as private agency. However, Anne
Lister was more than just an accomplished world traveler. She was a classically educated diarist,
132 Liddington, Jill. Pp. 72 133 (Halifax Guardian, 31st October 1840) 40 an influential political actor, the mistress of an expanded and profitable estate, an unapologetic and self-actualized lover of women, and above all, a learned lady.
41 CHAPTER 3
MARY BERRY: “LEARNED LADY” OR “LION-HUNTER”?
In his work ‘The Four Georges’ completed in 1862, William Thackeray recalls that he:
“knew familiarly a woman who had been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been
patted on the head by George I. This lady had knocked on Dr. Johnston’s door, had been intimate with Charles Fox, and the once beautiful Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. She had known the
Duchess of Queensberry in her old age at Douglas House, the patroness of John Gay and the one- time admired beauty of the Court of Queen Anne. I often thought as I took my old friend’s hand how with it I held on to the old society of wit and men of the world. I could travel back for seven score years of time- have glimpses of Beau Brummel, Selwyn Lord Chesterfield, Walpole,
Conway, Johnson, Reynolds, and Goldsmith and the fair Maids of Honour of George II’s court.”134
No scholar who addresses the topic would argue that Mary, almost always with her sister
Agnes in tow, would go on to lead anything less than an accomplished and fascinating life. Yet
most scholarship of the Berry sisters begins and ends with their friendship with the famously eccentric and well-connected Horace Walpole: youngest son of First Prime Minister Sir Robert
Walpole, former Member of Parliament, celebrated author and Earl of Orford. This friendship is
said to have been a source of joy and renewed vigor to the last eight and one-half years of
Walpole’s life. In his friendship with the Berry Sisters, Mary was Walpole’s clear favorite,
though he made a repeated point of assuring his equal love for both. He states in one of his letters
134 Beardmore, John. “Horace Walpole and the Berry Sisters” 42 B38 010, 2010 (Borough of Twickenham Local History Society, Paper number 89) 42 to Mary “I am delighted that my next letter is to come from wife the second [one of his many pet
names for Agnes]. I love her as much as you, and I am sure you like that I should. I should not
love either so much, if your affection for each other were not so mutual.”135
While Walpole was no doubt instrumental in the social, intellectual, and economic elevation
of Mary Berry; the role she played in her own advancement is too often neglected. Scholarship
has often written Berry off as a “Lion Hunter”136 or social climber, a skilled manipulator of an
advantageous circumstance she stumbled into by chance. In this section I argue that in fact
Berry, motivated at least in part by the lack of support provided by her own family and her need
to provide a respectable future for herself and her sister, was the true architect of her lasting
security and autonomy within the elite networks she was not born to but where she would remain
for most of her life.
Berry’s experience is indicative of a larger societal trend of Victorian upper-class
womanhood, whose members I have chosen to call the ‘learned ladies’. As with the other
subjects explored within this project, Mary Berry fails to meet existing classifications that exist
for women who enjoyed similar levels of intellectual, economic, and social agency. Despite her
multiple efforts in the fields of writing and drama, she should not be defined as a ‘romantic
genius’ or among the second coming of the ‘Blue Stocking’ circle- though she would certainly
interact with both social groups throughout her life. She did not obtain social agency through
virtuous pursuits of medicine or religious tutelage, which many women used to justify their
presence within the sphere of public influence. Rather, as a ‘learned lady’, Mary Berry purchased
135 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, June 30th, 1789. 136 This is a phrase used with almost universal frequency in reference to Mary Berry, one example being within the Volume The Grace of Friendship edited by Virginia Surtees; another being more recent works including Horace Walpole and the Berry Sisters by John Beardmore (2010) 43 her public and private agency through a combination of economic independence and social
capital obtained through her integration into multiple social networks of the period, and through
the eventual construction of her own salon-society.
Berry’s views on her own experience of womanhood are best articulated in her
autobiographical Notes of Early life. These writings give valuable insight into the life of Berry,
as she wanted to be remembered. Others have noted the care Berry took to distance herself from
her less than impressive family lineage. Mary Berry was tellingly silent on the topic of her
forebears, offering not even a passing mention of her grandfathers. Berry does mention one
figure in passing, saying that “My father was the maternal nephew of an old Scotch merchant of
the name of Ferguson.”137
This evidence, or rather this lack of evidence, illustrates the distance that Mary Berry is eager
to place between her own legacy and that of her family. The Uncle Ferguson that she mentions
made his fortune as a London merchant. Despite his allegedly humble heritage, he proved
successful in business and accumulated a fortune of 300,000 pounds by the time of his death, a
fortune that was to be claimed by his sister’s sons- Robert and William Berry- who would
become his heirs due to his childless marriage. Robert Berry would study to become a lawyer
before taking time off to travel, making his way across the continent. These travels were cut
short when he was requested back to England, presumably by his Uncle- who he relied on for financial support. His career in law was presumably abandoned, as Mary says “he seems never to have thought of more; nor was it thought necessary that he should.”138
137 Berry, Mary. Notes on Early Life (As compiled in The Berry Papers Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry (1763-1852). Ed. Lewis Melville (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914).) 138 Berry, Mary. Notes on Early Life. 44 Upon his return to England, Robert’s relationship with his Uncle and Benefactor would become increasingly strained. Mary seems to think that the divide between the two men derived from a difference in character, she writes “I can easily suppose his careless disposition, even to his own situation, his turn towards literature and literary society, little suited the hard, narrow mind of the man on whom his fortunes depended.” Robert Berry would further alienate his
Uncle with his marriage to Miss Seton in 1762, who despite coming from an old established
Scottish family, lacked any distinguishable fortune to bring into the marriage. In Mary’s words, her mother possessed “every qualification, beside beauty, that could charm, captivate, or attach, and excuse a want of fortune.”139
Ferguson would become increasingly disappointed by his nephew’s choice for a match when the marriage resulted in two daughters- Mary on March 16th, 1763 and Agnes a year later on May 29th, 1764. Mrs. Berry died in 1767 in child birth, along with the third Berry child.
Ferguson quickly became eager to have Robert remarry to a woman who could provide a male heir and thus ensure the legacy of his fortune. Robert’s refusal only deepened the already stark divide between him and his uncle. Robert’s younger brother William, however, would become a successful man of business and marry a well-dowered daughter from an established English house, with whom he had two sons in his first two years of marriage. Mary suggests in her records that her father’s brother saw Ferguson’s discontent with her father as an opportunity.
He soon perceived the carelessness of his older brother’s character, and how little it fell in, in any respect, with that of the old man, and how easily he could assimilate himself to all his views.140
139 Ibid. 140 Berry, Marry. Notes on Early Life. 45 However, as the source is a daughter who saw her father’s failure to secure this inheritance as
directly inhibiting her own future security, we cannot know if William indeed plotted to usurp
his older brother’s inheritance. Regardless, when Mary Berry was six years old, Ferguson
announced that he would continue Robert’s allowance of 300 pounds per year, but would make
William his sole heir. Mary Berry would harbor a life-long bitterness at the loss of this fortune, which she counted among the proof of her father’s weak character, “that he should not have seen the character, and obviated the conduct, of his brother before it was too late, during all the youth and middle of my life sorely afflicted me.”141
She describes her father’s actions as a “hereditary neglect of fortune” and states that this
neglect “has deprived us of what might, and ought to have been, our own,”142 It is important to
consider how this experience would shape Mary’s life-long understanding of wealth, and her
own feeling of helplessness in this instance to provide for herself. Following the death of her
Uncle, Robert Berry was awarded some 10,000 pounds with a supplemental annuity of 1,000
pounds per year provided by his younger brother. This annuity was only enforced for the
duration of Robert’s life, with no consideration paid to the ongoing welfare of his daughters, a
point that Mary “took great grievance with.”143
It is telling that Mary, despite her obvious disgust over the perceived injustice of the
arrangement, did not advise or seemingly think that her father was in a position to deny either.
Her description of her father is not that Mr. Berry was a cruel man, but rather a weak one. She
consistently refers to her fathers “easy, inefficient character”144 with a sort of detached
141 Berry, Mary. Notes on Early Life. 142 Mary Berry, Journals and Correspondence, i. 377 143 Melville, Lewis. Pp. 10. 144 Mary Berry, Journals and Correspondence, i. 378. 46 exasperation. These episodes in Mary’s early life illustrate how she formed her understanding of wealth, painting the portrait of a woman who understood financial means as being directly related to her own ability to live the way she wanted. This was particularly true in regard to her own desire for proper education. After the departure of their first and only governess at age seven, the Berry sisters were largely responsible for their own education. Mary would credit to
Ferguson for this predicament, for letting her father “starve on an allowance of 300 pounds a year.”145 However, it can be argued that Mr. Berry could have, even on such a small income
“might certainly, at the price of some small sacrifice of comfort, have spared the wages of a governess.”146 It seems more likely that Robert, like his Uncle, saw little to be gained by investing in the education of his daughters.
The Berry sisters would instead have to settle for the inadequate academic encouragement of their grandmother, who would live with the Berry family throughout the sisters’ childhood. She focused predominantly on religious instruction; having the girls read aloud every morning from the psalms and the bible. Every weekend, however, she would also have Mary and Agnes read from The Spectator. The style of early education provided to the Berry sisters was thus limited to that expected of a daughter of the middle-classes.
Later documentation shows that Mary eventually became accomplished in various fields of classical education- including speaking and writing fluently in French and Latin, reading and analysis of various classic and contemporary works, and even going on to dabble in formal writing of history and drama (though admittedly without much success). While the later support and mentorship of Mr. Walpole likely assisted in these endeavors, we will see that upon his
145 Mary Berry, Notes on Early Life. 146 Melville, Lewis. Pp. 9-10 47 meeting of the sisters, they were already educated in a way that was sufficient enough to garner
his respect and interest. The most likely conclusion is that Mary was the architect of her own
education, along with her future financial security and social capital -largely without the assistance or interest of her early familial influences.
Upon the death of Ferguson in 1781, Robert received his meager inheritance, bringing his annual income to 1500 pounds a year, enough to pass for rich, if not enough to actually be so.
The one way that he surely contributed to the education of his daughters was through travel. In
1782, he took his daughters on a tour through the west of England and in the subsequent years their travel became farther and more diverse; first to Holland, then Switzerland and Italy. On a trip to Florence in 1782, Mary began her journals, and it is in these that we find the clearest articulation of Mary’s assessment of her own condition. Mary had long ago lost hope that Robert
Berry would be of any assistance in securing the “success and happiness of his two motherless daughters.”147 Mary seemed to understand that the men in her family had neither interest in nor
ability to secure a future for herself and her sister. “I began to feel my situation, and how entirely
dependent I was on my own resources for my conduct, respectability and success.” In respect to
her education, her economic situation, her societal prospects and her own quest for personal
happiness and fulfillment- Mary Berry saw herself in every sense as, by necessity, a ‘self-made’
woman. While the generosity of Horace Walpole’s friendship would provide Berry with
economic and social capital, it is important to recognize the role Mary played in her own
elevation. Five years before meeting the man who would provide so much of the material record
of her life, Berry recognized that “the society in which I was to live, depended entirely on my
147 Berry, Mary. Notes of Early Life and Miss Berry’s Journals and Correspondence, i. 12. 48 own exertions.”148 Next, I will explore how her “lively sense of everything that was
distinguished” and the “greatest desire to distinguish [her]self”149 would contribute to Berry’s
success in obtaining the economic independence and social agency that would elevate a middle-
class daughter of no name or fortune into the ranks of Victorian England’s ‘learned ladies’.
A literature review released in 1865150 describes Walpole as the Berrys’ met him as being “a
little weary of the world, or he affected to be so. Man delighted not him, nor woman neither. He
had fallen into the belief of unbelief in the men of his old age.” At seventy-two, the once vibrant
man was now suffering the plight of the survivor, with many of his long-term friends dead and little excitement left to fill his remaining days. “The world had been to him as a picturesque comedy, of which he had detected all the poverty of plot, and the actors in which he had long laughed.”151
In Chapter two, it is shown that Yorkshire woman Anne Lister secured economic security
and independence through the will of her Uncle. Lister would write in her journal that her
beneficiary did not generally believe in leaving estates in the hands of women, and that “were I
other than what I am, he would not have left his [fortune] to me.”152
Similarly, Horace Walpole, a constant within the elite social scenes of London and abroad throughout his life, had crossed paths with more than his fair share of virtuous and interesting women of character and talent; carrying on intellectual friendships with the likes of Hannah
More, Elizabeth Montagu and others. This is not even to mention those women within his own
148 Berry, Mary. Journals and Correspondence, i. 12. 149 Berry, Mary. Notes on Early Life. 150 The Atenaeum’s 1865 Literature review of Lady Theresa Lewis’s Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry (published about a decade after Mary’s death) 151 The Anthenaeum, Saturday, September 23rd 1865. Literature Review of Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry. From the Year 1783 to 1852. Edited by Lady Thresa Lewis. 3 vols. (Longmans & Co). 152 The Journals of Anne Lister, as compiled by: Whitbread, Helena. I Know my Own Heart. 49 family, such as his beloved niece Anne Seymour Damer- who we will discuss more fully later in this chapter. It is telling that it was Mary, and to a lesser extent her sister Agnes, that captivated the old man so completely in the latter stages of his life.
Mary Berry was twenty-five when she first met seventy-two-year-old Walpole. The first time Walpole crossed paths with the sisters, he could not have known the significant role they would play in the twilight years of his life. In fact, he would deny an invitation to be introduced to them at all, saying “The first night I met them, having heard so much in their praise that I concluded they would be all pretension.”153
This passage suggests that Mary was already building a reputation for herself within the
networks of London’s elite even without the assistance of the man who would become her most
valuable social ally. It would not be until their second meeting, in the winter of 1787-88 that the
acquaintance would begin in earnest; in a very small company gathered at the home of Banker’s
wife Lady Herries. Mary’s ongoing presence at these gatherings speaks to the fact that she had
already found some success in English society’s networks of well-off women, repeatedly placing herself in rooms where a daughter of a middling family of no name or fortune could claim no natural entitlement to an invitation; and more importantly thriving within these circles as a subject of compliments and praise by the people who would become her peers. Mary Berry was already building social capital needed to move beyond the class designation of her birth, when on that faithful night Walpole “sat down next to Mary, and found her an angel both inside and out”154
153 Letter from Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, dated October 11, 1788. (Horace Walpole, Letters (ed. Cunningham), ix. 152) 154 Letter from Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, dated October 11, 1788. (Horace Walpole, Letters (ed. Cunningham), ix. 152) 50 Along with the social connections obtained by Berry prior to her meeting Walpole, it is
equally important to consider Walpole’s first accounts of Mary as an intellectual. His earliest
observations are extremely telling. Particularly noting that she lacked early access to an
intellectual education. When describing his new acquaintance, Walpole marvels at her
understanding of Latin, describes her as a “perfect Frenchwoman in her language”, and as being
“qualified to talk on any subject.”155
Walpole’s immediate acknowledgement of Mary as a woman of respectable intellect
illustrates that while she would benefit from the access and tutelage Walpole (and as we will see
later, Anne Damer) would provide; Mary’s foundational education was to a large extent her own
accomplishment, an early demonstration of agency and ability which counts her among the
privileged status of ‘learned lady’. Thus, just as Anne Lister would not have been granted her
Uncle’s faith and ultimately the responsibility of his inheritance is she were other than “what she
was”, we must acknowledge that Mary would likely not have benefitted so extensively from
Walpole’s kindness and generosity if she were any less than what she already was upon their
meeting; thus proving that Mary’s ultimate public and private agency, while facilitated in part by
her friendship to the Earl of Orford, cannot and should not be entirely credited to him.
