Dissipation, Divinity & Didactic Narrative Structure in

Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall

By David Scott

A thesis subm itted to

Sonoma State University

in partial fu lfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

10

English

Professor Chingling Wo

" Professor Timothy J. Wandling

Date Copyrighl© 20 J 4

By David Scott

II Authorization for Reproduction of Master's Thesis

I grant permission for [he print or digital reproduction of this thesis in its entirety, without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgement of authorship.

DATE: '"='"'" ' = David Scott Dissipation, Divinity & Didactic Narrative Structure in

Sarah Scott's Millellillm Hall

Thesis by

David Scott

ABSTRACT

My study examines Sarah Scott 's narrati ve response to dissipation and corruption caused by the growth of mercantile capitalism. I argue that this phenomenon is strongly

associated with the city of London, and how the ma in characters of Scott's novel - the

ladies ofMillenium Hall - are driven from this space 10 the country because of what

London has become. I further suggest that the reasons for this move are what inspires

them to enact thei r own version of society, in the form of a phi lanthropic and utopian

community. I view these women as applying the power of religious authority to qualify

themselves in their endeavors and in this manner, I shed light on a potential allusion to

the Vestal Virgins of Ancien t Rome. This projects connects mercantilism and dissipation

in the city, the utopian alternative in the country, and the divine nature that the women

assume to the didactic structure of the text that provides a transformative experience for

the reader.

Chair: ______~~-_ Signature

Date 04-/ 30 /20{ r- Acknowledgements

I would like 1O acknowledge Professors Chingling Wo and Timothy J. Wandling for helping me not only to formulate this thesis, but for helping me to understand bener the principles of literary criticism. In addition. I would like to acknowledge all of my

SSU professors who contributed to my larger understanding o f the Engl ish language and how it is taught, in the order in whi ch I took their classes: Greta Vollmer, Anne Goldman,

Noelle Oxen handler, Scott Mi ller and Cathy Kroll. Last but nOi least, I would li ke to acknowledge Merle Williams in the SSU English Department for keeping everythin g in such impeccable order so that this thesis could even be possible. Thank you from sincerest depths of my gratitude.

v Table of Contents

L Introducti on ...... 1

U. Getting Away from London ...... 17 m. Didacticism and the Vestal Virgins of En gland ...... '" ...... ', ...... 49

IV. Bibliography ...... 76

VI 1

Chapter I ~ Introduction

In my reading of Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762),1 I contend that it is a social problem novel that addresses London’s dissipated lifestyle which resulted from the growth of mercantile capitalism during the early eighteenth century. I argue that the novel’s women have harnessed the power of religious authority to sanction and develop a utopian community which stands as an alternative to and a critique of the London city space as affected by dissipation. Because the novel details specifically the lives of six women who come to comprise the “Ladies” of the Hall, I argue that their activities as a group pose an allusion to the six Vestal Virgins of Ancient

Rome. Lastly, I argue that the connection between the critique of London and the divine authority that the women are imbued with works with the didactic structure of the novel to perform a transformative experience for the reader.

Scott’s target audience was London’s patrician class, and because her novel went through four editions, this publication activity is testament both to the quality of Scott’s writing, and to the presence of a compelling interest in her ideas. Though it has not been traditionally credited for any significant role in the rise of the novel as a literary form, it has nevertheless been studied for its unique features.2 Traditionally considered a text that

1 The full title reads: A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent: Together with the Characters of the Inhabitants, and such Historical Anecdotes and Reflections, as May Excite in the Reader Proper Sentiments of Humanity, and Lead the Mind to the Love of Virtue.

2 See Watt; his rise of the novel studies focus on the works of Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding, but makes no mention of Scott’s text as a contributor to the novel’s growth as a literary form. As M.A. Rabb notes, a change in eighteenth-century studies occurred when gender studies were introduced, inspiring her to include Millenium Hall in her novel courses “because of its contrast to the canonical list of the five male ‘greats’: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollet” (7-10). 2

prefigures the principles of feminism, modern critics are also interested in its formal features and aspects of social engagement. To borrow from Crystal Lake’s terminology,

Millenium Hall is a “hybrid text” (680). Unlike character driven narratives such as

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740), or Henry Fielding’s The

History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Scott’s novel utilizes the formal features of both of these novels and combines them with a blend of her own techniques and imagination to produce a text that makes explicit observations about society and how it should function. What makes her ideas stand out lies most significantly in the fact that they are brought out in the form of fiction, yet they are not necessarily cloaked under the guise of subtext. The intermixing of forthright and conspicuous social criticism with the aspect of fiction renders Millenium Hall as unique, replete with a wealth of historical material for critics and scholars interested in the sociocultural situation of the mid-eighteenth century.

The country of England at the time was seven decades into a process of change extending from two of the greatest events known to British historians: The Restoration of the Monarchy and the Glorious Revolution. The Restoration marks the dividing line between England as governed by Oliver Cromwell’s Interregnum and the 1660 reinstatement of the Stuart monarchy under the reign of King Charles II. In this particular situation, the country experienced blowback from the constraints of a puritanical society in which the social order transformed from rigid religiosity into a kind of sanctioned hedonism. 3 The Glorious Revolution in 1688, alternatively, resulted from the death of

Charles. At the threat of his Catholic brother James II assuming the English throne,

3 See Starkey, Chapter 19, for further reading on these periods and their monarchs. 3

English Parliament backed King William III of Orange of the Netherlands, by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of Charles, Princess Mary II, in a campaign to drive the

Catholic heir from the country.

Millenium Hall’s connection to the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution is learned when we come to understand how the text is a response to their long term effects.

Though London town had been steadily growing from the period of the Tudor Monarchy, the sudden Dutch king arriving from his equally expanding country provided the impetus for nudging open the floodgates to an entirely new world of trade. “[A]ll of this trade flowed to Britain and the continent through British ports, most often London: from 1722 to 1724, the metropolis handled over 80% of England’s imports, 67% of its exports, and

87% of its re-exports” (Bucholz & Ward 89). A flourishing system of mercantile capitalism had taken root so that opportunities for wealth became prospects for countrymen and citizens as never seen before, where the “capital thus generated made

London’s merchants rich” (91).4 If we consider the previous liberalization of society under King Charles II – with its aspects of heavy libation, sexualization of women and scandal – then the sudden growth of London’s trade market combined with this hedonistic way of life proved to be the perfect concoction for social disaster. By the

1730s London’s streets became overcrowded lanes full of people that were somehow tied to the mercantile trade phenomenon, where the taverns and gambling clubs, in turn, took advantage of the populace in their mercantile pursuits. “As this implies, taverns provided a degree of connection and conviviality – innocent and illicit – that had the potential to take the edge off of the hustle and bustle of urban life” (Bucholz & Ward 190). Yet the

4 See both French and Grassby for more information on the phenomenon of mercantile capitalism. 4

notion of taking “the edge off” gets blown out of proportion when one considers the great gin epidemic that wreaks its havoc from 1720-1750. People became serious drunkards, and yet this was only a portion of the problem. Gambling plunged men into debt, the aristocratic class conducted their socially corrosive scandals, the world saw its first financial bubble collapse in the South Sea Company, and prostitution grew to ruin the lives of women at an alarming rate. As it seems, mercantile capitalism, in its latest and expanding form, laid the foundation for a multitudinous series of unforeseen problems to arise.

Scott’s novel follows in a trend of which writers sought to criticize the corrosion of English life through fictionalized documentation. Female authors such as the Fair

Triumvirate of Wit – Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood5 – initiated much of this kind of criticism in the form of prose in what scholars now refer to as

Amatory Fiction.6 In this type of novel, the amorous scandals of the aristocracy are simulated through the use of skilled plot and character development. Alternatively, an author like Daniel Defoe took to writing pseudo-histories in which his protagonists are tracked as they experience the harsh realities of contemporary living. In either case,

England’s way of life comes under great scrutiny for readers to absorb; and yet, in the case of the triumvirate, the criticisms found within their stories largely function under the guise entertainment. Defoe’s work can equally be categorized in this manner, if less plot driven and more fictive-autobiographical.

5 As Kastan documents on page ten of his volume, this term was coined by the poet-critic James Sterling in a dedicatory verse to Haywood’s Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (1725).

6 See Warner on the immense popularity of this genre, and how it fostered a booming reading-for-entertainment industry. 5

One of the traditional challenges involved with performing criticism on such kinds of historical texts is to try and approximate what kind of ideological work they are performing, both on the surface and in terms of subtext. If we consider the works of

Aphra Behn, we find the scandal and seduction that her characters engage in are allegorical, metonymic, and metaphorical for England’s corrupted aristocratic and governing classes, where the intention is to smear them without directly smearing them.

Defoe, by contrast, underscores the problem of the governing system: how individuals sustain and endure hardship under its unfair, albeit, seemingly inhumane aspects. In both, however, readers are drawn into the action of corruption as it unfolds, leaving room to marvel, wonder, speculate and even fear the situations laid out in their literary forms.

Millenium Hall is notably different when it is critically examined. Sarah Scott’s text draws issues out into the open in a blatant way that distinguishes it from her predecessors by creating a source of meta-commentary.

By utilizing the technique of the framed narrative, Millenium Hall takes a page from literary works such as The Canterbury Tales (circa 1390) and the Arabian Nights

(English edition 1706). Yet instead of having the characters convey their own narratives, or having a character tell tales for the purposes of self-preservation, Scott’s text employs a single character to narrate the lives of the other characters for the larger purpose of saving the soul of England. In this manner, the difference between mimetic and diegetic modes of writing serve critical narrative functions. The framing of the narration involves that of a written letter in which its author, Sir George Ellison,7 conveys to the recipient of

7 The author of this letter is anonymous throughout the text; we learn his name from the novel’s sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). 6

his letter the events of a chance encounter he has had with a utopian community presided over by a number of women. Here the use of mimetic language operates with power, serving to instill a quality of inclusion that draws readers into the world Sir George has discovered. He describes in vivid detail the surroundings he has observed and the people he has witnessed so that the immediate temptation is to believe some plot is about to unfold within this world. Soon, however, the mimetic quality gives way to the diegetic, and the narration “shifts from a bucolic estate tour to a series of anguished and dizzyingly complex tales of orphanhood, mother/daughter separation at birth, paternal weakness or turpitude, financial destitution, and so forth” (Jordan 33). The process functions nearly like a trap: the transfer from “bucolic estate tour” to the anguish of the tales is staged so that the diegetic mode can facilitate a didactic process. The female narrator of the tales,

Mrs. Maynard, along with the women of whom she is telling their stories, Mrs. Morgan,

Mrs. Mancel, Lady Mary Jones, Mrs. Selvyn and Mrs. Trentham,8 become instructors on topics of morality and ethics as they pertain to self and society. Sir George and his traveling companion Lamont are the recipients of this clearly contrived lesson plan.

Though Millenium Hall comes right out in the open with criticism about the way society functions, this does not mean that subtextual ideological work is not to be gleaned. The fact that the society Sir George encounters is run by women, for example, has led some critics to suggest that Scott’s text prefigures the acceptance of lesbianism.