Early in the increasingly intimate friendship between Horace Walpole and the sisters he
would repeatedly address as his “beloved spouses”; the elder man would invite them to come and
see his infamous printing-press at Strawberry Hill, a point of great personal pride. This visit to
Walpole’s deliberately “gothic” estate near Twickenham, Middlesex would be the first of many
by the Berrys’, accompanied by their father for decorum’s sake (though Robert Berry was
155 Letter from Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, dated October 11, 1788. (Horace Walpole, Letters (ed. Cunningham), ix. 152-3) 51 infamously likely to doze off at some point in the countless long and animated discussions which
would take place between his daughter’s and the older gentleman who would become the
family’s benefactor). This first visit would prove indicative of the doting nature of his friendship
with the two young women, and with Mary in particular. Walpole recalls to his friend Lady
Ossory in a letter marked October 19th, 1788 that he “recollected my gallantry of former days”156
on behalf of the occasion, surprising the girls with the following stanzas ready set in the press
upon their arrival:
To Mary’s Lips has ancient Rome Her purest language taught, And from the modern city home Agnes its pencil brought.” Rome’s ancient Horace sweetly chants Such Maids with lyric fire; Albion’s old Horace sings nor paints- He only can admire. “Still would be his press their fame record, so amiable the pair is! But, ah! How vain to think his word Can add a straw to Berrys!157
Apparently, the old man’s self-described attempt at ‘gallantry’ was well received, as the next
morning he received a response from Mary Berry, who he refers to in a letter recounting the
experience as “the Latian nymph.”158 This endearment is yet another indication of how impressed Walpole was with Mary’s intelligence, and particularly her mastery of Latin, even from the early days of their relationship. As explored in chapter one, Anne Lister used her knowledge of Latin to access resources which assisted in her self-construction of sexual
156 Walpole, Horace. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Vol. 11, “Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry and Barbara Cecilia Seton”. Vol. 1. Edited by W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace. (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1944) 157 Scrapbook containing various documents printed at Strawberry Hill, including Playbill for ‘Fashionable Friends’. Lewis Walpole Library Archive. (Quarto 33 30, Copy 6) 158 Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, 19 Oct. 1788 52 identity159. Further, knowing how to read and write sufficiently in French and Latin was a means
for women to gain access to academic resources traditionally reserved for men; and a benchmark
of the masculine academia mastered by these ‘Learned Ladies’. Mary used her knowledge of
Latin to assert her own intelligence and demonstrate her value as a worthy companion. She
would later use her mastery of literature and language to cultivate her position as a benchmark of
salon culture within the elite circles of Victorian London. Mary showed both her social aptitude
and cleverness in her response to Walpole’s flattering prose"
Had Rome’s famed Horace thus addrest His Lydia or his Lyce, He Had ne’er so oft complain’d their breast To him was cold and icy. “But had they sought their joy to explain, Or praise their generous bard, Perhaps, like me, they had tried in vain, And felt the task too hard160
This exchange marks the beginning of the friendship between Horace Walpole and Mary
Berry. Of his own state in life, Walpole had once said “Dowagers as plenty as flanders inhabit all
round me,” referring to the death of his many old friends.161 It seemed that his new friendship with the Berry sisters would serve to fill the void they had left behind. Over the next eight and a half years, their friendship would be documented in perhaps thousands of letters. These illustrate a relationship between a doting, adoring and aggressively generous benefactor, who refers to himself often as “your doubly constant husband” and a young girl eager to please the man whose friendship and praise had “occasioned half a dozen others in which [the Berry’s] name and praises had been payd[sic].”162This observation by Mary alludes to how her newfound favor and
159 Clark, Anna. Construction of Lesbian Identity. 160 Scrapbook containing various documents printed at Strawberry Hill, including Playbill for ‘Fashionable Friends’. Lewis Walpole Library Archive. (Quarto 33 30, Copy 6) 161 Surtees, Virginia. The Grace of Friendship: Horace Walpole and the Misses Berry (GET YEAR, PUBLISHER) 162 Letter from Mary Berry to Horace Walpole, November 1st, 1788 53 friendship with Walpole translated quickly into increased social capital and belonging within the circles she had previously only visited.
Introductions and invitations by Walpole into the inner sanctum of the English elite was likely the most enduring of all the many gifts he bestowed upon the Berrys’, as these would solidify a place of importance within society that would endure for the remainder Mary’s life; securing herself and her sister the stability and station her own family failed to provide.
Perhaps among most important introduction made by Walpole would be that of his niece,
Anne Seymour Damer. Chapter four will explore Damer’s own experience of fluctuating class designation as it interacts with economic independence and social capital to facilitate her own experience of agency. Central to this analysis is the role social capital played in maintaining
Damer’s respectability as a failed marriage gave way to the stigma of separation and then, through the scandal of John Damer’s suicide, widowhood; a trajectory which would erode her fortune but would ultimately result in her own social and economic emancipation; achieved in part through the economic independence she secured in her work as a trained sculptor.
In reference to her well documented friendship with Mary, Mrs. Damer says “I have not, it is true, been accustomed to the charm of real friendship, but my own heart has taught me it’s value. Rest assured that, could you know to what degree you contribute to the comfort, even the repose of my mind, your utmost good nature would be more than satisfied.”163 The two would exchange hundreds of letters throughout the course of their friendship, each filled with similar platitudes and passionate declarations of mutual affection and dedication. Concerning letters written between the Hon. Mrs. Damer and herself, Mary Berry wrote in 1842:
163 Letter written from Anne Seymore Damer to Mary Berry; October 10th, 1790. 54 These letters, selected from at least a hundred others, I cannot bring myself to destroy. I cannot for my soul obliterate all memory of the truest, the most faithful and most generous friendship that ever animated two human beings.164 The romantic and adoring language used in these letters is often emblematic of the frequently
studied passionate friendships that often existed between Victorian women. While some scholars
(and contemporary critiques) wonder whether their relationship ever moved beyond friendship
into the realm of physical desire, this is a question that goes beyond the scope of this paper.
Though I would argue that the women who I have chosen to name ‘learned ladies’, in their
enjoyment of public agency, choice in romantic desire, and the masculine privilege of privacy
serve as logical subjects for further explorations of lesbian potential.165
What we can say for certain is that Horace Walpole resented the closeness between his niece and his “first wife”, and that Damer was frequently annoyed by her uncle’s resentment and monopolization of Berry’s time and attention166; a state she refers to frequently as his “jellies”.
“A Firmness That Nothing Shakes”: Mary Berry, Agency and Travels Abroad
In no case were Walpole’s “jellies” more on display than when the Berry’s left England for
extended periods of travel. Used to their close proximity and compulsory Sunday visits,
Walpole’s anxiety at the Berry’s absence begins almost the moment they left. The first example
is their trip to Florence in 1789, Mary’s first time returning there since the tour which followed
Robert’s initial inheritance following his Uncles death. On her absence, Walpole writes “I am
more an old Fondlewife than I suspected, when I could put myself into such a fright on not
hearing from you exactly on the day I had settled I should- but you had promised to write from
164 Melville, Lewis. viii 165 This term is borrowed from the scholarship of Judith Bennett and her study of lesbian potential within periods predating the construct. 166 This is reminiscent of the ‘Triangle of Desire’ Illustrated in Deborah Cohen’s work (See Deborah Cohen . Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013.) 55 the road.”167 Complaints about a lack of writing, though Mary and Agnes would both correspond quite regularly, were constant themes in Walpole’s letters while the Berrys’ were abroad. On
July 19, 1789 he declares that “such unwriting wives I never knew!”
It should be noted that, even as his generosity contributed to the funding of the Berrys’ repeated journeys abroad, there was never a question as to whether they should go where and when they meant to. He states in a rare letter to Robert Berry in December of 1790, “Nay, can I be so unjust as to wish to shorten their stay in a country to which that are so partial?” It is clear that Robert Berry is also not in control of the itinerary, writing to his friend Bertie Greatheed while on the same trip referenced by Walpole, he says “My daughters not choosing to form any liaison with some of our countrywomen who are here at present, nor to give offence by shunning their company, made us resolve to spend the three winter months [at Pisa], and to return to
Florence in March.”168 These passages are telling in two ways, first in that they clearly illustrate that neither their lonely Benefactor back at Strawberry Hill, nor their Father (required to accompany the women abroad in the capacity of chaperone in order to maintain their respectability) had influence over Berry’s wishes in regard to travel. Based on further correspondence within the same period, Mary was above all the mastermind regarding their expeditions.
This illustrates that despite his influence over Mary and his position as her social and fiscal benefactor, Walpole did not have the ability to will Mary back to his side. Regarding travel, she exercised agency both privately (where she went and when) and publicly (whom she saw while there). This letter from Robert Berry also illustrates the growing social capital Mary cultivated in
167 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mary Berry: June 30th, 1789 168 Surtees, Virginia. Pp. 73. 56 her travels abroad, and her navigation of female social networks that now surpassed the English
border.
Her choice to stay at Pisa to grow these relationships was her own, placed ahead of the
interests of both her father and the benefactor who expressed his fervent desire for their return in
every letter he sent. While in Italy they would consort with noble families, frequently attend the
ballet, balls and other forms of aristocratic entertainment;169all indications that Mary had
successfully cast off her middling roots and found a place amongst the Victorian elite- all with
Horace Walpole several hundred miles away.
However, the older man could not pretend to be angry with his beloved friend, despite his
obvious anger at her extended absence. “I cannot be disappointed.” He writes to Mary from
London on February 4th, 1791:
You have a firmness that nothing shakes- and therefore it would be unjust to betray your good nature into any degree of insincerity. You do nothing that is not reasonable and right, and I am conscious that you bore a thousand times more from my self-love and vanity…” he goes on to support Mary in her decision to stay on abroad saying “I now wish you take no one step, but what is comfortable to your views, interests, and satisfaction. It would heart me now to interfere with them.170 With her benefactor’s begrudged blessing, Mary (with Agnes ever in tow) would continue to
enjoy the social scene of Florence and Pisa. An entry in her travel journal marked only “1791”
states here intentions upon her return. “After winter between Florence and Pisa, return home in
November, take possession of little Strawberry Hill.” However, much to Walpole’s chagrin,
travel plans would change, and It was around the time of their intended return to England that
Mary informed Walpole of their plans to return via Paris.
169 Surtees, Virginia. Pp. 74. 170 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mary Berry: February 4th, 1791 (Letters and Correspondence of Horace Walpole) 57 Walpole was horrified that they should think of traveling across France in the unsettled
state of the country, which was in the throes of its revolution. In a letter dated September 18th of
1791 he wrote Mary:
I am vain in my attachment to two such understandings and hearts; the cruel injustice of fortune makes me proud of trying to smooth one of her least rugged frowns; but even this theme I must drop, as you have raised a still more cruel fear! You talk uncertainly of your route thro’ France and it’s borders, and you bid me not be alarmed! Oh! Can you conjure down that apprehension! I have scarce a grain of belief in German armies marching against the French, yet what can I advise who know nothing but from the loosest reports? Oh! I shall abhor myself-yes, abhor myself!- if I have drawn you from the security of Florence to the smallest risk, or even inconvenience. May dearest friends, return thither, stay there, stop in Switzerland, do anything but hazard yourselves. I beseech you, I implore you, do not venture tho’ France, for tho’ you may come from Italy, and you have no connection of any sort on the whole continent, you may meet with incivilities and trouble, which even pretty women, that are no politicians, may be exposed to in a country so unsettled as France is at present. If there is truth in my soul, it is that I would give up all my hopes of seeing you again, rather than have you venture on the least danger of any sort. When a storm could terrify me out of my senses last year, do you think, dearest souls, that I can have any peace till I am sure of your safety? And to risk it for me! Oh! Horrible! I cannot bear the idea!171 Despite Walpole’s frantic pleas, the Berrys would not alter their plans, illustrating once again
the agency they enjoyed in travel and movement, undelegated even by their adoring and
powerful benefactor. For her part, in a letter written to Mary on October 4th, 1791, Anne Damer
supported the decision of her friend, saying “I still think it likely that you may come through
France, and as far as I can judge, wish it. Upon the whole a little time passed in Paris will amuse
you; all there is quiet.”172
Damer seems to also play a role in keeping Walpole’s anxieties concerning the safety of the
two sisters at bay, mentioning in a letter to Mary on October 18th, 1791 that she believed “Our
171 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mary Berry: September 18th, 1791. (Letters and Correspondence of Horace Walpole) 172Letter from Anne Damer to Mary Berry (Mss. 37727.f.24.), (78) 58 friend” the title she often used to refer to Walpole in her letters to the Berrys “does not seem to
be alarmed about your carriage, and suspects nothing. I, of course, encourage this good
disposition.”
The Berry’s would successfully arrive in Paris ten days later on October 28th, where they
stayed at the Hotel de Bourbon through November, when they made their way back to their
house in North Audley street in London. It was around this time that Horace Walpole gave the
Berry sisters possession of his secondary estate at Twickenham, Cliveden-which would become known under the Berrys’ inhabitance as ‘Little Strawberry Hill’. In their freedom and financial ability (provided in part by Walpole’s generous offer to draw money as needed from his account at his Charing Cross banker173) to travel freely in this period, even against the wishes of both her
father and her benefactor, illustrates that Mary has at this point gained access to a level of agency
far beyond the scope of most women of her background. We also see in this period that her
public agency and social capital were greatly increased by her integration into social networks of
aristocratic women who were also traveling abroad. However, Mary’s agency and control over
her own movement across the continent- often in direct opposition with her male patron and her
father, speaks to the level of agency she enjoys and contributes to her designation as a ‘learned
lady’.
For his part, Walpole was delighted to finally have his ‘beloved wives’ back in England. It is
likely that establishing the Berrys’ at Little Strawberry Hill was far less so a case of charity and
far more about having them so close after missing them for so long. This is evidenced by the
interruption in the elderly man’s own travel routine.
173 Surtees, Virginia. Pp. 79. 59 He stayed on at Strawberry Hill longer than usual that year, leaving for London only when the Berrys’ chose to do the same. This once again illustrates that when it came to the movement of both herself and those in her company, Mary exercised a great deal of agency; far beyond that of most heiresses or married women, who would have depended on their family or husband’s money in the same way Mary still, at this point, depended on Walpole’s. However, Mary’s experience of Victorian womanhood fits into neither of these categories; the agency she expresses here and in other avenues of her life; and the economic independence she will secure following the death of her father and Walpole, combine to make Mary Berry an unorthodox example of an upper-class Englishwoman I argue is best defined by the paradigm of ‘learned lady’; wherein public and private agency are derived not from virtue or genius, but from autonomous economic and social access; factors which this work argues should be considered equally alongside class designation when attempting to understand a woman’s actual position and experience within English society.
Another way in which Mary Berry’s public and private agency has been overlooked is as it was exercised in her romantic choices and the unique freedom she enjoyed in regard to her pursuit of desire. As we see has been the case in various aspects of Mary’s life, most scholarly interest has gone towards the speculation of perceived romance with her benefactor himself,
Horace Walpole. While Walpole’s own eccentric brand of masculinity and questions of his sexual preferences have been well explored by modern scholarship174, there is still some debate
as to the nature and intent of his affections for the eldest Berry Daughter. In 1792, Walpole
would succeed his nephew and officially obtain the Earldom of Orford. Walpole had no intention
174 One of the best examples of this is the ongoing work of George E Haggerty. See specifically his Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century. (Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2011) 60 of taking his seat in the House of Lords, as he was truly beginning to feel his old age, increasingly struggling with his crippling gout. He felt that an attempt to rejoin government formally would only make him appear “ridiculous”175 On the topic of his newfound position, he writes:
An estate and an earldom at seventy-four! Had I sought them or wish’d them, ‘twould add one fear more- That of making a countess when almost fourscore. But Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of Season, Though unkind to my limbs, has still left me my reason; And whetehr she lowers or lifts me, Ill try In the plain simple style I have liv’d in, to die: For ambition too humble- for meanness to high.176
He sees this appointment, so late in life, as a cruelty and a burden, but recognizes that he now has the capacity to make a countess of a woman, should he choose to marry. After his death,
Mary Berry would mimic these observations to many within her social circles, claiming that
Walpole in his last years “had offered to marry her in order to leave her a countess and a jointure”177 We have no way of knowing whether Walpole ever seriously considered actually marrying the woman he so frequently referred to as his spouse; all we can know for certain is that the marriage never came to pass. However, I argue that scholars have neglected to recognize the extent to which the choice not to marry was likely not Walpole’s alone. I argue that Mary
Berry recognized, as Walpole likely did, that such a marriage would not have served her long- term social interests, even if it would have been financially beneficial.
175 Surtees, Virginia. Pp. 133. 176 Walpole, Horace. “Epitaphium VIVI Auctoris,1792. 177 Beardmore, John. Pp.13. 61 In his first mention of meeting the Berry sisters, in his letter to Lady Ossory in 1788 we see that Mary made no attempt to shield Walpole from her humble beginnings. In the letter, Walpole recounts that Robert Berry was “totally disinherited”178 by his merchant benefactor. His constant financial support of the Berrys’ throughout their friendship is done gladly and often with bullying enthusiasm, finding joy in providing his “twin wives” with every possible “trifling service.”179 This is further evidenced in his letter to Robert Berry in December 22, 1790, written about providing the Berry’s the indefinite use of Little Strawberry Hill and the other financial assistance. Here he tells Robert Berry, often addressed in letters as his “father-in law” that he:
…should be vexed at your thinking it necessary to thank me for an affection, by which I am certainly the greater gainer. At my great age, and decrepit as I am, what could happen so fortunate to me, as to meet you and your daughters…180 While it is clear that the Berry’s personal lack of name or fortune was known to Walpole; and did nothing to dampen his affection for them, and for Mary in particular-Walpole might have held some concern as to what such a marriage, to a woman of lower station and in the midst of his old age, would do to impact his own legacy and Mary’s future respectability.
This concern may have been well placed; as evidenced in a letter written a full century after the initial meeting of Walpole and the Berry sisters. In 1888, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe wrote to the Duke of on the topic of his research of the now deceased but still infamous Horace
Walpole. He recounts visiting a club where he was shocked to find that “the grandfather of these heroines [The Berrys’] was nothing more than a tailor at Kircaldy, one of whose sons changed his name to Ferguson…” The unearthing of the Berry’s less than noble heritage, which as we have shown Mary took great pains to distance herself from, was mocked by the nobleman, who
178 Letter from Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, October 11th, 1788. 179 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, February 12, 1791. 180 Letter from Horace Walpole to Bobert Berry, December 22, 1790. 62 went on to imagine Walpole’s reaction to what he imagined was an unknown revelation. “… the
amusing thing is, to think of Lord Orford’s horror had he married either of the ladies, and then
discovered the goose in the Countess’s pedigree!.. Imagine the new Countess…announcing her
crime to her husband…” Sharpe mocks, “‘Hear, tell and tremble! Horace, thou didst clasp a
tailor’s gosling!’ The Count Swoons in the Countess’s arm and an earthquake shakes all the
baubles at Strawberry Hill!”181 Through his letters, his numerous publications, his careful
cataloguing of those things he owned, and loved-we know Walpole as a man who was deliberate
in his “construction of himself”182 and acutely aware of his legacy. We see in earlier exchanges
between the two that Mary was often concerned with public perception of her unorthodox
friendship with an elderly bachelor.
In December of 1791, their letters mention “some mischievous journalist report”183 which
essentially painted Mary as a lion-hunter (a legacy that would, as we have seen, haunts her
legacy even in modern scholarship); who pursued a friendship with Walpole out of self-interest
rather than affection. It is likely, given the timing of the report’s publication, that it was the result
of the sister’s acceptance of Walpole’s gift of ‘Little Strawberry Hill’ for the duration of their
lives. In a letter written to Walpole on December 9th, 1791; Mary makes her anguish known. She
says, “I did not like to show you, nor did I myself feel while with you, how much I was hurt by
the newspaper. To be long honoured with your friendship and remain unnoticed, I knew was
impossible, but to have it imagined, implied, or even hinted, that the purest friendship that ever
181 C.K. Sharpe, Letters, II. 550. Concerning the alleged proposal of marriage by Walpole, see Vol. I. of that work. 182 Haggerty, 3. 183 It is not surprising that the report in question has been presumably lost, at least in the collections of Berry and Walpole, considering how angry it made all parties involved. 63 actuated human bosoms should have any foundation…in interested motives…all this I confess I
cannot bear.”
She goes on to address the topic of Cliveden (now ‘Little Strawberry Hill’), alluding to
possibly rejecting or returning this gift for the purpose of maintaining the reputation of their
friendship. “I shall think we have perpetual reason to regret the only circumstance in our lives
that could be called fortunate- the only one that I thought happy.”184 Walpole would respond to
both this letter and their mention in the “vilest of all tribunals, the newspapers” by comforting
Mary with assurances of his own faith in her and in the purity of their friendships. “I see you are
too proud to like to be obliged to me, though you see that my greatest and only pleasure I have
left is to make you and your sister a little happier if I can.”185 This exchange is important in that
it illustrates that Mary had her own concerns about the way the public might view her
relationship with Walpole, and the impact that these views might have on her own social capital
and respectability. It is interesting also to consider that Berry had hoped the extent of the
friendship between them would continue to go “unnoticed” by those outside of their own
fashionable circles. Despite scholars often depicting it as Walpole’s choice to keep the eldest
Berry his “beloved spouse” in name only, Mary very well might have been equally concerned about the impact a marriage to a much-older benefactor would have on her own legacy and respectability. It serves to ask ourselves, what good is being a Countess if your husband and primary defender are soon dead, your humble heritage (so carefully hidden) is exposed for all of
England to see and your reputation is that of an opportunist and grave-robber?
184 Mary, Berry. Letter to Horace Walpole from Mary Berry. December 9th, 1791. 185 Walpole, Horace. Letter to Mary Berry from Horace Walpole. December 11, 1791. 64 This argument is further served by a letter written by Mary Berry to an unknown friend on the topic of Walpole’s life-long hesitance to marry, a choice Berry defends. “And why should he?
When, without the ridicule or trouble of a marriage, he enjoys almost as much of my society and every comfort from it.” It is important to notice Mary’s association of marriage with “ridicule” and “trouble”, as it reinforces the argument that she thought a marriage between the two of them would lead to both. She goes on to say that “Was the willing offering of a given heart, the time and attentions I bestow upon him have hitherto given me pleasure. Were they to become a duty, and a duty to which the world would attribute to interested motives, they would become irksome.”186 This letter serves to support the larger argument in that Mary seems to recognize that a marriage to Walpole would not be in her best interest, and would make her the object of ridicule in a society she had worked so hard to integrate herself within. This illustrates Mary’s knowledge that the maintenance of her own respectability and position within the social networks that had provided her access to increasing private and public agency would be disrupted by the scandal of such an unorthodox marriage.
I argue that this is just one example, among those we have already explored, where Mary’s own autonomy within her relationship with Walpole has gone unrecognized but reveals itself when approached through the paradigm of the ‘learned lady’, where class distinction needs to be considered in conjunction with economic independence and social capital. Marrying Walpole would have increased her class distinction but would have undoubtedly limited her agency in regard to economic independence (through the regulations of her station and the fusing of her assets formally with her would-be husband’s) and in regard to social capital- as the scandal of marrying her much older benefactor would damage her in a way that would be irreparable,
186 Surtees, Virginia. Pp. 134. 65 particularly after his death. As we will see upon his death, Walpole would provide a livelihood
more suited to the life Mary Berry hoped to lead, without the confines of a marriage of financial
convenience.
This is not to say that Mary did not at any point entertain the idea of marriage. At the age of
31, she would enter into a whirlwind romance and engagement with a man twenty years her
senior. General Charles O’Hara, a man with a distinguished (though not very elevated) military
career, would first capture Mary’s attention during her time in Italy, after which she would
occasionally ask about him in various letters. This included one exchange with Walpole, where
she expressed her agreement with both the Earl of Orford and General Conway that he had been
treated “disgracefully”187 when he was overlooked for the post of Lieutenant Governor of
Gibraltar. Their courtship likely began in earnest when he arrived back in England in August of
1795. This ultimately doomed romance proves another illustration of the unusual level of agency
Berry enjoyed in her pursuit of romantic desire. Many years later, Berry wrote in October 1844, of a parcel of letters she found relating to her relationship with O’Hara saying that they “relate to the six happiest months of my long and insignificant existence,” however, she goes on to describe that these were six months “accompanied by fatiguing and unavoidable uncertainty, and by the absence of everything that could constitute present enjoyment.” Alluding to the distance placed between the two, a mere month after their love affair began, a distance cause by “the political state of Europe making absence a necessity and even frequent communication impossible; letters lost and delayed, all certainty of meeting more difficult, questions unanswered, doubts unsatisfied,”188
187 Surtees, Virginia. 80. 188 Melville, Lewis. Pp. ix. 66 It is worth noting that this period of their romance was coordinated largely with the help of the
Honourable Anne Damer, who seemed to enjoy playing the part of “go-between”189, assisting and supporting her friend’s romance; much in the same way she had assisted and supported Mary in her decision to travel through Paris, against the wishes of Walpole, as recounted earlier in this chapter. This example shows how Mary’s relationships and access to networks of ‘learned ladies’ like herself, facilitated her agency in romance as well as movement. When Mary told
Walpole of her intention to marry O’Hara, the elderly man responded in a tone that was injured but understanding saying that “I naturally dread being grown a burden on those I chiefly cultivate.”190 He seemed to understand the risk that at some point the woman whose time and affection he had monopolized for the last several years would need to think of making a match for herself.
Just as Anne Lister would consider finances of utmost importance when choosing her partner,
Ann Walker- Mary Berry also considers the management of wealth a key factor in her own marriage, stating that “upon the subject of money, on which I now we both think much alike”.
She is blunt and unapologetic in discussing economic realities with her betrothed. In one letter written to O’Hara while he is abroad, marked January 1796, we see finances are a large consideration for Berry in anticipation of their life together. “I have made out a plan which, I am persuaded, includes every comfort necessary to a small establishment in London.” She goes on to advise him that he, being unaccustomed to the cost of living in London, “will, I daresay, be astonished at the expence [sic] of every article” She includes with her letter an enclosed draw-up of their budget, factoring in all necessary expenses and as she informs him, she has “cut off all
189 Beardmore, John. Pp. 17. 190 Beardmore, John. Pp. 18. 67 your[O’Hara’s] extravagances.”191 It is intriguing to think of what O’Hara, whose infamous
“wildness”192 Berry herself expressed some concern for her ability to tame, thought of his
fiancé’s financial dictations, however several of the letters from this period were lost, and likely
destroyed.
What remains of their letters tells the story of a relationship in steady decline. O’Hara’s
responses became more distant and detached. One such response is alluded to in Mary’s letter
written on April 27th, 1976 in which she balks at O’Hara’s claim that he had “consented to
become my [Mary’s] husband”. The choice of word, which Mary took to allude to begrudging
obligation, wounded her deeply.193 Unwilling to play the role of a desperate woman dragging a
bridegroom into marriage through perceived duty rather than love, she concluded this angry
response, where she berates him for (among other things) “two letters whose least faults are their
being a farrago of inconsistences and contradictions, both in regard to me and yourself.- They are
expressed in terms which I believe were never before used to any Gentlewoman, not to say any
woman of common sense and common spirit.”194 She goes on to say that her “frank, open,
honourable nature” had given her pause, hoping that he would respond to her concerns in a more
“Gentlemanlike” manner. However, she sees his failure to do so as an irreconcilable difference,
and she ends their engagement, saying “if ever in the future you want or require the comfort of a
sincere, intelligent, affectionate friend, remember the pains you took to eradicate sentiments
which you will then no longer mistrust and of which no power on earth but your self could have
robbed you. Farewell.”
191 Surtees, Virginia. 205-206. (Letter from Mary Berry to General O’Hara and Enclosed document, marked January 1796) 192 Beardmore, John. Pp.17. 193 Surtees, Virginia. 206. 194 Berry, Mary. Letter to General O’Hara. April 27th 1796. 68 Mary later-albeit with the hindsight of forty-two years passed and the conscious approach of old age- muses that all could have been solved between them, “had we ever met for twenty-four
hours.”195 However, this letter ending her engagement is telling in two ways. First, I argue that it
shows the agency she wielded regarding her own romantic choices. She ends her engagement
without fear of societal judgement or private familial retribution. Second, it illustrates the
elevated esteem she now holds herself in, claiming the formal title of gentlewoman, and
unapologetically asserting her belief that she deserves to be treated as such.