As Sally O’Driscoll suggests, “Once one acknowledges the possibility that relationships between women such as Mrs. Morgan and Miss Mancel may move beyond friendship

8 “[T]he title ‘Mrs.’ being the eighteenth-century usage rather than our current signal of marital status” (O’Driscoll 67). In this light, the titles “Mrs.” and “Miss” are used interchangeably throughout this essay as well as the text; as best as can be gleaned, use of the title Miss denotes a female character at a young age. 7

into the erotic, one opens up the possibility of a lesbian reading” (72). Her reasoning is based on the work of George Haggerty, who argues that because the women live in a predominately male-free zone, that any kind of a reading “insists on intimate relations between [the] women” (O’Driscoll 72). The problem here is that “erotic” possibilities at the Hall do not present themselves textually. Any reading that requires an insistence on intimacy is ultimately speculative. In fact, Miss Mancel, before committing herself to the

Hall, had been in love and was on the verge of getting married to the young man, Sir

Edward Lambton. After his death, her life at the Hall is depicted as pious and asexual.

This experience alone points to an inclination towards heterosexuality that is marked by a transformation into the chaste. But if the lesbian reading is extended to consider that the six women at the Hall are without need of men, it still does not wholly point to lesbianism. Lady Mary Jones had allowed herself and was even eager to be courted by

Mr. Parnel; and among a scene which appears to have been comprised mostly of married men practicing infidelity, Miss Trentham is seen during her venture into dissipation procuring “many lovers” (Scott 240). Mrs. Morgan and Miss Selvyn have had difficulties with men, the former a fixed marriage and the latter an unwanted sexual advance, yet their present day behavior, like the other women of Hall, lean towards the chaste rather than the erotic.

While O’Driscoll similarly denotes the fact that there are “no explicit scenes of same-sex love” (73), she makes an alternate observation based on the Foucauldian analysis of Lisa Moore in which the ladies of the Hall are “portrayed not as victimized but as concerned with power, and they are tyrannical in their panopticon-like surveillance of their dominions” (74). This critique poses an interesting possibility, if a harsh one. The 8

Hall’s ladies mean well for the people they care for in their philanthropic endeavor, and their work is depicted in its published form so that the idea may spread and enact change in the real world. Since Millenium Hall was written during an age where it is largely understood that men control the reins of power, six women presiding over the Hall is something of role-reversal. Here the women are in control to the extent that, in their didacticism towards their male guests, they are doing so with a kind of chip on their shoulder. They inform and instruct on the ways they control others, which underscores the “tyrannical” aspect of the critique. This implication of reversal not only cast the ladies in a negative light, but is additionally problematic because the system they have created does not present itself as entirely alternative, which is to say: it relies on a strict hierarchy that does not agree with the characteristics of a utopian society.

The idea of role-reversal thus suggests that the patriarchal system intended for critique has simply been re-gendered, especially in light of the carpet industry that the women partake of on their estate. The role-reversal computes into a simple supplanting of an economic system from city to country in which, at the removal of the men, women are free to run the show. Because these women are more considerate in their way of thinking

– that is, philanthropic – the idea is that the system will not produce corruption because the system is well-regulated and the employees are paid well. James Cruise observes a problem with this realignment by making note of the financial factor involved. He suggests that where mercantile capitalism created problems in the city, it will do so in the country, because the lesson the ladies are teaching, in spite of their moral framework, is still based on the pursuit of profit. Even though the carpet factory workers are paid well, the ladies themselves still receive the largest bulk of the cash. And as their guest, Sir 9

George, is essentially reeling from a lifetime of “mercantile gain” (Scott 54), and his friend Lamont is the son of a wealthy gentleman, “Whether Sir George and Lamont are capable of going beyond moral appeasement and of doing what is finally asked of them is a matter left uncertain, since their resistance to economic justice, as Scott herself recognizes, is one ingrained into their culture” (Cruise 570).

In her speculation on the power the ladies appear to seek, Nanette Morton would seem to agree. She tells us, “Scott’s attempt to redefine the role of women is profound, for the female community of Millenium Hall represents a reordering of the eighteenth-century economy of power” (186); but she appears to be thinking along the lines of Cruise when she ultimately suggests, “the text is not so much revolutionary as it is reinforcing: women, given their proper place, are to act as bulwarks to shore up an already existing structure” (204). This “existing structure” is code for the many problems of inequality of which the Hall’s utopia is intended to solve, yet the system by which the women have created seems hardly egalitarian. The individuals who benefit from the

Hall’s philanthropy are fixed in their lower rank. The people who work at the carpet factory are simply employees void of any investment capital, and the lot of them are subject to control and regulation under the rules that the ladies themselves arbitrarily set.

In this manner, the textual ideological work is suggesting that women have the right to preside over a hierarchical system in the same manner that men do, though it comes at the expense of truly defining a utopian community.

For the ladies of the Hall to desire power, by contrast, seems understandable.

Nicole Pohl keenly notes how the house on the estate belonging to the ladies – that is, the

Hall itself – has been redesigned, “where existing ‘male’ architecture is taken over by a 10

female utopian community and reconstituted as a new spatial form where women are liberated from the “inferiorizing definitions of men’” (51). Though their efforts produce hierarchical characteristics, the message is that equality has to start somewhere. The rhetorical question here reads: If men can preside over home and estate, benefit from a mercantile enterprise, and run society in general, then why cannot women? Nicolle

Jordan builds on Pohl’s idea, suggesting that ownership of home and land by the ladies results in a display of what it means to understand the responsibility that comes with power (41). Her argument suggests that a woman’s control over property allows her to translate her traditional domestic role as servant to master and family into that of a servant to the people, by founding the philanthropic endeavors the ladies conduct. By using the story of Mr. Hintman, a landowner who seems to take advantage of his landowning power to seduce Miss Mancel, she distinguishes the traits of a proper steward of the land from an abusive steward of the land. The distinction is intended as a metaphor for the treatment of the citizens of a society. Jordan’s argument contains an additionally interesting element in that she suggests how the country space is possessed of an essence which can inspire good stewardship, and how union between the two fosters the philanthropic condition. Power, under Pohl and Jordan’s terms, is not viewed as negative so much as it is viewed as a matter of the struggle for equality and integrity of responsibility.

Other kinds of critical, ideological and subtextual work have been spotted and applied by a list of critics with an interest in Millenium Hall. For instance, Jordan’s interests go beyond the aspect of landscape ethos when, in a separate argument, she considers how the Hall’s estate wealth is reinvested into the philanthropic endeavor 11

instead of creating more systems of capital production. Jordan observes a colonialist factor in that the system of trade by which the carpet factory engages in is, at some point in the economic chain, tied to the problem of slavery that colonialism propagates.

William H. Wandless, alternatively, focuses on the seclusion that the ladies of the Hall seek, and the paradox involved with the lengthy letter that is written with the intention of publicizing the Hall’s location and its philanthropy. On the topic of philanthropy, Dorice

Williams Elliott argues how Scott had the plight of unmarried women in mind as she wrote, women of whom, in their lack of situation, faced dire possibilities with regard to their futures. And in appearing as some of the earlier criticism on Scott’s work, by modern standards, Melinda Alliker Rabb takes into consideration the formation of the literary canon. Her observations are based on the historically established criteria involved with forming the canon, and how critical studies have affected a rethinking of such criteria so that works like Millenium Hall can find their way into scholarly circles. Lastly, and appearing as some of the latest criticism, Deborah Weiss makes note of contemporary philosophical matters on moral, ethical, and feeling theories, applying the ongoing textual references to the use of “reason” as her support. During Scott’s era, contemporary philosophies suggested that people who acted instinctively on their emotional reactions were in fact, the more moral of society’s populace; yet Weiss succinctly notes how Scott appears to have disagreed. By applying the example of Mr.

Hintman’s reaction to the orphaned Miss Mancal, only to plot to ruin her later in life after adopting her, the suggestion is that people who act on their instinctive reactions are subject to moral blindness; in this sense, emotional reactions must be modulated by the principle of reason so that proper decisions about any applicable situation may be made. 12

My own interest in Sarah Scott’s novel begins with its paradoxical quality as a story. On the one the hand, the scenes Sir George and Lamont encounter at the outset of the narration are staged with a kind of writerly imagination that is testing of a reader’s credulity. A mystically described lute player who charms them stops for a moment to attend to a lamb that is drifting from the herd, while women and children labor away in the fields nearby, in the their “happy amiable innocence” (Scott 56-57). Sir George’s response is equally testing in that he comes to label this location as “enchanted ground”

(58). Proceeding an extensive tour of the estate and its philanthropic activities, Sir

George professes “astonishment” (76), requesting a complete rundown on how the whole thing came to be. Curiosity has driven both him and Lamont to marvel on such sights and yet, the curious nature of what is depicted in the passages are, in fact, curious to the reader as well, because they are seemingly unrealistic.

By contrast, once Mrs. Maynard begins narrating the histories of the Hall’s founders, and discussions are held which concern the aspect of the circumstances involved, the text assumes a very non-fiction-like quality: it fuses superficial fictive energy with the realistic aspect of discussion and didactic structure. The experiences that the women go through seem very real; but further than that, the discussion topics are vitally relevant to the contemporary setting in which novel is published. Thus the interactive nature of the text – the exchanges that occur between narrator and listeners – produces an interesting effect in that during the reading, one feels as though one were sitting in, participating with a marked measure of thought and opinion. The effect is one of realism in a seemingly pure form. A story is not being conveyed for the purposes of entertainment; rather, topical matter is being documented, outlined, and commented on 13

for the purposes of enacting a change in the way a reader thinks.

The motives of the characters and how such motives are tied to the London city space are of additional interest. Apart from the obvious notion that Millenium Hall performs ideological work for the rights of women in a patriarchal environment, my own observations involve how the text is a critique on how mercantile capitalism affects the social sphere of London. Because the ladies of the Hall have utilized the country for their philanthropic endeavors, my argument participates in the critiques and studies of Nicole

Pohl and Nicolle Jordan. I work from their understanding of the country as a location that is hospitable to women and the philanthropic endeavors they choose to enact, yet my discussion primarily concerns that which they do not cover: the aspect of London’s social problems and why it is a location that drives the ladies away. My intention is to document the contrast between city and country by underscoring the problems developed by mercantile capitalism as signaled in the text, how these problems affected the psychology of citizens, and how London becomes non-conducive to spiritual and mental health.

In addition, my interests involve how the ladies of the Hall utilize the principles of religion in a way that qualifies them for the instruction of their guests. Because

London was still largely dependent on an existing feudal patriarchal order that was grounded in Protestantism (Bucholz & Ward 5), understanding how the ladies turn the principles of religion into a tool for power is important to document and understand. In any society that experiences a crumbling of the social order, intervention is seen as a duty. In this manner, Sarah Scott is not out to get men, she is steeped in the endeavor to uncover a lack of attention to the crumbling of a society brought about by the effects of mercantile capitalism, and how mending the ways of such disintegration can be achieved. 14

To do so, she depicts the ladies in her novel as utilizing what Michael Foucault refers to as the “perfect disciplinary apparatus” (Morton 199); that is, she depicts them harnessing the principles of Christianity as a means to command the attention of both men, and her reading audience in general.