Horace Walpole, Mary Berry’s dear friend and primary social and economic provider,
passed on March 2nd, 1797 at the respectable age of 80. In the weeks leading up to his death,
Mary would be constantly at his side. On the subject of her greatest mentor’s final days, Mary
writes that after a couple weeks where he “was still capable of being amused” in between bouts
of pain, “At last nature, sinking under the exhaustion of weakness, obliterated all ideas but those
of mere existence, which ended without struggled.”196
And so the closing years of the 18th century found Mary Berry separated from the man she
loved, and with death having taken the elderly man on whom she had depended more than any
other. The latter, however would not leave her unaccounted for. He cared for his “beloved
spouses” in death as he had in life; leaving Mary and her sister Agnes 4000 pounds each as well
as Little Strawberry Hill, along with its grounds and furniture. To Mary alone, he left also the
work that would make up the bulk of her future livelihood. It speaks a great deal that of all his
many colorful, esteemed and talented acquaintances he entrusted Mary with the task of editing
and publishing his remaining works. For a full year after his death she would labor to complete
195 Melville, Lewis. Pp. ix. 196 Melville, Lewis. Pp. 123. 69 the final request of her benefactor, in 1798 publishing the infamous five volumes which made up
The Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford. Years later Mary would loudly and publicly
defend Walpole against the bitter attacks of scholar and historian Catherine Macaulay, a matter
we will discuss more in a later chapter. Her loyalty and obedience, following and leading up to
Walpole’s death, are perhaps the strongest evidence against a narrative which paints Berry as an
opportunist rather than as friend; devoted to a man that invested and cared for her in ways that
her own father never did.
The dawn of the 19th century would mark a new chapter in Mary’s life, having received
her inheritance, she finally achieved true economic independence. In 1801, Berry would befriend
the great playwright Johanna Baillie and, at the latter’s assistance and encouragement, write her
own play titled ‘Fashionable Friends’ which was performed first at Strawberry Hill, the estate
that had since been taken over by her dear friend Anne Damer.
The title of Berry’s single foray into playwriting is appropriate, as it is another example of
the role friendships within social networks of intellectual women would serve Berry throughout
her life. The significance of Anne Damer’s private theater at Strawberry Hill and the public
agency the space created for the “sociable female networks”197 , that Damer and Berry both
benefitted from, will be more thoroughly explored in a later chapter. The play itself was taken to
a public stage at Drury Lane in 1802, where it was widely panned. Also heavily critiqued were
Berrys’ few attempts at published writing. One critic writes:
Some months ago I read a little of Miss Berry’s book. I thought the preface very badly done. It is very odd that she should have lived so much with people of fashion without acquiring better manners, and so much with people of talent without learning
197 Schmid, Susanne. Mary Berry’s “Fashionable Friends”(1801) on Stage. (The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 43, No. 3)(Summer 2012), pp. 172-177. 70 to write her own language tolerably. I am sorry for it, for I think much more favorably of her than those will do who judge by her writings.198 Mary Berry was many things: well-read, an engaging conversationalist and a skilled collector of
talented and powerful-one might even say “fashionable” friends and benefactors. She was not,
however, a writer; though her continued editing and publishing of Walpole’s works and letters
would continue to occupy her time and supplement her income. In this way, her benefactor had
provided her a life much more suited to her than that of a widowed countess.
In addition to her scholastic efforts, Berry would continue to travel freely, as she had done
throughout her younger years. In 1802, following the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, which
brought a temporary peace to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Mary and Agnes were among the
first to revisit Paris where they met and spoke with newly self-appointed First Consul, Napoleon
Bonaparte. On this same visit, in the opera box of Lady Stuart, she would overhear someone
“remark that General O’Hara, the governor of Gibraltar, had died. She raised her hand to her brow and swooned motionless to the floor.”199
In her later years, Mary would remain a mainstay of the fashionable elite, particularly through
the regular salons she held with her sister Agnes at their modest but fashionable home in London
(ending their time at Little Strawberry Hill in 1812). Miss Kate Perry wrote of these gatherings
in her privately-printed and rare volume, Reminiscences of a London Drawing-Room, saying that
“There was a charm about these gatherings of friends that thereafter we may say: ‘There is no
salon now to compare with that of the Miss Berrys’.”200 Mary and Agnes knew everyone and
would continue to make efforts to acquaint themselves with anyone who became widely talked
198 John William Ward (Afterwards first Earl of Dudley) to Mrs. Dugald Stewart, June 1810. (Both: Letters to Ivy, 116.) (9) 199 Melville, Lewis. 20. 200Perry, Kate. Reminiscences of a London Drawing-Room, L X-Xi 71 about, as evidenced in a letter from Reverend Sydney Smith to the emerging literary star Charles
Dickens in June 1839:
My dear sir, nobody is more justly talked of than yourself. The Miss Berrys, now at Richmond, live only to be acquainted with you, and have commissioned me to request you to dine with them Friday, 29th, or Monday, July 1st, to meet a Canon of St. Pauls, the Rector of Coombe Flory and the Vicar of Halberton- all equally well known to you.201 The most impressive of all the invitations from the later years of Mary’s life is not one sent,
but one received. In June 1852 just six months before she died at 90 years old, Mary writes: “I
have had the honour of being sent for by the Queen who, by my friend the Duchess of
Sunderland, has desired to make my acquaintance. Luckily, I have strength enough to carry me through the interview, very agreeably. And I was pleased to find our sovereign so pleasant and unaffecting a person- to say nothing of her extreme graciousness to me.”202
A central purpose of this work is to present an alternative to the scholarly narrative of Mary
Berry which depicts Mary as a footnote in the final years of Horace Walpole’s life, where she is
presented at best as a passive beneficiary of an old man’s boredom and generosity and at worst
as an opportunistic Lion-Hunter and plotting collector of fashionable friends. While it is
undoubtedly true that Berry was able to elevate herself from the middling class obscurity that
was her birthright in part through her skilled navigation of social networks of intellectual women
and fashionable circles; and secure economic independence and security through the generosity
of her dearest mentor, I argue that her own role in the construction of both her identity as a
gentlewoman and her unorthodox experience of upper-class Victorian womanhood has been underexplored.
201 Beardmore, John. Pp. 27. 202 Berry, Mary. Journals and Correspondence. 72 However by taking into account the agency she exercised both within her relationship with
Walpole and outside of it, Mary Berry can be recognized as a prime example of a ‘learned lady’, a term here used to describe those women who access unique levels of public and private agency; not through virtue, talent or the selfless work on behalf of others but through social connections they forge and through the economic resources they control.
73 CHAPTER 4
ANNE DAMER: PRIVATE SPHERES AND PUBLIC AGENCY WITHIN ENGLAND’S UPPER-CLASS
Anne Seymour Damer, born Anne Seymour Conway, has frequently been used as an
interesting but ultimately supporting character in academic history- a footnote in the lives of
more famous friends such as Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire; or as one of the colorful cast
of characters immortalized in the letters of her Uncle, Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole. A
sparkling fixture of celebrity in the most fashionable circles of London, Damer is unavoidable
when exploring the social history of this period.
She is also an enigma of sorts, difficult to classify within the existing constructs of respectable
Victorian femininity but undoubtedly respectable nonetheless. She is thus a prime example of the
limitations of class as a category of analysis when attempting to understand the boundaries of
female agency in this period. As a woman of classical education and literary interests, (having
written a novel, Belmour, in 1801), she is sometimes mentioned in passing connection with the
Bluestocking group. However, she herself never claimed such an affiliation203 and is seemingly
never mentioned in contemporary criticisms of the “bleus”204. Historians such as Alison
Yarrington, Susan Benforado and John Mclintock have done excellent scholarship exploring her
career as a sculptor, where she was an anomaly within the male dominated profession. However,
she cannot credit this career to her own romantic genius, and despite her success never found
203 Yarrington, Alison. 1997. “The female Pygmalion: Anne Seymour Damer, Allan Cunningham, and the writing of a woman sculptor's life”. [London]: Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. Pp. 39. 204 Gross, Jonathon David. The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist. Yale Center for British Art. NJ18.D19661525 G76 2014 (LC) Pp. 43. 74 acceptance within the Royal Academy making her career unusual even amongst other female
artists of the period. In addition to her art, Damer would become a central figure in the
fashionable private theatres that blossomed in popularity from the late eighteenth to early
nineteenth century, performing for many of London’s most elite.
Equally worthy of consideration is her life-long talent for acting with apparent impunity while avoiding the potentially damaging effects of personal scandal. Throughout her life she would be forgiven the sort of shocking behaviors that have destroyed the reputations of other upper-class
women. She was able to separate from her husband, and weather the aftermath of his suicide
with her respectability and social position in tact. She was then able to regain control over her
own finances, pay off the remainder of her belated husband’s debts and secure financial security
and economic independence for herself. As a widow, she took part in the infamous Female
Canvas of the Election of 1784 but was never criticized for perceived “petticoat influence”
because of her political activities; nor was she abused by the media and the public like her friend
the Duchess of Devonshire. Damer also made a habit of befriending “underdogs”205of British
society, often to the chagrin of the gossiping old ladies such as Lady Mary Cook and Lady
Greenwich,206 whom Horace Walpole referred to as the “Hags of High Rank.”207
Some scholars have recognized the unique agency that Anne Damer enjoyed, behaving with
relative impunity while, all the while maintaining a reputation of being“irreproachable in moral
character.”208 Emma Donoghue and Andrew Elfenbein in particular have looked to Damer’s
unusual experience of womanhood as a site of lesbian potential, analyzing the romantic
205 Gross, Pp. 257. 206 Gross, Pp. 34. 207 Walpole, Correspondence, 33:457, January 13, 1785. 208 Noble, Percy. Anne Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion. pp. vii 75 friendships she shared with numerous women following the premature death of her husband.
However, freedom in regard to sexual desire is only one aspect of the unique level of public and
private agency Anne Damer enjoyed.
It is logical to presume that much of the freedom Damer enjoyed was a product of her
high station within fashionable society, and much existing scholarship presumes exactly that. It
can be argued that this is an oversimplification. After all, Anne Damer was one of many women
of high station, many of whom were her friends and social equals. Yet as a Learned Lady, she
possessed various masculine privileges that set her upper-class experience apart from that of
many of her female peers: 1. a classical education, 2. access to privacy, 3. full economic
independence, 4. Personal authority regarding their own movement and travel, 5. Personal
authority regarding their own pursuit of romantic desire and 6. using social capital for personal
rather than familial advancement. A central goal of this thesis is to acknowledge a neglected
difference in how women of the same class experience agency, in part through identifying
commonalities in unexpected places. By observing Anne Damer’s life through this paradigm, we
begin to see that the way she experienced class and exercised agency has more in common with
the experiences of low-gentry heiress Anne Lister of Halifax than with her friend Georgianna,
the Duchess of Devonshire. In her pursuit of an intellectual education, her self-constructed access to privacy, her economic independence and her deliberate use of social clout and connections to maintain her public respectability (despite her various unorthodox behaviors)
Anne Damer is emblematic of the paradigm.
In exploring her marriage, her politics, her time in the arts, and her skilled navigation of social networks this chapter seeks to emphasize the active role Damer played in constructing her own unique experience of Victorian womanhood. In her positions as an unorthodox widow, an
76 actress, a sculptor, a political activist and as a celebrity of upper-class society Anne Damer mastered the art of avoiding scandal and maintaining respectability in part by skillfully manipulating the contemporary social politics of private and public spaces. Thus, Anne Damer was not merely the passive beneficiary of a good name and family connections, she was the conscious architect of a reputation that afforded her a life of unusual freedom.
Mr. & Mrs. Damer: A Fashionable Marriage
On the surface, the marriage of Anne Conway and John Damer was one of the most high-
demand invitations in town. The ceremony represented two young people bringing together two
grand, noble families in a wedding that was billed as one of the most important events of the
season. The announcement ran in London Evening Post Saturday June 13th, 1767:
Sunday was married at Park Place, The hon. Mr. Damer, eldest son of Lord Milton to Miss Conway, daughter of the right hon. Henry Seymour Conway who together with his Lady, the countess of Ailesbury, and several persons of distinction, set out that morning to be present at the marriage ceremony.209
The only daughter of two great Whig families, the Campbells and the Conways, Anne was a
valuable match for John Damer, one that his father Lord Milton had sought on his son’s behalf.
The lucrative financial agreement made for the young marriage by their families was the central
topic of conversation throughout the couple’s fashionable circle. Horace Walpole, ever the
reliable chronicler, wrote to Horace Mann that “Lord Milton gives up five thousand a year at
present and settles the rest; for his two other boys are amply provided for. Miss Conway is to
have a jointure of two thousand five hundred and five hundred pin money. Her fortune, which is
209 Percy, Noble. 41-42. (Notices of the Marriage also ran in Llyod’s Evening Post and The London Chronicle) 77 ten thousand, goes in jewels, equipage, and furniture210.” Lady Mary Coke, another reliable source of extensive letters and journals regarding the goings on of London’s most fashionable, writes “Miss Conway’s fortune is 10,000 pounds, which goes in jewels, equipages, and furniture.”211
Mr. and Mrs. Damer, secured by generous dowers on both sides, began their life together in an extravagant house on Tilney Street; where the couple were considered among the most fashionable in London society. Another entry from Lady Mary Coke gives a brief glimpse into the early days of Anne’s marriage. She writes on June 15th, 1767:
Lady Ailesbury came to town yesterday with Mr. and Mrs. Damer; she told me that Mrs. Damer’s ear-rings had cost 4,000 pounds; she laments the Court being in the morning as it prevents her finery being seen, I think it has been the case of most brides this year.212 However not long after their wedding, people noticed that Anne was appearing out at social events without her husband, sometimes with her mother, but most often alone. Even more embarrassing for the young bride must have been the endless rumors of the distractions that kept her husband from her side. His love of gambling, horse racing and an insatiable appetite for hired women were all well known amongst the elite circles Damer navigated. Unwilling to be undone by her husband’s behavior, Anne chose instead to pursue one of her favorite past times: travel.
Starting in 1772, Anne Damer left for the continent, where she traveled extensively “for her health,”213 returning briefly to London to be presented to the court alongside her husband in
October of the following year. However, before long she would leave again this time with her
210 Coke, Mary. Unpublished Letters. Pp. 43. 211 Coke, Mary. Unpublished Letters. Pp. 44. 212 Ibid. 213 Damer, Anne. Journals. (Cited in Gross, Pp. 244) 78 Mother to Paris in January of 1774. Our understanding of this period in Anne’s life suffers from
a lack of material sources, concerning both her travels abroad and public response to her failing
marriage. However, Damer’s choice to leave the country likely dulled the impact of her
husband’s behavior on her own reputation.