This sense of duty to society lies at the heart of Millenium Hall’s success at the time of its publication, but only contributes to a portion of its enduring legacy.

Formulaically speaking, it “extensively develops an alternative fiction to the paradigmatic ones in which the heroine marries happily or dies tragically” (Rabb 9). This change up in the formula reveals the kind of thinking that extends beyond the box, the will to carve new paths in literature without fear of criticism, and because the text was produced by a woman, “it challenges our ways of reading and our expectations about women writers” (15). As Rabb argues, this is cause for a reformulation of canon formation criteria, that which had been dominated by male-oriented scholarship. In essence, this means that Scott’s novel challenges patriarchal culture even in the modern age. Millenium Hall is a work of excellence for its ability to challenge ideas that are pertinent both to contemporary and modern society.

The legacy does not entirely revolve around duty to society and breakthroughs for feminist culture, but additionally serves historical work according to the “dizzyingly complex” nature of the text. “Rather than existing as a feminized fictional counterpart to her masculinized historical writing, Millenium Hall mimics antiquarian texts structurally, and combines historiographical methodologies, like the historical biography, with the novel” (680). Though one of the clichés of novel critique involves discussing how they provide a window into the age of the society of which they are written, the phenomenon 15

is slightly different in this case. The non-fiction characteristic exhibited by the discussion element of the text works with historiographical methodology to reveal not only what

England society was like, but what people were thinking about that society. In this manner, the text is of immense sociocultural value for understanding a myriad of historically related topics which include philanthropy, economics, class disparity, gender discrimination, marriage, property ownership, corruption, distinctions between country and city, as well as the moral and ethical topics that comprise the discussion sections.

Scott’s contribution to the literary community is based on a thorough analysis of culture and society as viewed through the lens of a woman’s eye, a factor that is highly unique for the age in which she wrote. Ultimately speaking, her novel stands at the forefront of a wave social reform that comes to follow in the ensuing years following the publication, most notably labeled under the efforts of London’s fabled Bluestocking Movement.9

Though the analysis of Scott’s text leads us to understand it as largely a social problem novel intended to induce a transformative experience in the reader, the reading does not wholly leave us with an utter sense of didacticism. We can feel the emotions of the old woman who, as a beneficiary, lives with great respect for the ladies of the Hall, and we can feel the gratitude of the disfigured people who recognize how they are no longer economically exploited because of the good will they receive. We can sense the dismay of Miss Mancel’s predicament at the death of her aunt, leaving her to be adopted by a strange man, and we can feel the pain she and her best friend Miss Melvyn

9 “This was a feminizing and feminist movement among upper- and middle-class women that emerged…for the moral and cultural reform of salon society in the middle decades of the eighteenth century” (Kelly 11). See Kelly’s introduction to his edition of Millenium Hall, the edition used for this thesis, for a robust exposition on the Bluestocking phenomenon. 16

experience when, as a result of the wicked Lady Melvyn’s schemes, the two are separated by the dreadful Mr. Morgan. In the complexity of the tales, such moments are many; they are well-written and well-described, and they provide a sentimental context for the didacticism that is interwoven throughout the entirety of Mrs. Maynard’s narration. To complete this intertwining quality, the religious element overarching the narrative draws forth an ethereal essence to the text that makes readers feel as though a higher power is at work, that some greater purpose, difficult to explain, lies at the heart of the messages that are conveyed. Though Millenium Hall espouses largely a didactic purpose, this rich and thorough quality of Scott’s writing endows it with a formal and thematic aesthetic which can go far in explaining why it is her most recognized work.

For the present discussion, the title of my thesis itself outlines the trajectory of my argumentation. Mercantile capitalism flourishing in the city did more than create opportunities that were essentially only beneficial to the patriarchal and the aristocratic order, it produced a phenomenon contemporaries of the culture would classify as

“dissipation,” a term that is used frequently throughout the text. In this kind of society, immorality is the problem, characterized by everything that is offensive to Scott’s religious principles. Such immorality unfolds in tandem with London’s previous and prevalent social issues so that Millenium Hall as a novel becomes a bold endeavor to tackle them all. The agency involved with addressing such problems is where the notion of divinity comes into play, that it is by divine right that the ladies are allowed to instruct their guests, as well as the reading audience, on the nature of moral rectitude versus the problem of immorality.

17

Chapter II ~ Getting Away from London

In Millenium Hall, the city of London acquires a negative image. Such characterization seems odd in light of London historians who tell us, “London, it is true, is exceptional. It underwent a transformation, indeed a revolutionary one, in the course of the [eighteenth] century” (George 1). According to a statement like this, London can be envisioned as a symbol of England’s prosperity and success during the eighteenth century, but the natural inclination towards this phenomenon, one would think, should be pride. Historians Bucholz and Ward offer a more complex understanding of the situation:

“Even when an eighteenth-century author like Daniel Defoe called London a ‘monster,’ the allegation was often couched amid words of grudging admiration” (30). The connotative difference between the terms “exceptional” and “monster,” “grudging” and

“admiration,” is gaping, suggesting that the rise of London as a preeminent urban center was not always viewed as an entirely wholesome phenomenon. More to the point, the transformation that London underwent appears to have garnered England’s attention in a way that suggests, people were caught off guard by what London had become. That

Bucholz and Ward use Defoe to denote a sense of mixed feelings about London is notable. Defoe was an author who participated in contemporary publishing culture, and as they tell us further: “Contemporary writers stressed not only London’s growth, but its increasing lack of unity and coherence” (30).

In documenting the lives of Millenium Hall’s founders, Sarah Scott participates in this tradition of commentary by allowing a contrast to develop between London and the country space. Through this contrast, London becomes a place that women find 18

themselves departing from so they can find what they cannot seem to find otherwise.

London is repeatedly associated with a crowded, fast-paced life embroiled in immorality and dissipation while the country is presented as the alternative in the search for a safe, peaceful, and healthy living environment. In this manner, Millenium Hall as a novel goes further than to offer potential solutions to the problems that the city space conjures, but makes a clear acknowledgment to the negative effects of that city space as a source for why departure is even necessary. In so doing, the text makes a statement about the impact of London’s development on people and by proxy, the need for an awareness of London as a center of commerce.

Though five out of the six histories of the Hall’s founders are depicted as departing from London, the history of Lady Mary Jones is notable in that hers involves a conversion experience; that is, her disposition changes after experiencing discomfort and misfortune as a result of her London lifestyle. She is the only one whose father was a member of the peerage, an advantage that proves useless since he leaves her nothing when he dies; the point is significant for the decadent lifestyle she comes to experience as a result. Lady Mary is adopted by her father’s sister, Lady Sheerness, a London woman of the aristocracy who, long before the adoption, “became a victim to dissipation…[and] was carried full sail down the stream of folly” (173). Thus at the age of ten, Lady Mary becomes exposed to and influenced by the Lady’s ways. This is the impetus for the whole of Lady Mary’s experience, the aspect of “dissipation” lying at its roots.

Entries number four and six of the Oxford English Dictionary define dissipation as “[w]asteful expenditure or consumption of money, means, powers, faculties, etc.; squandering, waste,” and “[w]aste of the moral and physical powers by undue or vicious 19

indulgence in pleasure; intemperate, dissolute, or vicious mode of living” (OED). As an aristocrat, Lady Sheerness could afford to allow herself such guilty pleasures without suffering consequences, for as M. Dorothy George notes, such consequences could be dreadful. In documenting the life of the social reformer Francis Place, she tells us that he once drew up a “melancholy list of [London] men with good businesses who became destitute through dissipation and gambling” (George 273). Lady Sheerness is set apart from the threat of destitution by virtue of her rank, but this does not mean she escapes the coldness of the life that dissipation brings. When she becomes struck by an “incurable disorder,” instead of comforting her in her illness, her friends – or rather: “Her acquaintance she found began to absent themselves” (Scott 187). As Lady Sheerness faces the certainty of death, Lady Mary is struck by emotions of impending grief due to her attachment to the woman; but she, too, also notices the nature of the Lady’s friends,

“who she plainly perceived would have fallen into total neglect of her had she not found means to render her house more amusing… She now saw that friendship existed not without esteem; and that pleasurable connections would break at the time they were most wanted” (188). The death of Lady Sheerness is all the more depressing for the reason, that she is carried away during a card party to die in her room, her guests retiring because the evening was apparently over. Such a scene testifies that self-satisfaction takes precedence and people are expendable. London can be understood in these terms as productive of apathy and indifference, whose citizens think only of themselves and what the world can offer them, before they think of the well-being of others.

Dissipation for Lady Sheerness spells a vapid existence that does more than render her something of an empty soul: the spatial periphery of her ways affects the 20

person closest to her. Amid the London scene, as learned of and frequented through the habits of Lady Sheerness, Lady Mary makes an acquaintance in Lord Robert St. George.

The young man is a rake who notices the effect he has had on her and thus, formulates a plot. On the evening of an arranged “private party” Lady Mary finds herself in a room alone with Lord Robert, “and with surprize found seduction was his aim” (183); after making a polite, if unclear dismissal of his actions, “his perseverance increased Lady

Mary’s surprize and she began to think herself affronted” (184). Though the situation is resolved peacefully, Lady Mary is confused and makes inquiries about the matter among her other acquaintances. Through this endeavor she is informed by Miss Selvyn the problem of a “woman with improper behaviour or discourse” (183). The interpretation here equates something of the egregious fault-of-the-woman argument, that Lady Mary’s problem is her coquettish behavior; the explanation, consequently, plays into the origins of Lady Mary’s conversion. The experience builds on a previous experience in which another man, Mr. Lenman, had schemed to take advantage of Lady Mary because she flirted with him heavily, with “a thousand airs of coquetry” (175). Though Lady Mary manages to keep her honor intact on both occasions, in her particular experience with Mr.

Lenman, a friend had helped her to see that it was the hand of providence that saved her; but following this occasion, it is in her experience with Lord Robert in which she “began to reflect on her own behaviour” (183). Between these two events, the mindset associated with the lifestyle of dissipation begins to conflict with the mindset of virtue; yet the distinction, inherently, involves casting aspersions on the nature of London life. Not only is it a location of indifference and apathy, the women of London are susceptible to sexual advance. And in the assailant’s rationalization, the behavior that a woman develops in 21

being exposed to the life of dissipation offers justification for his actions.

London’s association with the history of Lady Mary continues when, after Lady

Sheerness dies, she is forced to take up residence with a sister in-law who is older than her, Lady Brumpton. With Lady Sheerness, Lady Mary had been “initiated into every diversion at an age when other girls are confined to their nursery,” and by “fifteen years of age she became the most caressed person in every company. She entered into all the fashionable tastes, was coquettish and extravagant” (174). With Lady Brumpton she

“now entered into a new set of company [and] frequently found herself at a loss” (192).

This “new” lifestyle is like the Siamese twin to the lifestyle of dissipation, found in the effects it produces: Lady Brumpton suffers from an all “too great vanity”; she is

“encircled by science and flattery”; and the people around her “were continually striving whose wit should go off with the greatest report” (190-93). Lady Mary grows cognizant of the distinction between the dissipated lifestyle and the pretension-of-intellect lifestyle and undergoes a quick schooling so that she can try and fit in. “[F]or though she perceived an absurdity in these mock skirmishes of genius, yet she thought proper to conform to her company” (193). In this manner, London’s image moves from one of harboring dissipation to that of celebrating pedantry. Not only are London’s citizens possessed of an “unfeeling mirth” (188) – as seen in the friends of Lady Sheerness who represent a kind of inhuman lack of emotional warmth – it is filled with a scene of people who pride themselves on the look of erudition as opposed to the prospect of applying knowledge for the betterment of mankind.

Lady Mary endures the death of both of her benefactresses. If in life their activities told on the nature of London, their deaths did so in equal proportion. Lady 22

Sheerness dies with “considerable debts incurred” (188), leaving Lady Mary with nothing to fend for herself as she faces the prospect of living in London alone. Lady Brumpton, alternatively, undergoes a deathbed conversion in which “she saw how much a desire to gain the applause of a few people had made her forget the more necessary aim of obtaining the approbation of her Creator” (194). In both instances, London life for both women has led to notions of bankruptcy, financially and spiritually. As a participating founder in the project that is to become Millenium Hall, that Lady Mary dodges the worst of these outcomes is fitting. When she had been on the verge of being ruined by Mr.

Lenman, the notion of “providence” at work had been instilled into her thinking; on facing destitution at the death of Lady Sheerness, that Lady Brumpton happens to come along and save her, this causes Lady Mary to revisit thoughts about “being preserved from the fatal consequences of her own follies…[which] awakened in her mind a lively gratitude to the supreme Disposer of all human events” (191). Luckily for her, Lady

Brumpton does not abandon her in the same way as her predecessor. And though she is left with a fortune to do with as she pleases, Lady Mary’s feelings about the state of her life plays into the completion of her associations with London: “and tired of the multitude in which she had so long lived, she was seeking for retirement” (194). The retirement she finds is in the country. The lifestyle associated with London that Lady Mary experiences has not only created a moral dichotomy that distinguishes for her what is right from wrong, but has caused a distinction to be made between the city, the country, and the moral features that attends each. Because Lady Mary cannot find solace in London due to the inherent nature of its space, she is required to seek out the country for matters of personal health. In essence, Lady Mary’s life path has led her to Millenium Hall. 23

That Lady Mary applies the term “multitude” among her reasons for why she must leave London is worthy of note. “In the eighteenth century London was growing more rapidly in bricks and mortar than in population as people left the crowded lanes of the City for the newer parts of town” (George 1). Bucholz and Ward confer on the matter, telling us that by the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, “London was not only the capital of that [British] empire, but the continent’s greatest port, its financial and banking center, and its largest city, inhabited by about 675, 000 people” (2). They follow up on their documentation by coloring the city space: “London in 1750 was a shock city of palaces and slums, concert halls and gin joints, churches and brothels, possibility and fear” (3). Sarah Scott’s point of view leans towards vilification, denoting London as location “[s]urrounded with every snare that can entrap a youthful mind” (Scott 173). The connection in her text between “multitude” and the lives of Lady Sheerness, Lady

Brumpton and Lady Mary, seems to imply that as the city grows and expands by the power of mercantile capitalism, the concentration of people evokes the tendency for immorality to materialize and operate as a kind of force that permeates and thus, deteriorates the social landscape.

Sarah Scott even complicates the connection between multitude and immorality by suggesting that the two working together can affect the rate of time. When Miss

Selvyn becomes the second target of Lord Robert’s advances, she not only rejects him, but attributes Lord Robert’s earlier and partial success with Lady Mary as an effect of blindness in the “hurry of dissipation” (209). At the end of the novel, Mrs. Trentham explains to her pupil Lamont that “the homely board of the cottager is blessed with plenty” (246), and that the endeavor to live a principled life can serve to avoid a “course 24

of hurry and dissipation which will not afford us leisure to recollect our errors, nor attention to attempt amending them” (246). In this light, thick concentrations of people not only produces conditions of immorality, but affects the rate of time. This, in turn, affects mental perception and the ability to make decisions. The social problem of dissipation becomes a kind of circular one in which, the faster the social sphere moves about in its affairs, the more dissipation seems to flourish. Most notably, the problem is strictly associated with the city space, for it is the “cottager” in the country who is

“blessed with plenty.”

Miss Louisa Mancel’s London experience is free from direct involvement with dissipation, but the city nevertheless acquires a negative image through her story. Her experience begins with an encounter with an older man, Mr. Hintman, who adopts her as a child because her aunt has died of consumption. The predicament goes well at first, as

Mr. Hintman takes her away from London, puts her through school, and endows her with fatherly love and an assortment of gifts. Matters go south when later in life, she learns that he wants her to be his mistress, going as far as to realize “she must either accompany him into the country, or disoblige him for ever” (100). Like Lady Mary, London has put

Louisa in contact with a sexual predator. “Mr. Hintman had a very great fortune, which he spent entirely in the gratification of his favourite vice, the love of women; on whom his profuseness was boundless” (98). In this particular case, the connection between the predatory male and London itself is seemingly loose, yet significant, because London is the focal point for where she had been adopted. Her aunt had raised Louisa in the country, but when the two learn of her aunt’s impending death, she takes the child Louisa to London in the hopes of finding someone who will help her; instead, they find 25

someone, a man, who ultimately seeks to ruin her. Fortunately, as with Lady Mary, the hand of providence seems to be working in Louisa’s life, only this time it comes in the form of a request. “[T]he greatest part of her time was spent on her knees in praying to that power in whom she trusted” (100); Louisa calls on God to save her and sure enough,

Mr. Hintman dies of a stroke before he can take her away.

Before Louisa gets to the point of joining with Mrs. Morgan to form the utopian community that is Millenium Hall, she has to undergo the years as they proceed from her close call with Mr. Hintman; and they involve circumstances that reflect on the London city space. Louisa, upon realizing she cannot be around her best friend Miss Melvyn because of an impending fixed marriage, moves elsewhere in the countryside with a woman, Lady Lambton, who has taken a liking to her. Before this had occurred, Louisa had to deal with people of lower ranks at the church always gawking at her astonishing good looks, “for such perfection of beauty scarcely ever came out of the hands of nature”

(135); and naturally, it is this beauty that attracts the attention of Lady Lambton’s grandson, Sir Edward. In this case, Louisa allows herself to consider the possibility of marriage, but the problem is that for Lady Lambton, there is no way she will consent to

Sir Edward “marrying a woman of obscure birth” (142). Because the impossibility of marriage causes tremendous stress for Louisa, she ventures away from the country to

London where she encounters the chance opportunity of working for a woman who turns out to be her real mother, Mrs. Thornby. While the six years she spends with her mother remain largely undocumented, we do learn how the nature of London ultimately clashes with her extreme beauty to produce discomforting results.

26

Within yet another side story, the tale of how Louisa came to be orphaned leads to feelings of forgiveness and jubilation which colors the essence of their reunion. The two of them thus live in relative comfort so that “Mrs. Thornby, more delighted with the admiration paid her daughter than she herself, carried her frequently into public and kept a great deal of company” (156). The notion of Louisa being displayed frequently for her beauty is significant, for it plays into the economy of spectacle that characterized the social sphere of London during the age. As Nanette Morton tells us, “In the economy of spectacle, the gaze of others is indispensable to the augmentation and maintenance of one’s own rank” (199). Though it would seem that Mrs. Thornby is participating in this kind of behavior, inadvertently or not, the effects do not bode well with Louisa. She

“could not be insensible to general approbation, but was hurt with the serious attachment of those who more particularly addressed her” (Scott 156). On a more specific scale, we find Louisa faced with the problem of men and their perpetual advances: “She endeavoured to make publicly known her fixed determination never to marry; but as those resolutions are seldom thought unalterable, many men flattered themselves that their rank and fortunes, with their personal merits, might conquer so strange an intention, and therefore would not desist without an express refusal” (156). In light of this source of aggravation, and after Mrs. Thornby dies, Louisa, having “nothing to attach her to any particular part of the kingdom, she more than ever longed to settle in Mrs. Morgan’s neighbourhood” (157).

For Louisa, the city space bears associations to the apathy and sexual predation found in the stories of Lady Sheerness and Lady Mary. Without her mother, the city is nothing more than a location where she is targeted: London is a place full of strange men 27

who are trying to get at her. London takes on the specter of the multitude, a place that is crowded with predators; inhospitable and void of anything wholesome. The idea that

Louisa has to voice “express refusal” indicates a level of annoyance, adding to the notion that the city space is one that agitates, found in the number of times she clearly has to express it. Invariably, this is the predicament in which she realizes she has nowhere to go except to the hospitality of her best friend; that is, the comforts of a friendship she had in the distant past once enjoyed, one that just so happens to have existed and still stands to exist amid the climes of the country. Louisa’s life, too, has ultimately led her to

Millenium Hall.

Miss Trentham’s history is notable for the costs she has to pay by virtue of association with the city of London. She has been raised far north near Derbyshire, and after developing a close-knit, deeply intimate relationship with a young man, Mr.

Alworth, who stands to be a potential mate, her destiny is thwarted by Miss Melman, a

“compleat coquette, capricious and fantastical” (231). Though Miss Melman’s history is unknown, the nature of her disposition mesmerizes Mr. Alworth so that they marry, and afterwards “the approaching winter called them to London” (233). Within the London social sphere, Miss Melman slips with ease into the life of dissipation in spite of her husband’s best efforts, a life that characterizes her as “too volatile to think, too vain to love; pleased with admiration, insensible to affection, fond of flattery but indifferent to true praise; imprudently vivacious in mixed companies,” and the “little time she was at home was employed in dressing and a multitude of coxcombs attended her toilet” (236).

There is a connection between Miss Melman’s deception of Mr. Alworth to gain his hand in marriage with her use of him as a source of wealth to enjoy London life: her actions 28

are indirectly responsible for the destruction of Miss Trentham’s and Mr. Alworth’s relationship. Mr. Alworth “too late saw the difference between sensible vivacity and animal spirits…[and] became violently in love with her [Miss Trentham]” (236-37); but for Miss Trentham, his regret proves too little too late.

Under these conditions, Miss Melman is representative of the effects of London.