As explored in previous chapters, freedom in movement is a benchmark of the agency
enjoyed by Learned Ladies, and Damer is no exception. Extensive travel is not only a manifestation of the unique agency enjoyed by these women, but also a source of agency itself,
providing privacy from critical eyes of London society. It was not unusual for upper-class women to travel abroad to protect themselves from scandal or to hide from unwanted scrutiny and attention. Nor was it uncommon for a husband to fall short of marital expectations. Many scholars have outlined the patriarchal power imbalance which existed within Victorian marriage.214 Legal authority in this period dictated that the husband had final authority over his
wife’s “freedom to leave home and travel about.”215 While there is a material gap which impedes
us from knowing John’s reaction to his wife’s departure, we know that she made the choice to
leave alone and in her own best interest. Thus, what made Damer’s going abroad unique was that
it was a decision made solely to preserve her own reputation, likely at a detriment to her
husband’s.
At the end of her trip to Paris, perhaps growing weary of her self-imposed exile, Anne Damer
publicly separated from her husband, whose gambling had become even more unruly in her
absence. To make matters worse, Lord Milton had stopped paying his debts and refused to even
see his eldest son- hoping that this would inspire his son to get a handle on his reckless spending.
214 See Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England By Mary Lyndon Shanley 215 Kelsey, Jennifer C. Changing The Rules: Women and Victorian Marriage. Ch. 8 “Delicate Matters”. 79 On August 15th, 1776, John Damer shot himself at the Bedford Arms at the Covent Garden. As
if this was not terrible enough, he did so after “having had supper with four common women, a
blind fiddler, and no other man.”216 He was found with a paper in his pocket which read “the
people of the house are not to blame for what has happened, which was my own act”217 a point
which Horace Walpole recognized as the “sole tribute he paid to justice and decency.”218
John Damer’s suicide was a private tragedy for Anne, however it also brought her troubled marriage back under public scrutiny. Walpole’s letter written to Horace Mann on
August 20th, speaks foremost of his concern for Anne:
What a catastrophe for a man of thirty-two, heir to two and twenty thousand a year. We are persuaded that lunacy, not distress, was the sole cause of his fate. Lord Milton, whom nothing can soften, wreaks his fury on Mrs. Damer, though she deserves only pity and shows no resentment. He insists on selling her jewels, this is all the hurt he can do to her.219 Lord Milton, for his part, did all he could to make life difficult for the woman who, as he likely
saw it, had left his son to drown in his own sin. However, despite his best efforts, public opinion
was firmly with Mrs. Damer, at least within their own circles.
This sentiment is heavy in a letter written by Lady Sarah Lennox to Lady Susan O’Brien on
September 19th, 1776:
I am provoked at Lord Milton, for I was throwing away my pity for him, and behold, not even the death of his son has softened him about his family in general or taught him generosity. He has been very shabby about Lionel Damer
216 Walpole Horace, Letters. (Cited in Stokes, Hugh, 1875-1932. The Devonshire House Circle. N.Y.: McBride, Nast & Co., 1916. Pp. 158.) 217 Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann: Volume 2, Pp. 388. 218 Ibid. 219 Noble, Pp. 61. 80 and quite brutal to Mrs. Damer who, by the way, behaves with all propriety in the world…220
Lennox goes on to retell a terrible scene at the house Anne had shared with her husband at Tilney
Street:
The Damers’ tell me she walked through the house amidst them all, into a Hackney coach, with a firmness that is quite heroic, for though she may be accused of not loving her husband, she cannot be accused of not loving her house and all its grandeur.221 Lennox was not the only one who suggested that Anne would mourn her fortune more than
her husband. A similar sentiment is echoed in the satire of William Combe, entitled “The First of
April: Or, The Triumphs of Folly”, one of four of its kind published in 1777, the year after John’s
death. Combe’s work names Damer alongside other upper-class women perceived to be ‘Negligent
Wives’222 in a stanza that reads:
“And lo! The sorrowing D- then succeeds, In all the mournful pomp of Widow’s weeds. I heard her loud lament and bitter moan, Not for Husband, but a title gone.”223 However, for those in the highest circles, who had watched the young marriage quickly disintegrate, Anne remained a pitiable figure. This was as much due to Anne’s respectable behavior after John’s death as it was a response to the impropriety of her husband and the perceived cruelty of her Father-In-Law. As Lennox writes:
220 Melville, Lewis. The Berry Papers: Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry; Pp. 20. 221 Ibid. 222 Gross, Pp.65. 223 William Combe was known for a number of poems satirizing the behavior of the Duchess of Devonshire throughout the late eighteenth century. 81 Mrs. Damer who, by the way, behaves with all propriety in the world; when one commends a widow for behaving well, it is allowing that love was out of the question, which is to be sure in her case.224 While Anne largely maintained her social reputation, her father-in-law would continue to
punish her financially. While Anne was entitled through her dower a jointure of 2500 pounds per
year, Lord Milton often neglected to pay it on time, as he continued to take any available
opportunity to punish his daughter-in-law. This is evidenced in part by a letter she wrote to Mr.
Sharpe, who handled Anne’s business matters on August 20, 1780:
I must trouble you to write a very pressing letter to Lord Milton about my money and the irregularity of his payments which was not what I expected from him and which he promised should be otherwise…225 It would have been quite easy for Anne Damer to have been vilified for separating from her
husband and for her reputation to have been ruined by either her husband’s adultery or reckless
spending or by the public and scandalous events of his last day. However, Anne Damer would
return to her father’s home with her social standing intact, while her late husband would be
remembered as “mad” and her Father-In-Law marked as “brutal” and cruel for his treatment of her. In placing her social respectability over her private dignity and by refusing to fight back against Lord Milton, Damer became a minor sympathetic character, rather than the face of a major scandal, and so preserved her good name for years to come.
‘La Belle Anglaise’: Anne Damer’s Travels
By November of 1777, Lady Sarah Lennox found Anne quite changed by the death of her
husband, but not for the worse. She writes:
224 Melville, Lewis. The Berry Papers: Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry; Pp. 20-21. 225 Damer, Anne. Letter to Mr. Sharpe. (August 20, 1780) 82 Mrs. Damer is improved, I think; she is vastly less of a fine lady and appears to have more sensibility than I ever saw in her manner before. She has behaved very properly in every respect as a widow, she did everything in regard to his servants and showed respect and regard for his memory…226 This shows that Damer, despite the harsh treatment of her father in law, maintained her own
respectable image by fulfilling the financial and social obligations of a widow. However, her life
was now a far cry from the wealth and style she shared with her husband. “She now acts sensibly
her own account, for she has taken a small house and lives with propriety without affecting
splendour and says that, having shown how to live well when she thought she had money, she is
resolved to show she knows how to live prudently now she has not.”227
It is interesting to consider Damer’s decision to embrace this drastic change in lifestyle,
rather than consider remarriage or rely on additional support from her family. Scholars such as
Amanda Vickery have established privacy as a largely masculine privilege, even within the
upper classes. As a rule, the house of an elite woman was not a private space but rather a site of
entertaining, business, and patronage.228 The only place where a gentlewoman could guarantee
her own privacy was her bedchamber, which Mary Wollstonecraft once titled “the sanctuary of
repose, the asylum of care and fatigue, the chaste temple of a woman.”229 By living within her means, Damer made a conscious decision to live independently, choosing economic independence and privacy over grandeur. Lennox seems to marvel at her pragmatism, “for though her income is good, she says it will not do for show and the comforts of life too without out-reasoning it and she prefers the comforts and not being in debt, to show.”230 This letter
226 Noble, Percy. Pp. 48. 227 Ibid. 228 See Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998), 9, 153-4 229 Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London, 1794), 11, 160-6 230 Noble, Percy. Pp. 48. 83 serves as the best introduction to Anne Damer as she lived out the rest of her life, transformed by
a doomed marriage and failed expectations. She became a woman determined to live
independently and as Lennox ends her observations of Anne’s new lifestyle, “She also means to
travel, I believe.”231
Travel, she did. Unwilling to sit somberly until society moved on to the next great scandal,
Anne chose instead to spend the first winter after her husband’s death abroad. She traveled to
Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France. This is the second example of Damer’s use of travel as an
escape from public expectations and scrutiny, one afforded to her by her unique freedom in
movement. The years following John Damer’s death would find her almost constantly abroad,
which seemed to agree with Anne immensely. On one brief return to England, Anne visited
Strawberry Hill, where an enthused Horace Walpole wrote Mr. Conway, saying that “I never saw
Mrs. Damer better in her life, nor look so well.”232 However supportive her family was, Anne
Damer’s extended travel did cause them occasional anxiety. One such instance occurred as she
was crossing the ocean to the continent during the American War of Independence. Reports say
that her ship was stopped by a French naval vessel, which entered a four-hour fight with the
English passenger ship. At the end, “the English vessel struct its colors and the sailors and passengers were taken prisoner.”233 It is said that Anne showed a great deal of bravery, and
successfully charmed the French officers, who called her “La Belle Anglaise” before she was
speedily liberated and enabled to proceed on her journey.
231 Noble, Pp.69. 232 Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford. 233 Noble, Pp. 71. 84 Damer herself was left delighted by the excitement, and the opportunity to witness a naval
engagement. Horace Walpole, however, was quite alarmed when he heard of the ordeal. He
wrote to her mother from Strawberry Hill in July 1779:
I am not at all surprised, my dear madam, at the intrepidity of Mrs. Damer: she always was the heroic daughter of a hero. Her sense and coolness never forsake her. I, who am not firm, shuddered at your Ladyship’s account. Now that she has stood fire for four hours, I hope that she will give us clear proofs of her understanding of which I have as high opinion as her courage and not return in any danger.234 Rather than making her more cautious, the events seemed to inspire Damer to continue her heavy
travel schedule, returning to London only when her scheduled trip to Naples was put off by news
of an active volcano. On September 13th, 1779, Horace Walpole wrote to Anne’s father, Mr.
Conway:
You may imagine how happy I am at Mrs. Damer’s return, and at her not being at Naples as she was likely to have been, at the dreadful explosion of Vesuvius. Surely it has glutted Sir Williams rage for volcanoes. How poor Lady Hamilton’s nerves stood it I do not conceive. Oh mankind, mankind, are there not calamities in store for us, but must destruction be our amusement and pursuit.235 In the years following John Damer’s death, travel served as more than mere entertainment or distraction, it allowed Anne to withdraw from the critical eyes of London’s social circles. While abroad she was able to act without the restrictions of her newfound widowhood. Anne was
determined to survive the scandal of her ill-fated marriage and was by all measures successful.
Also vital to her societal rehabilitation was her dedication to performing the role of the
respectable widow, though the shortcomings of her marriage were well-known. She also continued to maintain this behavior despite the cruelty of her father-in-law which allowed her to
234 Walpole, Horace. Letters…(July 1779) 235 Ibid. (September 13th, 1779) 85 maintain her respectable image even in the midst of a potentially ruinous scandal. Perhaps most important was her pragmatic fiscal behavior and efforts to take control of her own finances
which enabled her prolonged travel and allowed her to establish an independent way of life. As
illustrated in such works as Seth Koven’s The Match Girl and the Heiress, there is a direct
relationship in this period between one’s privacy and the acceptance of financial assistance.236In
choosing to live within her means, Damer sacrificed the style she had become accustomed to
within her marriage in exchange for the freedoms associated with economic independence.
‘Witches ‘Round the Cauldron’: Damer in Politics
Damer returned from her travels and immediately dedicated her efforts to the
Westminster Election of 1784. As a “fusion of the two greatest Whig families in England and
Scotland,”237 the Campbells and the Conways, it could be said that she was destined to help send
Charles James Fox to Parliament. While this election would mark her return to public life in
London for the first time since John Damer’s death, it is important to note that her political
interests predate her marriage, and so her freedom to pursue it cannot be credited to new
freedoms she experienced as a widow.
In 1775, Damer (then Conway) commissioned artist Daniel Gardner’s painting ‘Witches
Round The Cauldron,’238which depicts Anne Damer alongside fellow society women and friends
Elizabeth Lamb, the Viscountess Melbourne, and Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire in the
likeness of the witches from Macbeth.
236 Koven, Seth. The Match Girl and the Heiress. Princeton University Press, 2014. (See also: Boyd, Hilton. Age of Atonement.) 237 Webb, Pp. 6. 238 Gross, Pp. 34. 86 The artist depiction of the three high-society women around the flowering cauldron is thought to be an illusion to the women’s respective reputations for political ‘stirring’ and unusually active support of the Whig party.239 The choice to cast them as the witches in one of
Shakespeare’s famous plays might also be an illusion to the women’s common interest in theatre
(which will be discussed further in a later section). Lady Mary Cook writes of the painting with a
notable tone of incredulousness:
Has Lady Greenwich told you of the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melbourne and Mrs. Damer all being drawn in one picture in the characters of the three witches in Macbeth? They have chosen that scene where they compose their Cauldron, but instead of ‘finger of the Birth-strangled babe, etc.’ their Cauldron is composed of roses and carnations…” You can almost hear the incredulous tone in her last words on the subject, “I daresay they think their charms more irresistible than all the magick of the Witches.240
While Lady Greenwich and Lady Mary Coke believed the three young women dreamed up the
“monstrosity”241 of a painting together; scholar Jonathon Gross gives this creative credit to Anne
Damer herself. Further, he suggests that “Anne did not operate in a void when she chose
Macbeth to depict herself and her friends in 1775.”242 It is true that in placing herself and her
friends as powerful witches, Anne was defining femininity in her own terms and rejecting the
“precarious, tottering stances”243 of society women that saturated the period. After all, the
witches in Macbeth were women who saw things as they were and spoke this truth to men. The
decision to be represented this way articulated Damer’s own brand of uncompromising and
239 “Anne Seymour Damer: Sculpture and Society”. Strawberry Hill Press (Walpole Archive 75 D18 A4) 240 Quoted by Sheila Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly (London: Reynal, 1958), 13. July 14th, 1775. See also Unpublished Journals of Lady Mary Coke (Lewis Walpole Library) 241 Gross, Pp. 37. 242 Gross, Pp.42. 243 Bram Dijikstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle culture Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp 44 87 powerful femininity and can be read as an early example of Anne’s quiet subversion of societal
expectations. The portrait is also a proud depiction of strong female comradery, and thus speaks
to the role of female networks in facilitating and supporting Damer’s life long penchant for pot
stirring.