The very patriarchal nature of London causes her to exert a dark form of female self-empowerment: she is a woman trying to function and thrive in a man’s world; she behaves deceptively as a resource for establishing rank, for satiating the need to be seen as having some kind of power. As with the friends of Lady Sheerness, once she has gained this power, she engages an immoral lifestyle and thus, becomes cold and indifferent, even to the child she bears who is subsequently taken away, for “she would have seen little more of the babe had it been in London” (239). In relation to Lady Mary and Louisa’s frustration with the multitude, Miss Melman appears to embrace that multitude and the lifestyle by which it is characterized. When Mr. Alworth’s grandmother dies, he inherits the house where Miss Trentham has spent her entire life; but when Miss

Melman arrives with her husband to claim the household, after some time she became

“wearied with the country to the greatest degree” (239). And though there seems a kind of just retribution towards the figure of the typical male – the man who thinks with his sexual passion to pursue the coquette, instead of staying with the woman who had been so devoted to him – Miss Melman’s tactics nevertheless cause pain. Mr. Alworth has realized his loss of Miss Trentham with great strife. Miss Melman stands as an embodiment of the London city space that wreaks havoc upon the lives of which she comes into contact. That Miss Melman grows “wearied” of the country, a location she 29

characterizes as “scarcely more lively than the family vault” (239), her thoughts further establish the dichotomy between city and country. London in this case assumes yet another dimension in which the feature of keeping people entertained is the precipitating factor. For dissipation to thrive, the multitude has to be kept from thinking about moral and ethical behavior. Removed from this source of amusement, the cynical tone in Miss

Melman’s comment about the “family vault” appears as stemming from a kind of withdrawal, suggesting that people who have succumbed to the effects of the city may be prone to the more irritable symptoms of anhedonia once they have left.

Alternatively, Miss Trentham feels acutely the loss of Mr. Alworth. That he and

Miss Melman have come to occupy the only home she’s ever known, it produces a rather ironic circumstance: to escape Mr. Alworth’s plaintive lamenting of unattainable love,

Miss Trentham moves to London. Her disillusionment comes across as a guiding force, and in an effort to separate herself from her negative experience, “she began to try if dissipation could dispel her melancholy” (240). The significance of this event is profound for the way it colors the situation of virtuous women who venture into the city, and for the way it makes a statement as to the likely result.

Miss Trentham’s venture into the dissipated lifestyle appears uncharacteristic because her disposition had been so largely inclined towards the opposite. Her father believed that by “teaching her humanity, he initiated her into civility of manners” (225); when he died, she was orphaned into a group of her cousins who taunted her, though through her father, she “had learnt that to give pain was immoral,” that “to please by her actions and not offend by her words was an essential part of the religion in which she was educated…and in her nature [her benevolence] shone pure and uncorrupted either by 30

natural or acquired vices” (225). Miss Trentham is a paragon of virtue in the face of distressing consequences, yet to be characterized as having been “uncorrupted” is to pave the way for her ruin at the hands of the city space. In London, her beauty “procured her many lovers, and she became the most admired woman in town. This was a source of pleasure to her…[She] was glad to find that the idleness of the men, and her own vanity, could afford her entertainment” (240). From the uncorrupted country girl that Miss

Trentham was, she becomes corrupted with the help of London town. The fact situates

London as a site of immorality while reinforcing both the gendered aspect of that corruption, found in the idleness of “men,” and the illusory effect of dissipation which contributes to the blinding of Miss Trentham’s ability to understand what is happening.

A kind of symbolism takes shape when Miss Trentham faces what could be considered, utter ruin. Remnants of her benevolence resurface when she is called on to help with her cousin’s marriage troubles; she leaves town temporarily to perform this service, but in her efforts to get back to her London life, she acquires small-pox.

Proceeding the initial spasm of the illness, “When she recovered, she perceived that the small-pox had entirely destroyed her beauty” (241). Unlike the predicaments of Lady

Mary and Louisa, the hand of providence is replaced by the hand of divine punishment.

Such circumstances paint the picture of a moral tale, that people (or rather, pious women) who willingly seek the life of dissipation, will meet with undesirable results. Miss

Trentham’s misfortune paints the city space as the agency for these undesirable results.

Redemption for Miss Trentham, however, does not evade her. “She became perfectly contented with the alteration…and she regained the quiet happiness of which flutter and dissipation had deprived her” (241). While the moral of the story is apparent, London 31

retains its image as a location of immorality that robs people of their “quiet happiness.”

Miss Trentham’s decision to move back to the country places more weight on the negativity that London acquires. Her reason for going to London was to escape, to heal from the wounds of a failed relationship. In light of the results, London becomes ill-suited for the task of healing. London had provided her with the means to supplant her distressful thoughts with alternative if unhealthy ones. “In the country,” by contrast, “she had time to reflect on the necessity of conquering this inclination, if she wished to enjoy any tolerable happiness” (241). In this case, the country becomes the site which can facilitate this kind of healing. The dichotomy between country and city is again reinforced in which different kinds of happiness are distinguished, notable for a reiteration of the influence of time: London brings dissipation that serves to produce the illusion of happiness amid a society that “flutter[s]”; the country offers the “time to reflect” so that the result leads to a “tolerable” happiness. The notion of having to tolerate happiness further underscores the spiritual natures that separate the city from the country.

In London, one finds the kind of happiness that lacks integrity, suggesting that this kind of happiness is for those who do not wish to face the facts of life; the country offers a kind of happiness in which a functioning acceptance of the uglier aspects of life leads to a deeper level of life satisfaction.

Miss Trentham’s ultimate solution, then, is to leave London; or more pointedly, to stay away from it. Her purposes for doing so reflect a need for inner peace, and thus

“she found retirement more calculated for overcoming an hopeless passion than noise and flutter” (242). That she moves to the country falls in line with the same actions as that of

Lady Mary and Louisa, whose experiences with the city proved equally as distressing; 32

but the idea that London is an unwholesome place for such “retirement” does not end with their stories alone. The premise of the entire novel is based on the testimony of the narrator, who brings us the most vivid details of the country and its harboring of beneficence.

Sir George Ellison is an aging man who is traveling among the climes of the

Cornwall countryside so that he can find alleviation from the “ill effects” of living and working amid “the hot and unwholesome climate of Jamaica, where…[he] has dedicated all his application to mercantile gain” (54). With his traveling companions Mr. Lamont, his postilion and his servant, his carriage breaks down. Because the wooded area they have been stuck in looks possibly inhabited, Sir George and Lamont decide to explore the area while the postilion ventures to find a source of repairs, leaving the servant to watch over the broken carriage. From the “avenue of oaks” to a captivating landscape that

“charmed with the remarkable verdure and neatness of the fields, with the beauty of the flowers which are planted all around them,” to a description that entails “pinks, jonquils, hyacinths, and various other flowers,…[p]rimroses, violets, lilies of the valley, and polyanthuses,” these are scenes which filled them “with reflections on the infinite variety of nature” (56-57). Spending even a few moments amid these scenes turns Sir George’s rhetoric from impressive description to extreme idealization. After passing a shepherd who charms them with the sounds of a flute, and after taking in the sights of young women and children laboring away happily in a field, Sir George begins to dub what he is seeing as an “earthly paradise,” a “fairy land,” and “enchanted ground” (58).

From this activity, and because this section comprises the opening of the novel, two tactical elements that work against the image of London go to work. The first rest in 33

what the scene is clearly not: the city. The scenes are spaces of nature, and they are endowed with descriptions and metaphors that point to the essence of all that is good and pure. These are scenes that not only describe the potential for what nature can do, but stages and foreshadows the suggestion for what the urban space cannot.

The second is less obvious, but equally as critical. Sir George makes two statements that inform the originating reason for his trip. He informs the recipient of his letter, “I was advised by an eminent physician to make a very extensive tour through the western part of this kingdom,” then goes on to state, “I therefore chose to make the advised tour before I went into the north” (54-55). Mention of the directions west and north are significant because they render his position before leaving, in accordance with the geography of England, in the southeast of the country, the location naturally being

London; this is made clear in the fact that he specifically names London as the location he was in before he left. In considering these locations in accordance with the doctor’s instructions, the point becomes clear, that London itself is not a place for healing.

Bucholz and Ward tell us about the city during the specific age in which Millenium Hall was written: “a pall of smoke sits over the city. London’s growth has meant more chimneys, perhaps millions of them, belching soot from coal fires” (333). Yet even without the physician’s recommendation, Sir George yearns for the space of his “northern retreat,” commenting on the “eagerness with which…[he] longed to fix in…[his] wished-for retirement” (Scott 55). Between Sir George’s longing for a retirement that is not London, the physician’s recommendation to leave London for medical purposes, and what we know about unhealthy nature of London as historically recorded, London as a city space is non-conducive to the needs of human healing and serenity. 34

Again we have the notion of seeking retirement mentioned in conjunction with departure from the city. Lady Mary, Louisa, Miss Trentham and Sir George are people in need of a environment conducive to the benefit of their personal health. Lady Mary and

Louisa’s situation involve the direct problem of living in the city; Miss Trentham’s involves a blend of the city’s failure to offer spiritual satisfaction with the hint of a moral tale; but if Sir George’s situation does not seem as though his problems are not caused by the city, he nevertheless cannot follow his doctor’s prescription for health by staying in the city. His problems, however, are loosely related in to the nature of the city space in that his “mercantile gain” is the result of his colonization efforts which invariably have their profits gained by trading in the London mercantile sphere. Sir George’s need for a healthy zone of retirement has been caused by London’s growth in a very indirect manner; at the same time, it is London he must depart from if he hopes to find healing.

If we channel our focus back to the histories of Millenium Hall’s founders and the way their associations with London tend to evoke a negative image, then we are left to examine the two remaining founders, Miss Selvyn and Mrs. Morgan. For the most part, these two largely escape any direct effects of the city, though their histories do not fail to shed additional light on the nature of London as an urban center. Miss Selvyn had been raised in London for the first five years of her life, but because her adopted father, Mr.

Selvyn, was not “fond of trade, he was desirous of retiring to the country” (216). This circumstance is notable for signaling the activity of trade as an undercurrent to the

London immorality that exists according the histories of the other women. That he desires to return to the country suggests that he had come with expectations as to how matters unfold in the city; they invariably drive him away. For Miss Selvyn, leaving the city with 35

him for a life of adolescence in the country means a life free from dissipation and the multitude as described by her fellow founders. She is “bred a philosopher…[and] instructed in the doctrine of the ancient moralists” (200), but her education is not complete until it has been tempered by the “truths of Christianity” (203). Being in the country suggests that Mr. Selvyn has been allowed to instill principles into his daughter with a success that might not have been capable in London.

Miss Selvyn’s time in the country also stages her eventual return to the city. The reason for this return can be attributed to the actions of Miss Selvyn’s birth mother, Lady

Emilia Reynolds, who has been working with Mr. Selvyn without Miss Selvyn’s knowledge to have her raised her appropriately. Because Lady Emilia is a woman of rank, and in part, because she is ashamed of having given birth illegitimately, she chooses to live in London away from her daughter, but she does so with seeming immunity to the effects of London life. “She was grave and sensible, and kept a great deal of good company, without entering into a gay way of life” (203). The “gay way of life” is characterized by the way Lady Emilia judges the people of whom she cannot help but encounter. She “was not blind to Lady Sheerness’s follies, but she esteemed them objects of her compassion” (204). Because Lady Mary is the charge of Lady Sheerness, Lady

Emilia “sincerely pitied Lady Mary Jones, who seemed by fortune sacrificed to folly; and she was in continual fear lest she should fall a victim to that imprudence which in her case was almost unavoidable” (204). Though we know that Lady Mary carries out a self-examination of her ways, the compassion that Lady Emilia feels towards her and

Lady Sheerness could be cast to a greater lot. The people of London caught in the stream of the dissipated lifestyle are subject to pity; they are lost souls characterized by folly and 36

imprudence, whose personalities and individual traits pale in comparison to “Lady

Emilia’s respectable character” (204).