Women, and particularly elite women, participated in the political process in numerous ways
and most usually through financial patronage or as part of a familial dynasty. As shown in
Chapter Two, women like Anne Lister could also wield political power (and votes) in their
capacity as land owners. Damer herself would write that “As a true Old Whig I should have been
most ready to give my votes, had I any to dispose of. But the fact is, not an acre have I.”244 As a
young widow on relatively tight budget, Damer did not fit neatly into any of our preconceived
notions of ‘petticoat influence’ in this period.
In Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution, Anna Clark explores the political
power of aristocratic women like Damer. This power, Clark argues, is “derived from the system
of influence.”245 I similarly argue that it was Damer’s public social connections that enabled her to participate in the political sphere. However, it was Damer’s dedication to personal privacy and visage of respectability that allowed her to do so without fear of public scandal and scrutiny.
In the election of 1784, Anne Damer was back working alongside her friend (and fellow witch) Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire. Both women, along with Miss Crewe, were ardent supporters of candidate Charles James Fox and would take part in the now infamous women’s canvas. Dressed grandly in Fox’s colors, a group of the candidate’s female supporters canvased
244 Anne Damer to Mr. Greenville, 14 Aug. 1817. BL, Add. Ms. 41, 858, f. 265. 245 Anna Clark. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. 54. 88 London. While such a spectacle that may seem tame today, in 1784 was nothing short of
shocking. A 20th century account of the event quotes an elderly elector:
Lord Sir, it was a fine sight to see a grand lady come right smack up to us hardworking mortals, with a had held out and a “Master how-dye-do,” and a laugh so loud, and talk so kind, and shake us by the hand, and say “Give us your vote, worthy sir, a plumper for the peoples friend, our friend, everybody’s friend,” and then, sir, we hummed and hawed, they would ask us for our wives and families, and if that didn’t do, they’d think nothing of a kiss, aye, a dozen of them. Lord, sir, kissing was nothing to them, and it came natural…246 Despite both women taking part, Anne Damer’s part in the canvassing goes unrecorded after
the first day247 while the Duchess of Devonshire would complain long after of the effort’s
“lowering”248 effect on public opinion of her. It was Georgiana that was immortalized in such
satire as William Well’s Print: ‘Female Influence’ or, “the Devons-e canvas.” The print shows
The Duchess of Devonshire, followed by two other nameless ladies, canvassing a fat butcher.
The butcher stands holding the duchess's left hand and leering towards her. The Duchess, in profile to the left, bends towards him. She has a fox's brush in her hat, representing her candidate, which is inscribed 'Fox.’249 Georgianna was also singled out by The Morning Post,
which was controlled by the opposition. The newspaper repeatedly claimed that the Duchess was
offering sexual favors to electors, while Anne Damer remained unmentioned.250
Anna Clark has also addressed the unequal treatment of the duchess compared to other
women who participated in the canvas citing those like Georgianna and Damer who participated
not merely out of family concerns, but in service of their “own agendas.”251 While party politics
246 Noble, Pp. 94. 247 Webb, Pp. 89. 248 Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. 249 Well, William. Female Influence. Print. British Museum Online Gallery, Reference number: J,3.35. 250 Webb, Pp. 89. 251 Clark, Anna. Scandal. Pp. 75. 89 allowed aristocratic ladies to support candidates, the boundaries of propriety these women were expected to meet were both uneven and difficult to identify. The inequality in treatment could be a result of Damer’s public reputation of respectability, that allowed her to act with more impunity than her friend, a comparison that, while speculative, is a useful demonstration of how upper-class women experienced public agency (and scrutiny) differently. Anne Damer’s dedication to privacy and independence also play a role in her ability to avoid the scandal suffered by Georgianna throughout the election. After all, when one attacked the Duchess of
Devonshire, they were attacking her husband, his family and all of their respective reputations.
Additionally, while Damer limited her subversive behavior to private spaces (as was the case in the commissioned painting); the duchess was openly seeking her own influence and fame in the realm of politics. Thus, “her very success made scandal a necessary weapon against her.”252
In the end, the women’s effort was celebrated as integral to Fox’s victory. His victory march from the Devonshire how included a banner which read ‘Sacred to Female Patriotism’. Much to the King’s ire, the prince was also said to have dined at the home of female canvasser Mrs.
Crewe that night, wearing Fox’s colors and presenting his hostess a “wreath of victory.”253 Anne
Damer would continue to be an ardent supporter of Fox’s throughout his time in Parliament, and their friendship would continue to be a benefit to her. One example is his willingness to sit for her sculpting a marble bust of his likeness that she would famously present to Napoleon
Bonaparte years later.
Anne Damer’s political activities offer valuable insight into the agency Damer enjoyed, not just in the private spaces she constructed abroad but within London. Though unable to vote, she
252 Clark, Anna. Scandal. Pp. 76. 253 Noble, Pp. 95. 90 was able to voice her opinions through action and demonstration. In the case of ‘Witches ‘Round
the Cauldron’, she was able to subvert an idealized imagine of female propriety without fear of
serious consequence. Her participation in the female canvas for the Westminster election of 1784
allowed her to once again act outside the respectable boundaries of female behavior, without
retribution and to her own social and public benefit. Unlike many of the upper-class women who
canvassed, including the Duchess of Devonshire, Damer did not do so at the request of or with
the permission of a father or husband, but rather of her own volition.
A Very Public Amateur
Much of the scholarship that exists concerning the life of Anne Damer centers on her career
as a female sculptor.254 Her love for the inherently rigorous and masculine medium would
occupy much of her time throughout her life and particularly following the death of her husband.
Some have lamented that her time as a society wife caused irreparable damage to her progress in
the art world: “This alliance, among its other unfortunate effects, must have disturbed grievously
her progress in sculpture.”255 Despite these opinions, Damer did not have to look far to find a
fan-base for her large and diverse body of work, as one of her most dedicated fans lived within her own family. In Horace Walpole’s, Anecdotes of Painting, he takes care to include a sparkling review of his favorite niece:
A third female genius is Mrs. Damer, daughter of General Conway, in a work more difficult and far more uncommon than painting, the annals of statuary record few artists of the fair sex, and not one that I recollect of any celebrity. Mrs. Damer’s busts of life are not inferior to the antique and theirs, we are sure, are not more life. Her shock-dog, large as life, and only not alive, has a
254 See the work of Alison Yarrington, Susan Benforado and John Mclintock for more on this topic. 255 Yarrington, 39. Quoting The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors, Volume 3 By Allan Cunningham, 1831. 91 looseness and a softness in the curls that seem impossible in terra-cotta: it rivals the marble of Bernini in the Royal collection….256
Horace Walpole would remain an enthusiastic fan and collector of his nieces work for the
remainder of his life. The dog he mentions in the above passage would find a life-long home at
Walpole’s estate at Strawberry Hill, where he made special care to “introduce” it to his visitors.
The Duke of Richmond would also commission Anne for a copy of the dogs, which can still be seen at the tapestry drawing-room in Goodwood today.257 The Dogs would also be the topic of a
second positive review in the Public Advisor, “The Oddity of Her Achievement is striking! - The marble statues from a female hand! But so, it is, and at least in the work of the two dogs, with so much merit in them, that Bacon himself, or at any rate the best pupil of Bacon need not have blushed at owning them!”258
Walpole also makes a point of sharing Damer’s credentials in his work, which reads almost as
a preemptive defense against those who might accuse him of nepotism:
“The talent of Mrs. Damer must appear in the most distinguished light. Aided by some instructions from that masterly statuary Mr. Bacon, she has attempted and executed a bust in marble. Cerrachi, from whom she received four or five lessons, has given a whole figure of her as the Muse of Sculpture in which he has happily preserved the graceful lightness of her form.”259 Walpole’s review of Damer’s work would not remain uncontested. Critique John Hoppner
call’s out what he perceives as Walpole’s bias:
256 Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting. (Cited in Gross, Pp. 235.) 257 Gross, Pp. 107 258 Public Advisor, May 1 1784 259 Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes on Painting. 92 For talents unsupported by rank, Walpole appears to have had little respect- and we know of only one instance in which he condescended to wave this distinction, by placing Praxiteles at the side of Mrs. Damer!260 This is one example of many modern and contemporary critics that suggest that Damer’s
celebrity as a sculptor was heavily facilitated by her status and the advertisement of her more
talented friends.
In Cunningham’s Chronological History of the Rise of the British School of Sculpture, Anne
Damer is featured “both as the lone representative of her sex and in terms of her status as an
amateur rather than as a professional sculptor.” Yarrington argues that her inclusion in this
exclusive work was likely motivated by “an acknowledgement of her contemporary reputation in
the public realm,”261rather than on her artistic ability. These critics suggest that her impressive
visibility as a female sculptor in the nineteenth century was thus “not as a product of natural
genius but as the result of her clever manipulation of her social position and her notoriety- because of her difference within the public sphere.”262
Even her most kindly twentieth century biographers seem in agreement with this assessment.
In his Anne Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion, published in 1908, Percy Noble consistently
praises Damer for her fashionable style, her moral aptitude and her intelligence. However, on the
topic of her art, his complimentary tone fades slightly, “That her performances were not of the
highest order has never been insisted upon, but a woman of fortune and fashion who could
devote herself voluntarily and enthusiastically to so laborious and difficult an art, and achieve so
much success in it, as Mrs. Damer had done, must surely be no common genius among her own
260 Hoppner, John. Essays on Art. 1908. Pp. 64. 261 Yarrington, Pp.33. 262 Yarrington, Pp. 34. 93 sex, she at least was almost a prodigy,”263 or in other words, it was not the artwork itself that
warranted celebration-but rather the fact that a woman such as Anne Damer chose to pursue so
challenging a medium.
She suffered similar criticism within her own period as well. In fact, Walpole’s ardent defense
and admiration for Anne Damer’s work was likely in response to the callous treatment she
received by the art establishment in London, and by its more progressive wing, in the form of
Lord Egremont, the male connoisseur at Petworth. While Anne regularly obtained commissions
through social and familial relations: including Frederick Campbell, The Duke of Richmond and
her General Conway, “others outside the immediate family circle were often resolutely hostile or
indifferent, which was worse264.” It was not just the Academy who failed to recognize Damer’s
artistic talent. Joseph Farington had similar opinions a visit paid by Damer (in the company of
Mary and Agnes Berry). He writes of the exchange that:
It did not seem to me to prove that she has any exact knowledge of painting, whatever she may have of sculpture… she did not make intelligent remarks on the latter. I think her manner and particularly her voice were very affected and unpleasing.265 Because her work went unembraced by the Royal Academy and was largely neglected by the
greater voices in London’s art scene, Damer’s career as a sculptor would be best described as
amateur, rather than professional. This distinction is important to consider, as it separates her
from other women sculptors who worked within the public arena and so depended on approval
from the public arena to continue their work.266 Such female sculptors as Mary Thornycroft
263 Percy, Pp. 85. 264 Gross, Pp.212. 265 1797-1798. Joseph Farington, The Joseph Farington Diary. Edited by Kenneth Garlick, Angus D. Macintyre, and Kathryn Cave. 16 Vols. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1978-84n pp. 150 266 Yarrington, Pp.39. 94 relied on the approval of the Royal Academy to bring patronage and legitimacy to their careers.
Thornycroft, for her part, was so dedicated to maintaining her public relevance that she continued sculpting and exhibiting at the Academy through two pregnancies.267
While the role of a male amateur was established, female amateurs remained an anomaly.
Anne Damer benefitted from the vague boundaries of a category that barely existed. Yarrington suggests that this confusion stems from the fact that Damer occupied a space of overlap between the public and private spheres. Her work was in fact, extremely public. As an Honorary exhibitor, thirty-two of her works were displayed at Royal Academy exhibitions from 1784-1818 and many more of her works were designed specifically for display in or on public edifices,268yet she was not formally accepted by the RA itself, nor was she considered a part of the artistic community. Her work was not quite considered the public work of a professional sculpture, nor could it be described as feminine accomplishments of art pursued for education or entertainment within the private sphere.
The attitude of Damer’s professional critics is perhaps best represented in a print by William
Holland in The Damerian Apollo, published in 1789. The satire shows her carelessly wielding the chisel and hammer in her attempt to practice sculpture at the highest level by creating a clumsy version of the canonical Apollo Belvedere. Because of her lack of skill and her intemperate passion for her art she is about to geld the god with an unconstrained blow of her hammer and chisel. Thus Damer, in her feminine attire, is identified as a “destructive force within the arts represented by Apollo.”269
267 Devereux, Jo. The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England; Pp. 157. 268 Yarrington, 33. 269 Ibid. 95 It is not for us to decide, whether or not Anne Damer was a talented artist. Rather, I suggest that this debate is an illustration of how ‘Learned Ladies’ curate and manipulate social capital for their own purposes. Despite her failed attempts to gain recognition within the world of High Art, she continued her pursuit of a decidedly masculine discipline. Just as her political power was derived from social influence, her connections and social status similarly enabled her career.
While the general consensus of her own day classified her as an amateur, she heavily benefitted from a different view, held by the influential arbiters of taste that occupied her own social circles, who defended and supported her seriousness as a sculptor.
As Madam d’Arblay (Born Fanny Burney) once commented:
Her performances in sculpture were of no great merit, but were prodigiously admired by Horace Walpole, who had a notorious weakness for the works of persons of quality.270 Her career was not just accepted by her social networks, it was created by them; and while her work would never be met with unanimous approval, it would least become increasingly visible.
The production of Anne Damer’s statue of King George III would bring the amateur sculpture’s work onto a more public stage. The World reported on June 9th, 1787 of a royal visit to Anne Damer’s studio, saying that:
When the King and Queen saw Mrs. Damer at work on her colossal statue and necessarily clambering about in unaccustomed positions, they equally complimented her on the steadiness of her hand and of her feet.271 Upon the completion of this large undertaking, Lloyd’s Evening Post reported on August
21st, 1793 of a second royal visit:
270 Noble, Pp.77. 271 The World (June 9th, 1787) 96 Yesterday Her Majesty and the four elder princesses honoured the Leverian Museum with their presence and after inspecting the statue of His Majesty, done by Mrs. Damer, expressed their opinion of it in the most flattering terms.272 It must be mentioned, however, that not all opinions of the work were so flattering. The
radical pamphleteer Charles Pigott Lampooned it as: “Lord! What a lumpish, senseless thing!
And yet ‘tis very like the King!”273 While Damer could still not claim the title of a professional
artist, her growing visibility allowed her to continue to work in the public sphere, with or without
the approval of the Royal Academy.
While it has been acknowledged that her freedom to devote herself to sculpture was a result
of her societal position,274 this alone does not account for her ability to pursue this interest in
such a public way, even when rejected by the world of high art. As an upper-class woman, her artistic pursuits should have been restrained to the private sphere; thus, class alone cannot be credited for her many public successes. Nor can we ignore the fact that for a woman of the upper-classes, creative endeavors were not traditionally a money-making enterprise. Anne
Damer was paid for her work, using this income to solidify her own economic independence, thus further complicating the idea that her career was a mere privilege of her class designation.
However, it would also be problematic to consider her in direct comparison with other female sculptors of her period. It would be more fair to say that the space she occupied as an artist was entirely her own. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal perhaps articulated this best,
272 Webb, Pp.108. 273 Webb, Pp.109. 274 Yarrington, Pp.39. 97 stating that she was, “…perhaps, the first amateur of the day who at the same time was a
practitioner of the art.”275
In her career as a sculptor, Anne Damer enjoyed unique agency through her ability to occupy a space that straddled the line between public access and private respectability. A similar strategy was used in one of the places her art was most often displayed, the Private Theater of the
Duke and Duchess of Richmond. In the rooms that had been converted by popular architect
James Wyatt into a theatrical space, Anne also displayed her art. “Anne displayed her own art
work as well, with a bust of Elizabeth Farren as Thalia placed prominently on the Richmond
House set.”276 This was just one of the ways that her public pursuits in politics, sculpture and
theatre would play off one another.
A ‘Cult of Personality’: Anne Damer and Private Theatricals
It was at the age of thirty-nine that Damer discovered her second creative passion and would
begin to perform regularly at private theatricals produced at the home of her brother-in-law, the
Duke of Richmond. The first of these private performances took place on April 20th, 1787. This
event proved so successful that it soon spawned others, performed throughout April and May
before picking up again over the Winter months. Anne Damer appeared in all of them, each time
taking a leading role. As one attendee shared, the private theatricals soon found a place in the
center of London society:“After my return from Switzerland I found the whole town infected by
another mania- Private Theatricals.” Frederick Reynolds noted. “Drury Lane and Covent Garden
were almost forgotten in the performances at Richmond House.”277 Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys, a
275 32 The Sculpture Journal Volume 1 1997 (Walpole Archive 53 D18 Y24 Copy 2) Quoted from The Female Pygmalion by Alison Yarrington 276 Gross, Pp. 107. 277The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist by Jonathan David Gross (Lexington Books, NY), Pp.106. 98 neighbor of the Conway’s, attended a production at the Richmond House on May 23, 1788. “The prologue and Epilogue were both clever…spoken with great spirit by Lord Derby and Mrs.
Damer; the whole was amazingly well acted, and the house filled with all the fine people in town.”278
The Richmond House productions quickly became one of the most in demand invitations in upper-class society. “All the great world of fashion was anxious to be present, and tickets of admission were keenly sought after, no one being admitted without a card, on which to prevent confusion was printed with this notice ‘no one admitted after half-past seven!’279 Though it seems that some exceptions were made. It is said that Anne’s political paramour Charles Fox heard that the Duke of Richmond had assured his political enemy Pitt that they would make an exception for him and allow him to arrive late from a debate he had scheduled for the same evening. Fox responded by postponing his own arrival for the same time as Pitt. When the doorkeeper hesitated to admit both men, saying he had been instructed to only let in one additional guest, Fox is said to have responded “I know that, but to-night I am a “rider” on Mr.
Pitt.” This story shows that in the popular imagination The Richmond theatricals were a place where the public faces of upper-class society mingled in blended company wherepublic divisions were softened by the private space afforded by the theatrical performance, and a space where
Anne Damer was a star.
Not every review proved so positive. On Saturday April 21st The Whitehall Evening Post published a critique of the private theatricals, including some choice words on Anne’s performance. “Mrs. Damer boasts strong sensibility, but her tones are too frequently depressed
278 Ibid. 279 Gross, Pp.99. 99 and sometimes not audible at the conclusion. This was more peculiarly felt in the delivery of the
Epilogue, which alluded to her own talents for statuary, and was written expressly for her.”280
Hannah More criticized the private theatricals in general, reportedly saying “It would have made some of the old nobility stare, to have seen so many great personages descended from them, degenerated (as their noble pride would have called it) into geniuses, actors, artists, and poets.
Real talent, however, never degrades.”281 Horace Walpole famously rejected such criticisms, writing to the Countess of Upper Ossory in June 1787:
Who should act genteel comedy perfectly but people of fashion that have sense? Actors and actresses can only guess at the tone of high life and cannot be inspired with it. Why are there so few genteel comedies, but because most comedies are written by men of that sphere.282 Besides, the occasional critiques were a rarity compared to the social praise Anne gained as one of the core performers at the most in-demand ticket in town. “The Theatre at Richmond
House had everything to recommend it on Friday evening that elegance, beauty and expence
[sic] could confer,” The Gazetter noted. Anne worked hard to live up to this review. Dressing for each show in a grand style, showing “with great elegance and effect”283 a grandeur that would never be allowed on the professional stages at Drury Lane. The Gentleman’s Magazine described
Mrs. Damer’s costume as “morning habit, plain white robe; when dressed, embroidered gauze on a white background, a diamond necklace of prodigious value, wheat-sheaf of ornaments of diamonds in her hair, a girdle of diamonds and stars of the same festoons on her dress.”284
280 Noble, Pp. 102. 281 Memoirs of the life and correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, Volume 1. Pp. 260. 282 Walpole, Horace. Correspondence. 283 Gross, Pp. 111. 284 Webb, Pp. 100. 100 Attendees became obsessed with the widow’s costumes, as she became known for her large
jewelry and ornate gowns, displaying her wealth in a manner than blended fiction and reality.285
John Kemble was one of many who took notice when he attended the performance of “The Way
to Keep Him” at Richmond House, commenting that:
The dresses worn by Mrs. Damer were refined models of decoration, frequently suggested both by herself and Mrs. Siddons. And may I be permitted to ask what could equal such an amusement in the circles of Fashion, limiting its indulgence strictly to their own rank.286 This is important to consider, as it gives us some insight into how Damer and her fellow
performers were seen by those who attended their productions. Because their indulgence was
“limited to their own rank”, Damer did not risk the scrutiny or criticism of women who
performed on public stages287. In her book Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society,
Kirsten Pullen confronts these ongoing themes of presumed promiscuity and moral degradation
and that have long been associated with women of the public stage. Gail Marshall explores
similar tropes in her book, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the
Galatea Myth, where she suggests that in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, female actors had
to tread a thin line “between respectability and indecency, between decorum and the
acknowledged play of desire…”288As with her art career, Damer was able to occupy a space that was neither public nor private, maintaining her respectability while asserting her own self-
285 Gross, Pp. 111. 286 115 (Sybil Marion Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theaters and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978. 34) 287 Women attempting to build a career on the public stage were often the victims of harsh moral criticisms and scrutiny, as it was largely not considered a ‘respectable’ profession, regardless of class but perhaps particularly for women in Damer’s social position. For more on this see Cox, Jeffry N. “Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: Gender, Power, and Politics in the Theatre of Romanticism.” Women in British Romantic Theatre. Ed. Burroughs. 23-47 and Burroughs, Catherine. Ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. CUP, 2000. 288 Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth, by Gail Marshall. Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Pp. 42 101 expression. As she had done commissioning the painting, Witches ‘Round the Cauldron, these
private theaters allowed Anne to subvert expectations of proper society women with minimal
risk to her own respectability.
For Anne, her time in the theater served as a second coming out to London society, serving to
renew her station and importance. By all accounts, she took her performances very seriously. On
January 24th 1788, Lady Ailesbury commented on Anne’s dedication to her newest passion,
“I’ve not set eyes on Mrs. Damer since I came to town so much is she taken up with her
rehearsals to which I have never been invited and have no thoughts of petitioning the favor.”289
A similar complaint came from Lady Mary Coke who wrote on January 6, 1788 “Mrs. Damer is
at home every evening for rehearsals but I have not been invited.”290 These writings illustrate both Damer’s dedication to her new craft, and the exclusivity of the community in which she worked, shut off even to women who shared her class and wealth; but had not been invited to participate- another example of how social capital could impact the opportunities for agency received by women within the same class, and often even within the same social circle.
In addition to cultivating social capital and relevance, her participation in the theatricals lead to other creative opportunities, not just to the benefit of her artistic endeavors, but to her literary aspirations as well. Anne’s time in the theater lead to the cultivation of numerous friendships, and soon she became an established figure in many of London’s artistic circles. As one letter written January 12, 1788 reads:
Lady Craven has wrote a play a sent it with a letter to the duchess of Marlborough saying that she heard her Grace had plays acted at Blenheim. She
289 The Letters of Horace Walpole; Fourth Earl of Orford Volume 11, Pp. 56. 290 Coke, Mary. Unpublished Journals, Pp.6 102 had wrote it on purpose to be performed at her theatre. She has likewise wrote to Mrs. Damer to desire to be of her literary academy.291 As the Richmond Theatricals grew in popularity, the performers quickly begat their own “cult of personality.”292 They perpetuated this fanfare with the production of numerous engravings that circulated, depicting the fashions and hats of their performers. In taking part in these private theatricals, Anne reinforced her own importance and took her place in the center of the Whig aristocracy at the very moment that they most successfully “demonstrated their cultural power.”293
Considering the many benefits, and by all accounts personal gratification that Anne gained from her experiences working in the private theatricals at Richmond House, it should come as no surprise that she was devastated by their eventual end. In a rare surviving correspondence to
Charles Hotham on October 5th, 1788, she writes:
Alas, Alas! The Duke of Richmond wrote me word when I was at Spa that he meant to give up his theatre, that he found it troublesome and wanted the house for other purposes, yet if I wished it very much he would continue it one year more. I could make but one answer to this, which I am sure I need not tell you; and I gave up the most agreeable amusement as lost. I disliked this so much that, as ill news flys [sic] fast enough, I scarce mentioned it to anyone. Since I came to England I have seen the duke, he did not mention the subject to me, and I of course did not chuse [sic] to begin it, yet I hear the poor dear theatre still exists- this is all I know.294
291 Ibid. 292 Gross, Pp.112. 293 Gross, Pp. 112. 294 Gross, Pp. 126. 103 Strawberry Hill and Mary Berry The end of the Private Richmond Theatricals would not prove the end of Anne Damer’s
passion for theater. Obviously unable to pursue the public stages of London, she would perform
in several small productions in the homes of friends, both at home and abroad. However, the next
phase of her theatrical career would not truly begin until the passing of Horace Walpole in 1797.
Her Uncle had served as her ardent supporter and defender throughout her life and his friendship
had been one she once called “a debt I would always be paying and never have paid.”295
This debt likely only increased upon his death, as he left her living ownership of his grand
gothic estate: Strawberry Hill, 296which he had once described to Mr. Conway as “the prettiest
bauble you ever saw.”297 While Anne Damer had long ago achieved modest economic independence through a combination of sound money management and the sale of her various artworks, the estate at Strawberry Hill allowed her to once again take on the joys of entertaining,
a hobby she had abandoned in the early days of her failed marriage. However, unlike other
society hostesses, who did so for the social benefit of their families or husbands, Damer’s events
were thrown for her own enjoyment and to strengthen those social connections that remained
valuable to her. “In the summertime she gave wonderful garden parties, which were attended by
all the great world of fashion from London, and where she was surrounded by that intellectual
coterie of which she was the center.”298
As she had done in the Richmond Theatricals, in travel, and in her career as an artist, Damer
once again enabled personal agency by becoming the architect of her own social spaces; which
295 Melville, Berry Papers. Pp.80 296 He also made Mrs. Damer his executrix and residuary legatee. 297 Walpole, Correspondence. Pp.147 March 2, 1797 298 Noble, Pp.164. 104 fell outside the boundaries of public scrutiny and private respectability. This freedom is
evidenced in part by the near constant presence of Mary Berry, who along with her sister Agnes,
were frequent guests at Strawberry Hill. Mary Berry, the middling-born daughter of a nameless
son and a favorite of Anne’s belated Uncle Horace Walpole, had long been considered one of
Damer’s “truest friends”299 Berry was a consistent source of comfort for Damer, particularly
when she became overwhelmed by her many social expectations, evidenced in one letter she
wrote to Mary on September 27, 1791. “What can I do when depression of spirits, anxiety, or ill
health, renders me unfit at times, for society?”300
However, their friendship had long been a source of gossip- as many wondered if their
friendship was indeed platonic. This was only the latest rumor of this kind for Anne, as “soon
after she was widowed, attacks on her supposed lesbianism set in.”301 On June 17th, 1790 Hester
Piozzi noted: “Mrs. Damer a lady much suspected for liking her own sex in a criminal way, had
Miss Farren the fine comic actress often about her last year.” Five years later, Piozzi would
repeat her accusation, though the rumor was far from current: “Tis a joke in London now to say
such a one visits Mrs. Damer. Lord Derby certainly insisted on Miss Farren’s keeping her at
Distance and there was a droll but bitter Epigram while they used to see each other often.”302
Similar speculation concerning Anne Damer’s sexual preferences has been taken up by
modern academics. This is often the case for the Learned Ladies explored in this work, whose
lives prove a natural site of lesbian potential due to their unorthodox experiences of Victorian
womanhood- including their unique public agency in movement and freedom in pursuit of
299 Damer, Anne. Unpublished Letters. (Lewis Walpole Library) 300 Ibid. 301 Elfenbein, Romantic Genius, 91-124; Donoghue 302 Piozzi, Hester. Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi. Pp. 232. 105 romantic desire303 Whether true or untrue, these rumors are important to consider when
attempting to understand Damer’s level of public and private agency. While in the past she might
have distanced herself from such rumors, she now disregarded them. By keeping her friend Mary
Berry close at hand, doing nothing to disprove the rumors about their relationship, Anne
illustrates the impunity she felt to act as she wished within the walls of Strawberry Hill.
For her part, Mary Berry seemingly did not share Damer’s cool attitude towards these
rumors. As explored more completely in chapter two of this work, Berry had made her way to
the highest networks of London’s elite purely on the strength of her reputation and social capital.