That we learn, Miss Selvyn is the product of Lady Emilia’s premarital sexual behavior, is something of a paradox, even ironic; but she has chosen to stay in London away from Miss Selvyn for the amount of time needed for such behavior to wash over. In finding she no longer necessarily needs to hide from her daughter, she demands Miss

Selvyn be brought to her. In accordance with no longer needing to impose the separation, the fitting course of action to nurture a new relationship with her daughter is, as one can imagine, to depart from the city to the country. London sustains a blow to its image in this decision as it becomes not only ill-suited for the educating of children, but equally so for the development of familial relationships.

If the matter seems resolved for the mother/daughter pair as they find peace in the countryside, then the possibility stands for attributes of the city’s dissipated lifestyle to find them. The rake Lord Robert St. George had been among the scene that Lady Emilia could not avoid, even if she remained steadfast in her respectability as she did so.

Nevertheless, in her new country estate, the location happens to be within the vicinity of an estate belonging to Lord Robert. Riveted by the beauty of Miss Selvyn, he pries his way into their lives for a chance to have his way with the young woman. Fortunately for

Miss Selvyn, she knows all about Lord Robert; Lady Mary Jones had told her about his uncouth behavior. In this matter, the subject of education plays a key role. Where Lady

Mary had been, as Lady Emilia put it, “sacrificed to folly,” Miss Selvyn had been instructed and educated under the guidance of her adopted father, of which the country setting has allowed him to do. Thus she uses the powers of her knowledge to both fend 37

off Lord Robert’s intentions, and educate him on the immoral nature of his ways. The man is dumbstruck, but the lesson serves more to show that London is not a site in which the education of young women is high on the list of social priorities.

In the case of Miss Melvyn/Mrs. Morgan, she is the only one of the Hall’s founders who is documented as having no direct associations to London. Though her history involves the precise location of country property that becomes Millenium Hall itself, her experience nevertheless offers added insight into the distinction between city and country. Like the other women, the issue that most contributes to her life struggle involves men; more specifically, it involves the notorious predicament of fixed marriage.

Mr. Morgan is a man who easily though unwittingly complies with Lady Melvyn’s scheme, out of jealousy and fear, to have her step-daughter removed from the property.

One of the more notable circumstances that result from this scheme can be found in the trauma that Miss Melvyn and Louisa sustain proceeding the “dread day” (130). The now

Mrs. Morgan is told by her new and all-too-paranoid husband, worried that they will gossip about him – and with no less than a “malicious smile” (130) – that she may no longer associate with her best friend. Crushed by this dictate, the two foresee “no end to this cruel separation” and they are found later “drowned in tears” (131). The imagery and sentiment of this scene is powerful and denotes a deep bond that plays an important role later in time. With Louisa’s path having drawn her to London, only for her to realize she has nothing there when her mother dies, “she more than ever longed to settle in [that is, return to] Mrs. Morgan’s neighbourhood, but feared to occasion some new uneasiness to her friend” (157). In this “uneasiness” there is a symbolic transference of apprehension about space and its connection with men: in London, Louisa is uneasy about the men who 38

prey on her; with regard to her best friend in the country, she is uneasy about sparking the temper of a man, Mr. Morgan. The situation is more than a source of frustration, it is one of isolation and loneliness, an effect borne from the behaviors of men. But where the men are seemingly allowed to have their way in London, the outcome is different in the country.

The origins of this outcome begin with the nature of Mrs. Morgan’s living situation once the logistics of her marriage and subsequent move to Mr. Morgan’s property have been completed. Upon arrival, she encounters a “situation dreary, the roads everywhere bad, the soil a stiff clay, wet and dirty, except in the midst of summer, the country round it disagreeable, and in short, destitute of every thing that could afford any satisfaction to Mrs. Morgan” (132). In relation to the magical and heavenly scenes that

Sir George has provided, this description seems out of character in that the exact same location is depicted as being at one time, unsightly and inhospitable. The matter is explained to a large extent when we learn that to “complete her [Mrs. Morgan’s] vexation, Mr. Morgan, who had always drank hard, increased so much in that vice that few days passed wherein he was not totally intoxicated” (155). Though it would be folly to suggest that location and the disposition to drink could be united to establish causation, statistical evidence from the era shed light on the connection between drinking and the corrosion of space. In trying to explain London’s high death-rate in comparison with a low birth-rate, the “only explanation seems to be that usually given by contemporaries – the orgy of spirit-drinking which was at its worst between 1720 and 1751, due to the very cheap and very intoxicating liquors, which were retailed indiscriminately and in the most brutalising and demoralising conditions” (George 27). London, in this case, is a center for 39

the flourishing of a drinking epidemic. Considering that Scott’s novel was published in

1762, following on the heels of this epidemic when the Bluestocking movement had begun its endeavors, to suggest that the effects had tentacles reaching into the countryside is not farfetched. In fact, Raymond Williams seems to concur with this thought when he notes: “There was the promotion of distilling, as a remedy for what Defoe, in 1713, called the ‘disaster’ of the over-production of corn. Gin Lane, in this way, ran back to the country houses” (147).

Additionally, “‘Luxury and extravagance,’ manifested chiefly in excessive drinking and a passion for gambling, were common to all classes…temptations to drink and gamble were interwoven with the fabric of society to an astonishing extent, and they did undoubtedly combine with the uncertainties of life and trade to produce that sense of instability” (George 272). This instability from the result of drinking, or as it could be called when joined with other vices, dissipation, is reflected in the neglected scenes that upset Mrs. Morgan. The absence of human goodness – the indifference and apathy that seeps throughout the streets of London – is made manifest in the neglect of the country property that stifles Mrs. Morgan’s once cheerful disposition. The dissipated lifestyle, so closely associated with the city throughout the text, causes one to neglect those things that are wholesome to the existence of mankind.

To be sure, London is the location that Mrs. Morgan’s friends depart from to be with her at her estate, but this is only when order has been restored to become the location that is Millenium Hall as Sir George describes it. Again, the seeming hand of providence seems to be working on behalf of the women, for the death of Mr. Morgan is the activating factor that allows for the Hall to come into being. In the wake of his death, 40

his estate is redeemed from that sense of unsightliness and “instability.” Mrs. Morgan and her best friend Louisa agree to “retire into the country…desirous of fixing in a way of life where all their satisfactions might be rational and as conducive to eternal as to temporal happiness. They had laid the plan of many things, which they have since put into execution” (Scott 159). The “laying of plans” calls attention to the need for order, and the choice of location calls attention to where such order is capable of being established.

Nicolle Jordan has an interesting take on their choice of country for their endeavor, suggesting that the “formal reinforcement of the plot’s commitment to landscape as an ethical practice becomes a way for the novel to marshal landscape as an all-encompassing approach to the world rather than simply a visual object to behold or to cultivate” (42). In this light, the country space is one that can serve as a model for facilitating morality, as opposed to the way the city serves to facilitate immorality. But because the estate Mrs.

Morgan inherits had previously been in a state of dilapidation, and apart from recognizing the role of dissipation in this matter, the gender element overarching the transformation of the estate cannot be overlooked.

An understanding of the emergent link between women and country, men and city, and how these oppositions relate to stability and morality, is best conveyed when the situation of the old miser and the inheritor of his estate is taken into consideration. Their story is told as a separate module from any of the women’s histories, and is inserted into the novel as a kind of parable; the correlation between the old miser and Mr. Morgan is substantial. Like Mr. Morgan, the old miser was a paranoid landowner, if in a different strain. He was so worried about his wealth that when he died, his only servant realizing she could no longer make contact with him, “at length they were obliged to untile part of 41

the roof,” where they “found the old man dead on a great chest which contained his money” (220-21). The result of this behavior, much like in Mr. Morgan’s case, renders his house “formerly a very fine mansion, but now much fallen to decay. The outside is greatly out of repair” (219). Like Mr. Morgan, there exists the problem of neglect, a corrosion of property that seems to unfold in a progression that resembles that which occurs in the city: the more that immorality thrives – this time in the case of greed – the more that the immediate environment deteriorates; and thus the more it deteriorates, the more immorality seems to thrive.

Of significance to the future of the property lies the gender of the inheritor.

Instead of a wife to benefit from the wealth left behind, the old miser’s nephew remains the only one to lay claim to the estate. He was “just of age, and having till then been exposed to all the evils of poverty, was almost distracted with joy at the sudden acquisition of a large fortune…and without giving himself time to look over his estate, hastened to London” (221). The nephew does not think in terms of restoring stability and nurturing landscape for the purposes of cultivating an ethical situation, as does Mrs.

Morgan; he thinks in terms of selfishness and the seeking of dissipation. “He soon became one of the most constant frequenters of Whites… There was not an occurrence in his life about which he had not some wager depending” (221). Yet as with most who succumb to the throes of gambling addiction, he was thus “reduced to sell a considerable portion of his estate” (221). The similarities between the outcome of Mr. Morgan’s inheritance and that of the old miser’s are distinguished by a difference in gender, and the distant influence of London. For Mrs. Morgan, she chooses to take advantage of the estate for the betterment of self and society, to engage a philanthropic endeavor intended 42

to set a precedent. The nephew, by contrast, chooses to indulge himself in the dangers of gambling. His venture to London to nurture this impulse operates to further endow the

London city space with a negative image. Such behavior further demarcates the contiguity between gender inclinations and space by suggesting that given the opportunity, one will gravitate towards nature and a sense of revitalization while the other will gravitate towards city and the tendency for self-destruction.

The reference to “Whites” in the situation of the nephew is highly significant because it moves the negative image associated with London from the general to the specific. As we learn from Bucholz and Ward, “White’s Chocolate House became an aristocratic gambling club whose members included every prime minister from Sir

Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel” (197). To reference Whites as a source for the ruin of the nephew is to imply that the nation’s leaders are not free from the culpability involved with the spread of dissipation. London is home to corruption because its leaders are every bit as dissipated as its citizens; in the transparency of their behavior, the example they set as leaders in effect, condones a way of a life that is lacking in principles.

Additionally, when we consider the growth of London, with its proliferation of clubs, taverns and alehouses, we find that their customer base “tended to divide across occupational lines and probably excluded the poorest Londoners and most women”

(Bucholz & Ward 188). The London social sphere was characterized by gambling and drinking as engaged in by middle-class and aristocratic elitist men, but even when their activities allowed for the participation of women, it came in a very unwholesome form.

“[T]here was cheap ale to be drunk in alehouses or, later, cheaper gin in gin-shops, possibly followed by the patronage of brothels and prostitutes, both of which London had 43

more of than any other place in the country [i.e. nation]” (205). London in this light is a male dominated society that cultivates the attributes of immorality, where the seeming rampant nature of their actions reinforces “the limited choices for female immigrants to

London, and the dark option of prostitution” (207). Under these conditions, the founding of Millenium Hall becomes a mission to aid the women whose life choices are presided over by a prevailing male society that seeks to have them as a mere portion of the dissipation they engage.