Scholars such as Schmid have argued that the first play produced at Strawberry Hill, written by
Berry, was a refutation of these rumors and a means of distancing herself romantically from
Damer. Regardless of ulterior motives, Damer was enthused by the opportunity to restart her
career in the world of private theatricals. She installed in Strawberry Hill what was described by
The Lady’s Monthly Museum in January 1802 as “an elegant little theatre.”304
The productions at Strawberry Hill would be greatly assisted by another frequent visitor at
Strawberry Hill, dramatist Johanna Baillie. Baillie served as a great source of inspiration for
Berry’s work and performed the Epilogue in Berry’s play Fashionable Friendships when the
play debuted in 1801. Damer would reciprocate her efforts, providing her with the plot for one of
her more successful plays, Family Fortune. Her continued assistance in the production is
evidenced in a letter from Berry to Baillie in 1806; Berry writes: “Mrs. Damer tells me in her
303 See in particular: Donoghue, Emma. “‘Random Shafts of Malace?’: The Outings of Anne Damer” Lesbian Dames: Saphhism in the Long Eighteenth Century; Elfenbein, Andrew. “Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth Century Stage,” Eighteenth Century Life 25 (2001):1-16; Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia UP, 1999. 304 The Lady’s Monthly Museum, January 1802, Pp.60 106 note that there are some corrections you have to make on the last acts of Family Legend.”305 The
collaborative efforts of these women show how sociable female networks were strengthened by
these “theaters of the closet,” 306as women of the upper-classes were eager for an opportunity to experience the thrill of the theater without risking their social respectability.
However, Damer herself had final control over every aspect of her private theater. According to Miss Mellon, herself an Actress (before becoming the Duchess of St. Albans through marriage), Anne “undertook the character of stage-manager, besides being privy-councilor in all matters relative to costume and other little etceteras [sic] known only the initiated in thespian mysteries.”307While eager to do things her way, her experiences at Richmond House bore some
influence on her own productions. As had been the cause in the Richmond productions, the
performances at Strawberry Hill were invitation only. As reported by The Monthly Mirror on
December 12, 1801: “The Audience was comprised of the social elite: the noblemen and the
gentlemen’s families ‘round the country.”308
Private theatricals blossomed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, creating a
transitional space situated somewhere between public and private. As shown throughout this
chapter, Anne Damer consistently placed herself at the center of this phenomenon, participating
first as an actor on the stage at Richmond house and later taking the helm of her own productions
at Strawberry Hill. This served both to bolster her own social significance, and that of her
extended female networks. It also allowed her to indulge her love for the theater in a setting that
did not threaten her respectability, but rather garnered the respect and admiration of her peers.
305 Schmid, 173. 306 Burroughs, “A Reasonable Woman’s Desire”, 188) [Citation: Burroughs, Catherine. Closet Stages: Johanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997] 307 The Memoirs of Miss Mellon, an actor who through marriage would become the Duchess of St. Albans 1:243 308 The Monthly Mirror (December 12, 1801) 107 Thus, in Damer’s career in the theater, as in her career as a sculptor, she occupied a space of her own making- enjoying a level of agency facilitated not by mere class designation: but through a skilled mastery of societal networks and understanding of transient spaces that occupied a middle-ground between public and private, all to the ultimate benefit of her own reputation and importance.
108 CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
The societal and legal structures which pervaded England from 1750-1860 created an
environment where biological sexual difference manifested in female disadvantage in nearly
every aspect of lived experience. Works such as Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have provided some
insight into the way this imbalance impacted how men and women experienced class within this
period. This seminal text in class and gender history illustrates the pervasive role of gender in the
construction of every aspect and institution within middle class culture and society.
Davidoff and Hall cite the late eighteenth century as decades “of acute social, political and
economic disturbance and disruption associated with significant shifts in class relations and
political power,”309 when questions of “sexual difference and sexual antagonism came to the
fore.”310 Within English society there was a certain preoccupation with what proper relations
between the sexes should look like, a topic taken up equally by conservatives like Hannah More
and radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft.311 Davidoff and Hall’s work effectively illustrates how
this central question fostered ideals of female domesticity and moral influence, and how women used these very ideals to gain agency and privilege within their class experience. “Power was for men, influence for women. Through their example in life women could hope to make those
309 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850. Pp. 75. 310 Ibid. 311 Davidoff and Hall, Pp. 168. 109 around them, in their family circles, better people. It was moral influence which was to allow a reassertion of self for women.”312
In The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, Anna
Clark crosses the same boundaries of class and gender history to better understand the role of
sexual difference in working-class experiences, much in the same way Davidoff and Hall did for
the middle classes in this period. In this work, Clark questions E.P Thompson’s formation of
working-class consciousness313 by integrating gender into her examination of plebian rhetoric
and discourse. She argues that sexual difference and realities of power dynamics between the
two sexes proved the most pervasive influence over the formation of working class identity in
this period. While the middle class was the first to develop a coherent class identity, largely
encompassed by the notion of separate spheres, the idea of a female home and masculine
workplace was out of reach for the working man, “who had no property and often could not
afford to maintain a household.”314
This divide between middle-class and working-class masculinity was solidified by the 1832
Reform Act, which enfranchised middle-class men and excluded the working class. Clark argues that the same gendered notions that relegated females to the private sphere were used to justify the exclusion of working people from the “privileges of participation in the state.”315 This altered
political strategies among the working class, which Clark argues was informed by the working
man’s desire to maintain what power they could still claim alongside their upper-and middle- class counterparts: authority over women in both the home and increasingly in the workplace.
312 Davidoff and Hall, Pp. 170. 313 See Thompson, E. P. 1966. The making of the English working class. New York: Vintage Books. 314 Clark, Anna. 1997. The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 7. 315 Clark, Anna. Struggle for the Breeches. Pp. 8. 110 She also illustrates the way women also shaped plebian culture, in part through the construction
of their own formal “Ladies Clubs” and using robust informal social networks; in this way
expanding women’s culture “beyond the home into the streets.”316
Within the upper classes, a standard of male agency and privilege was set and protected
through a combination of legal, social, and economic infrastructures. Legal infrastructures of this
time protected their property, asserted their right to suffrage and, sanctioned their participation in
other political activities, and gave them lord-like authority over their wives and children. Social
expectations also insured their access to economic resources, if not by way of inheritance or
existing family wealth, then via other professional and educational opportunities. While there is no universal experience of elite manhood, these safeguards ensured certain standards were met in the way upper-class men accessed privilege and agency associated with their class. While women had some legal protections, the privileges and agency associated with their class were not
prescribed nor protected to the same degree as their male counterparts. Scholars such as Bennett
and Froide affirm that “as a rule, women were, compared to men of their class or status, disadvantaged.”317 This is no different for women of the upper-classes.
Joan Scott argues that “commonality among women does not preexist its invocation but rather
that it is secured by fantasies that enable them to transcend history and difference.”318Any all-
encompassing category of ‘upper-class Victorian female’ would be among these fantasies of
commonality, unsupported and often contradicted by the material evidence that presents itself.
Definitions of normative upper-class behavior cannot account for the experiences of Anne Lister,
316 Clark, Anna. Struggle for the Breeches. Pp. 39. 317 Judith Bennett and Amy Froide. Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 318 Scott, Joan Wallach. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. 49. 111 of Mary Berry, or Anne Damer who enjoyed levels of agency that should have been impossible, while keeping social respectability that should have been rescinded. Yet, while much headway has been made in understanding how women experienced class at the middle and working levels, less work has focused on understanding how upper-class women in this period interacted with class.
The Learned Lady paradigm which serves as the central thread of this thesis is a mechanism intended to isolate, describe and enable identification of one of the diverse ways that women within Victorian England experienced class within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Rather than presuming common class experience based on gender, this strategy begins with a series of commonalities or criteria. For the purposes of this exercise, each of the criteria selected was in and of itself unusual for women within the English aristocracy of this period; with the intention of disrupting the trope of the “exceptional woman” which is frequently used as a simple explanation for variations in privilege and agency enjoyed by women within the same class.
There are six key criteria which collaboratively encompass the Learned Lady paradigm: a.) using social capital for personal rather than familial advancement, b.) access to privacy, c.) economic independence, d.) dominant authority over movement and travel, e.) dominant authority in relation to romantic desire and f.) a classical/intellectual education. Each of these criteria were exhibited by the women within the three body chapters of this work: Anne Lister,
Mary Berry, and Anne Damer. The objective of this paradigm is not to claim that these women’s lived experiences are interchangeable, but rather that they experienced privilege and agency within their class in roughly the same way. For example, each of these women avoided the pressures towards marriage (or in Anne Damer’s case, remarriage) that were so usual in upper- class society, yet avoided the social isolation and embarrassment often associated with
112 spinsterhood.319 Similarly, they all possessed intellectual educations, obtained largely through
their own interest and at their own expense. While upper-class women had more access to such things than women in other classes, most were still educated only in those skills that would assist one in their ultimate adult roles of wife and mother. The women who make up this work circumvented standards of normative behavior within their class to obtain privileges largely thought to be reserved for men. The strategy used in their analysis enables a more honest and nuanced exploration into the way that these individual women negotiated such unusual levels of agency and privilege within this period, an arguably more productive exercise than merely writing them off as an ‘exception’ to a set of rules that never applied to them in the first place.
Issues in accessing primary sources proved a constant limitation to both the scope and depth of this project. For this reason, this should be considered a starting point for the potential of the strategy outlined and demonstrated within this thesis. As is too often the case, this project revealed as many questions as it did answers.
The first of these lingering questions involves the nature of privacy as an avenue to female agency within this period. As addressed within this work and others, privacy in this period was a dominantly masculine privilege. I believe that the concept of privacy itself is underexplored.
Within the body of this work, privacy was accessed by Learned Ladies in a variety of ways: in the construction of their homes, in their social behaviors and in their travels. It is the last of these that remains the most intriguing; both in relation to the specific case studies outlined in this thesis and in a broader context. Travel was frequently exploited by aristocratic women within this period as a means to escape unwanted attention and scandal. As evidenced in these chapters,
319 See Froide and Bennett. 113 ‘Learned Ladies’ were no exception. However, while Anne Damer undoubtedly used travel as an escape from the tensions and social pressures in her life, the scarcity in available material limits understanding of her own consciousness within this strategy. In her mind is she running away from or towards something? Any attempt to understand her motivation would be pure speculation. Her public excuse- that her frequent travels were for the benefit of her health was so frequently used (including by the Duchess of Devonshire when her husband infamously sent her abroad to give birth to another man’s daughter) that it cannot be taken at face value.
While Anne Damer used travel to hide from society, Anne Lister used travel to find it. After her repeated failures to assimilate within London’s social circles, scholars such as Jill Liddington have asserted that she found greener social pastures in France and Russia. This is a conclusion taken up by this thesis. However, access to these last years of the Lister journals are frustratingly difficult to obtain; and issues of materiality greatly limited this work’s ability to construct a comprehensive understanding of Anne Lister’s social capital in foreign circles. I believe that the inclusion of these materials would provide a much broader scope of insight into the role these travels played in shaping Lister’s social and romantic autonomy.
Mary Berry, having herself never been a particularly dedicated diarist, provided even greater problems in finding primary source material. Chapter 3 in this work successfully sheds new light on the agency Berry wielded within her relationship with Horace Walpole (perhaps the only subject in this work who cannot be accused of suffering a lack of primary source material). The chapter also dedicates itself to disrupting an oversimplified version of her social ascendency by disputing her contemporary reputation as a lion-hunter. However, due to the nature of the material available, Berry’s experiences are still largely described through the lens of those who knew her and very rarely in her own words. Any continuation of this project would have to
114 include a broader archival search. I am optimistic that there our untapped resources to be found in the archives associated with Strawberry Hill, the house that plays a central role in the story of both Berry and Damer.
Any expansion of this project would necessitate an increased number of case studies selected with the goal of broadening the base of where the women whose lives can be examined through this strategy. I believe that the first step in this process would be an exploration of what a
Learned Lady looks like within the context of wife and mother. While foundationally the paradigm is not incompatible with marriage, the integration of these roles would certainly complicate our ability to establish a clear picture of a woman’s experience of privilege and agency. Because the women featured in this phase of the project are largely independent, it is easy to distinguish examples of self-demonstrated agency and isolated privilege. Looking for similar experiences of power wielded by women within the context of a family would inherently complicate any analysis of the subject’s class experience as an individual. However, there is no reason that the strategy demonstrated within this project should not work regardless of the woman’s marital status.
I am similarly confident that, with sufficient expansion in scope and depth, that this project could eventually move beyond class experiences strictly within the upper class. The motivation for placing this project in the upper-classes was based mainly in problems of access to sources.
The future of this project would ultimately necessitate overcoming these obstacles by way of archival research and further mastery of the subject matter. However, ultimately, the strategy demonstrated within this work has the potential to improve understanding of diverse female class experience at every economic level within this period. I am particularly interested in placing this
115 mechanism into the context of working class women to better understand how they negotiated privilege and agency within the limited confines of their class experience.
116 REFERENCES
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117 Clark, Anna. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Castle, Terry. "The Pursuit of Love." The Women's Review of Books 6, no. 4 (1989): 6-7. O'Brien, Karen. 2010. Women and enlightenment in eighteenth century Britain. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press. Eger, Elizabeth, and Lucy Peltz. Brilliant women: 18th-century bluestockings. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008. Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Muriel Green (ed. 1992) Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters (1800-1840). Sussex: Book Guild. Lister, Anne. No Priest but Love: Excerpts from the Diaries of Anne Lister, 1824-1826. Ed. Helena Whitbread. Washington Square, NY: New York UP, 1992. William, Stafford. “The Gender of the Place: Building and Landscape in Women-Authored Texts in England of the 1790s”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 305- 318. Rowanchild, Anira. “Everything Done for Effect: Georgic, Gothic, and Picturesque in Anne Lister’s Self-Production.” (Taylor and Francis, 2006). Orr, Dannielle. "“I Tell Myself to Myself”: Homosexual Agency in the Journals of Anne Lister (1791-1840)." Women's Writing 11, no. 2 (2004): 201-22. Amy M. Froide, “Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewoman of Early Modern England”, Local Population Studies 68, spring 2002, pp. 27-41. Liddington, Jill. “Authority and Mining in an Industrial Landscape: Anne Lister 1791-1840”. History Workshop Journal, No. 42 (Autumn, 1996), Pp. 58-86. Deborah Cohen. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. New York: Oxford University Press. (2013) Haggerty, George. Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century. (Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2011) Yarrington, Alison. 1997. “The female Pygmalion: Anne Seymour Damer, Allan Cunningham, and the writing of a woman sculptor's life”. [London]: Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. Pp. 39. Gross, Jonathon David. The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist. Yale Center for British Art. NJ18.D19661525 G76 2014 (LC)
118 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998) Koven, Seth. The Match Girl and the Heiress. Princeton University Press, 2014. Clark, Anna. 1997. The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class. Berkeley: University of California Press.
119 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Kimberly Kent is completing her Masters Degree through the College of Arts and Sciences, in the Department of History at The Florida State University. She is the recipient for the Daniel Sr. and Sylvia Walbolt MA Fellowship. Her major field is Gender and Sexuality with a minor field in European History. Her work focuses on British social and cultural history and female agency within 18th and 19th century England. Following the successful defense of this thesis, she hopes to continue her academic career through the completion of her PHD in History.
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