After examining the lives of the Hall’s ladies and their relationship to London, we find that London’s image has been developed by indirect and associative principles. In this light, the lack of any direct description of London becomes apparent, if unusual. In contrast to a minor poet such as Charles Jenner writing passages about London,

“Where’er around I cast my wand’ring eyes / Long burning rows of fetid bricks arise”

(Williams 142), or as a renowned poet like William Wordsworth conveys, “How often, in the overflowing streets, / Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said / unto myself,

‘The face of every one / that passes by me is a mystery!’” (150), Sarah Scott reserves this kind of descriptive energy solely for the praise of the country. Sir George writes about the

“hedges of rose trees and sweetbriars, so artfully planted…[and the] pinks, jonquils, hyacinths, and various other flowers” that filled him and his companion “with reflections on the infinite variety of nature” (Scott 56-57). Yet neither he nor his narrating companion Mrs. Maynard ever mention details about the city space. London’s negative image is indeed formed through the narration of the women’s histories, but this formulation can be credited to Scott’s clever use of language.

For example, the term “dissipation” is among one of the most repeated words in 44

the text, applied no less than twenty-two times. And yet, as the word comes to be repeatedly used in connection with the downfall of people in London, the word when used during conversation comes to be understood as a textual byword for that city.

Additionally, use of the term “multitude” is never once applied to denote anything positive. In expressing sympathy for the disfigured tenants they care for, Miss Mancel comments on the “unthinking multitude” (72); in considering the contrast between the

Hall’s philanthropy and the unreliability of life in London, Sir George comments on the

“caprice of the multitude” (179); at her home in London, Miss Melman is visited by a

“multitude of coxcombs” (236); thus, in knowing that Lady Mary, as a London resident, grew “tired of the multitude” (194), the term invariably attaches itself to the city with negative connotation. Other types of examples follow in this trend. With regard to the nature of Mr. Hintman’s womanizing, an anonymous gentleman explains to Miss Melvyn that a man with morals as she would define would be subject to isolation in the “most populous city” (101). The people who Lady Sheerness has spent a great deal of time with as a Londoner are, upon her impending death, possessed of “unfeeling mirth” (188).

When Mr. Alworth realizes that he has lost his beloved Miss Trentham forever, he feels that his marriage to the London styled coquette Miss Melman is the result of some kind of “magic” (237); the comparison he makes between the two renders Miss Melman a young woman whose mind is governed by “animal spirits” (236); and when Lady Mary is drawn into the kind of scene that Miss Melman seems to cherish, that she is conned by the womanizing Mr. Lenman leads Mrs. Maynard to label her a “dupe” (175).

The process of London gaining a negative image by association and not direct description can be additionally understood when we consider the form of the text. Sir 45

George’s description is delivered as a means of conveying a sense of the present. It is told in the mimetic mode, occurring at the beginning of the novel so that readers can be situated in a time and place. As Jordan suggests, so “taken is he [Sir George] by his environment that he sees nature itself conjuring the delivery of the story; the flowers exude their scent to enhance the tale, and the rivulet “hush[es them] to attention” (35). In this manner, the present day is described to instill a sense of peace and stability, to lure readers into the position of accepting the message of the text.

The histories, alternatively, are told in the diegetic mode. Because readers are situated in a calm and stable present, the distressing nature of the past can be presented with safety. This past comes in a narrated form in which we come to learn about London through the effects that it has on people, and how these effects have induced the need for avoidance and departure. The country has been mimetically described to the extent that we are lead to agree with Sir George’s conclusion, that it is something of an “earthly paradise,” yet the city receives no kind of label to stand as an opposing entity. Instead, we learn through associative principles that London is a place that is filled with mindless masses of people who, by virtue of location, are predisposed to dissipation, a word that covers a wide range of immoral behavior; this multitude is painted with characteristics of apathy and indifference, and is comprised of coxcombs and other kinds of men who are perpetually on the prowl for women. London is a seat of entertainment for men in that gambling, drinking and prostitution are pervasive. The very idea of these aspects being entertainment functions as a kind of agency that blinds and deceives people, keeps them from recognizing the nature of reality. London additionally causes people with morals to experience isolation, where the immoral are characterized as seemingly inhuman in their 46

animal-like traits. Such associations further suggests that people who bear traits of virtue are the subjects of deception when they find themselves caught up in the London lifestyle, positioning them, in turn, as subject to the consequences. In sum, London is a vehicle for immorality that seeks to devour the inner-nature of those who engage the unwholesome lifestyle it harbors; and with the dominating gender being men, it is women who are all the more vulnerable to ruin.

This distinguishing textual factor that separates the country from the city, the mimetic versus the diegetic, and the image that London sustains as a result, functions to espouse a fundamental attitude towards the nature of London. In considering the potential for a lesbian reading of Millenium Hall, Sally O’Driscoll makes note of the pointed fact that the Hall’s founders are all women who have come live together, yet she suggests that

“the important question of whether they did so as an escape from male society or from an active desire to be together remains ambiguous” (66). Careful scrutiny of the women’s histories and their associations with the city of London seems to remove any such ambiguity. Jordan’s view on the distinction in some ways, reinforces this position: “In the starkest terms, the contrast generates an ethical geography by which vice festers in the city while virtue retires to the countryside” (32). Jordan’s “starkest terms” are those which underscore a general but blatant statement that situates the women as avoiding the city because it is a location in which “vice festers.” The women of Millenium Hall are women who have either directly dealt with the city, or are in close relationship with those who have dealt with the city, only to meet with negative results.

The larger idea which emerges is that in which the growth of an urban space is not without its attendant effects. As people came to realize the potential of making a life out 47

of the mercantile capitalism inherent to the unique and profitable location that was

London, the sudden influx and concentration of people created a scenario in which the social consciousness became affected. In a society in which a patriarchal aristocracy held the reins to progress, the nature of these effects became inherently gendered. In line with

Jordan’s point, if vice came to fester in the city, then the phenomenon is an attribute of male-driven instinct. Thus for virtue to come to reside in the country, with women at the helm of the philanthropic endeavor such as that which occurs at Millenium Hall, then the equation becomes complete: men are the emblems of vice, the city is their domain; women are the paragons of virtue, and the country is theirs.

If we consider the idea of vice flourishing in the city, then the logical conclusion is that such vice will cause a break down in the social order. Men in this scenario, become agents of chaos. “It was generally agreed that gambling, the club, the tavern and the alehouses were responsible for bad masters and bad apprentices, resulting in bankruptcies, absconding debtors, runaway apprentices, and deserted children, and leading by an inevitable sequence to paupers, vagrants, and thieves” (George 286). The ability for the construction of clubs, taverns and alehouses in this manner reflects

London’s capacity to foster dissipation and thus the ruin of its citizens’ lives, but the effects further serve to disrupt the process of social and familial affairs and to incite the production of crime. As Raymond Williams tells us, “Hogarth’s Gin Lane brings us nearer to mid-eighteenth-century London than any urbane formulation; and whether it is the moral contrast of his Industry and Idleness and of Lillo’s The London Merchant, or the ambivalent low-life vigour of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera or Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the sense of the actuality of London is at the opposite pole from the ideal of civilized order” 48

(144). For the women of Millenium Hall, by contrast, in their flight from the

“dissipation” and the “multitude” which so aggravates them, there is the pointed notion that they are making a concerted effort to avoid the city and its men. Working from seemingly natural dispositions of virtue, they seek to develop a society that restores the loss of social order that the city tends to incur. And as we come to find: “They [the Hall’s founders] drew up several regulations, to secure the peace and good order of the society they designed to form” (Scott 116).

The artist and writers that Williams mention are significant because their works function as counterparts to the work that Sarah Scott has done in writing Millenium Hall.

In light of the formal features of her text – the contrasting mimetic and diegetic modes, and that she has a group of women creating a wholesome society in the country away from the city – these are indicators that Scott was participating in an artistic trend in which the ailing condition of London became an object for moral scrutiny. As Williams further tells us: “As London grew, dramatically, in the eighteenth century, it was being intensely observed, as a new kind of landscape, a new kind of society” (Williams 142).

For an author like Sarah Scott, this “new kind of society” did not bear the seeming positive connation as implied by Williams. Writing from the point of view of a woman, the London city space presented a myriad of problems for the livelihood of women, thus her novel was a means to provide suggestions as to the way people should consider future modes of urban expansion. Scott’s novel, in this manner, is a tactical effort to make clear to the powers in place the willingness to expose the difficulties involved with urban expansion, the specialized impact these difficulties had on women, and the notion that action in the face of such adversity bore aspects of the highest plausibility. 49

Chapter III ~ Didacticism and the Vestal Virgins of England

Millenium Hall profiles the life journeys of six women who come to establish a society that offers them stability and relief from a country that is tainted by corruption.

Because the work they perform to create this society is intended to set an example for the betterment of England, and that there are precisely six women involved with the endeavor, I argue that these features pose a potential allusion the six Vestal Virgins of

Ancient Rome. The allusion is clearer when we consider that the novel was published in

1762 on the heels of what scholars call the Augustan Age, a period of time in which the sociocultural and literary landscape was steeped in a sense of classicism. The term

“classicism” is in reference to the period of Roman history when Augustus Caesar ruled and writers such as Horace and irgil produced some of the world’s most renowned literature. As Sarolta A. Tak cs tells us: “As with many things connected to Roman religion…and in particular the Augustan age, [this has] shaped what we study as the

‘ estal irgins’” (81). More descriptively: “The six estal irgins dedicated their lives to the goddess Vesta and, by extension, the Roman state. Though they were ‘between categories,’ neither matrons nor priests, they dressed as married women, and for the entirety of their priestly tenure they were to remain in a virginal state” (Tak cs 80). The allusion to the Vestal Virgins is important to highlight because it reflects on the power that is acquired when religious significance is attached to femininity, and how this power functions in dedication to the state.

To better understand and expand on this allusion, we must first consider the contrast that develops in Millenium Hall between country and city, and how it prepares us 50

to understand a didactic structure that emerges within the text. This contrast tends to depict the country as a location that bears intrinsic qualities that the city space does not appear capable of harboring. Though this contrast suggests that the city is where people become corrupted, and that the country is the ideal setting for the reverse to occur, the contrast is magnified so that the social problems involved with the city can be situated as discussion material for the process of moral instruction. A contributing factor to this aspect of the novel rest in the gendered nature of the contrasting locations. If the city is prone to the cultivating of corruption, largely at the hands of men, then by virtue of association, it is men who are the subjects of this instruction. In accordance with this gendering of space, the ladies in their country location live the exemplary life, situating them as prime vehicles for this instruction to occur. And yet these distinctions do not serve in and of themselves to render the ladies of the Hall as legitimate for the task of didactic instruction. This matter is resolved when we realize that the ladies have been endowed with characteristics of religious significance. In this manner, the didactic structure of the novel is allowed to develop with the ladies serving as qualified facilitators of the instructive process, by right of divine authority.

As the first pages of Millenium Hall unfold, a kind of country living that stands in exception to presumably normal modes of country living becomes apparent. This is discovered most notably through Sir George’s visceral descriptions that lead him to label what he is seeing as an “earthly paradise” (Scott 58). This narrative activity does tremendous work in that it conjures the essence of a mystery. Who is to be credited for the creation of such a place? The staging of the need for answers is highly significant because it leads to speculation that is critical to the overall narrative: Whoever is 51

responsible for creating this perfected country scene must be possessed of extraordinary character and integrity. Unlike the genre of a mystery, however, the answer does not remain hidden until the end of the novel. Sir George learns very soon that the Hall is operated by a group of women, six to be exact. That him and his companion Lamont express “surprize at the sight of so uncommon a society” (59), this is the narrative connotation and compass that serves to show how women are capable of doing things that men must think them incapable of doing.

But if the fact that women are behind the seeming perfection that permeates the environs of the Hall is shocking, then the mystery deepens when we wonder what characteristic agency lies at the source of their capability. While clues begin to surface when Sir George, on the first day of his arrival, comments on the “justness of their reflections, [and] the dignity which accompanied their vivacity” (63-64), the scene in which he converses with an old woman he has met the following day is where the character of the Hall’s ladies assumes a distinct shape. He has met her after examining the pristine condition of a garden located a short distance from the property, and in noticing that she lives in one of the cottage units close by, he cannot help but to make an inquiry. In reference to marveling on how everything appears so in order and full of

“neatness,” and why the woman seems so happy, the old woman’s answer makes the situation entirely clear: “God bless the good ladies!…we have every thing we want and wish…it is all owing to them” (65). The scene serves to make note of the philanthropic endeavor that occurs at the Hall, shifting the focus from the ladies as merely energetic landowners to that of them as caretakers of the people.

Later the same day, this philanthropy is again observed when Sir George and 52

Lamont are taken to a habitation in which people with physical deformities are allowed to live out their lives. The situation here is that they have been rescued from the kinds of people who would exploit them for money. The scene causes Sir George to draw an important conclusion: “The tender inquiries the ladies made after their healths, and the kind notice they took of each of them, could not be exceeded by any thing but the affection, I might almost say adoration, with which these people beheld their benefactresses” (74). Up to this point, careful scrutiny may have been needed to fully consider the “God” element of the old woman’s praise, yet in the case of Sir George’s comment on this occasion, the mark of divine religious principle cannot be overlooked.

Should a Catholic theologian perform a critical reading of Millenium Hall, mention of the term “adoration” would not be lost on him. The term is largely applied in connection to the worship of Jesus Christ, in contrast to the term “veneration,” which came to be more commonly used in the case of the Virgin Mary. To be precise, the act of adoration was to be applied solely to the worship of Christ as God alone. The prospect of giving adoration to anyone other, such as a saint, was to lessen the divinity of Christ by positing notions of equality; no one is equal to Christ, therefore no one can be adored like

Christ. As though Sir George were onto this distinction, he changes his word choice when he notices the behavior of four women who have come to visit the Hall from another section of the estate: “[T]he strangers seemed to look on the ladies of the house with such gratitude and veneration” (109). Though adoration has been supplanted with veneration, to argue that adoration had earlier been misapplied would be to confound the nature of the premise, for the suggestion still stands, that divine significance is being attached to the ladies of the Hall; more significantly, the notion of “veneration” draws more attention 53

of the two, for as Sarah Jane Boss tells us, “[t]hroughout the central and later Middle

Ages the veneration of Mary dominates religious culture” (199).

The idea that the ladies are subject to being viewed as saintly is of extreme narrative value in that it endows them with more than just a sense of beneficence, it endows them with the power needed to function – and in accordance with the didactic structure of the text – to instruct in a patriarchal world. The two references, however, in connection with proof of their philanthropic endeavors, leaves something of blank area as to the nature of the women themselves. In my opinion, use of the terms adoration and veneration are fleeting, requiring the most critical eye to compute the larger implications involved with their mention. In this manner, it is for the narrated histories of the women to draw forth and underscore the pious characteristics of their dispositions, acting as reinforcement to and reason for the veneration they receive.

Mrs. Morgan, originally Miss Melvyn, as we come to find, has inherited traits of piety from her mother. This fact alone is significant in that this mother figure, Lady

Melvyn, acquires her characteristics through comparison with Miss Melvyn’s father, Sir

Charles Melvyn. Whereas Sir Charles was “an easy-tempered, weak man who gave no proof of good sense,” Lady Melvyn was the kind of woman who “knew not half her own excellence” (Scott 83). Not knowing of, lest boasting of, the “excellence” of oneself is indicative of humility, a trait often associated with the pious. This excellence is depicted as being passed on to Miss Melvyn, as her mother “had the pleasure of seeing in her an uncommon capacity, with every virtue the fondest parent could wish” (84). Miss Melvyn is naturally possessed of excellence because of her maternal inheritance, but Lady

Melvyn diverts such credit by espousing a more divine origin, suggesting such excellence 54

“as a peculiar gift of providence to her daughter” (84). In addition to the seeming natural inclination towards the highest standard of virtue, Miss Melvyn is thus taught by her mother “all the principles of true religion” (84). In the description of Mrs. Morgan’s past alone, not only is a sense of divinity established, but the novel’s didactic structure takes shape by conveying the aspect of men (i.e. her father as representative) as principally lacking in any intrinsic quality of character and in need of instruction.

As an orphan, Mrs. Morgan’s lifelong friend and counterpart, Louisa Mancel, has initially been brought up by her aunt, who showered her with “utmost tenderness, and employed the most assiduous care in her education” (80). After she dies, Louisa later develops a self-awareness through the attention she gains from her beauty, but because of the quality of her “natural exellencies” (150), she was “the most assiduous in praying to him who made her heart, to preserve it humble” (97). As part of her narrative duty, Mrs.

Maynard openly informs that Louisa’s “heart was all purity, universal benevolence and good-nature” (97); and when Louisa learns that the man she could have married has fallen in battle, we find that “her piety and patience made it the more easy to persuade her calmly to submit to the decrees of providence. She soon saw that to suffer was her duty, and though she might grieve, she must not repine” (154). Like Mrs. Morgan, Louisa possesses qualities of virtue that are innate, and that she comes to behave in accordance with one of the more fundamental of Christian principles – the quality of the acceptance of suffering – she, too, becomes endowed with the essence of the divine.

Together the two women become predisposed to bypass “all the pleasures which most people so eagerly pursue, [for]they were desirous of fixing in a way of life where all their satisfactions might be rational, and as conducive to eternal, as to temporal 55

happiness” (159). Developing a way of life that works to the benefit of others as well as themselves appears to constitute rational satisfaction; the philanthropic aspect of this way of life, this mode of selflessness that the women exert, credits them with espousing a measure of Christian authenticity that situates them in favor with their higher power. The union of their decision to engage philanthropy with the aspect of their pre-established characteristics of divinity renders them not only as subjects of veneration by the people that they help, but positions their ideas for social action as attractive to others who come to think in the same vein.

Lady Mary Jones, Mrs. Selvyn, Mrs. Trentham and Mrs. Maynard are women who find themselves joining the endeavor that unfolds at the Hall. In so doing, we find that their characteristic dispositions have made them fitting counterparts to the task, situating them as equally deserving of the praise that the Hall’s beneficiaries endow.

Lady Mary, for example, has been brought up in London amid the lifestyle of dissipation, but when she is faced with a sexual advance, she is able to contend with the matter through the power of her “natural sense” (183). Later, when she is saved from destitution by Lady Brumpton, this quality of natural sense “awakened in her mind a lively gratitude to the supreme Disposer of all human events” (191); in fact, it pushes her to experience a kind of divine revelation in which she comes to be “thankful for the blessings conferred and not distrust the care of providence, of which she had received such signal proofs”

(191). To Lady Mary, divine power has revealed itself, a circumstance that ultimately drives her to realize “the many blessings bestowed on her, [that she] had a heart so touched with the greatness of divine mercy” (194). In this manner, Lady Mary naturally gravitates towards Mrs. Morgan and Louisa, and the symbolism of feminine divinity. 56

Mrs. Selvyn’s case presents an interesting addition to the group in that she was originally “bred a philosopher from her cradle, but was better instructed in the doctrine of the ancient moralists than in the principles of Christianity” (200). In other words, Miss

Selvyn was not originally religious. The secular nature of these circumstances are altered when we come to find that her “sceptical” father had been largely responsible for this kind of education. When a minister succeeds in convincing him otherwise, Miss Selvyn is schooled in matters of religion, but the point in time in which she is faced with the impending death of her biological mother, Lady Emilia, is where she comes to assume her divine characteristics. “What an example of virtue have you set me” (217), Miss

Selvyn exclaims at the woman’s death bed. That Lady Emilia sets an “example of virtue” implies the transfer of that virtue by principle of blood inheritance. Before she dies, Lady

Emilia confirms the certainty of this inheritable trait by both, claiming her place in heaven, and stating the insinuated fact: “With pleasure I go where I am called, for I leave my child safe in the Divine Protection, and her own virtue” (218). Mrs. Selvyn, like the three before her, falls in line with the philanthropic endeavor because of the divine essence that comprises her natural disposition, earning for her the veneration that she receives along with her counterparts.

Mrs. Trentham as a member of the group is equally as interesting as Mrs.

Selvyn’s in that she is the only one who appears to endure the process of divine punishment. In a rare instance in which a man passes on traits of virtue, we learn that by

“teaching her humanity, he [her father] initiated her into civility of manners” (225). This

“humanity” that Mrs. Trentham has been taught predisposes her towards the philanthropic condition. And in the case of her being taunted by her cousins, we find that 57

she espouses a sense of what is required of her on a very religious level, that to suppress the hurting of others was an “indispensable duty…[that] to not offend by her words was an essential part of the religion in which she was educated” (225). Because she is characterized as “innocence and simplicity itself; and in her nature shone pure and uncorrupted, either by natural or acquired vices” (225), that she goes off the deep end to resolve her emotional problems is alarming. “[She] began to try if dissipation could dispel her melancholy…[and] the fineness of her person procured her many lovers”

(240). The conflict between Mrs. Trentham’s sense of humanity and her venture into a life that unravels the aspect of her “pure and uncorrupted” self functions for the narrative to make a point. In the acquisition of small-pox and the subsequent destruction of her beauty, she realizes a deeper and more profound calling in her life that seems to guide her in the direction of the Hall. When the ladies there invite her to spend some time, she

“required no solicitation, for it was the very thing she wished” (242). Being accepted by the ladies positions her as a kind of prodigal child in which the spiritual powers, a.k.a. the

Christian God, reinstates her place among the divine.

Mrs. Maynard’s history is largely unknown, apart from her associations with Mrs.

Trentham. Her place among the other five is not denigrated in the least because of this factor. Her role in the novel is to convey the situation at the Hall – the nature of its philanthropy and its governing women, and its overall way of life. The inescapable point of her narrations to Sir George is that she draws out the principle of the divine in each of the histories with extreme detail; as a spokesperson for her counterparts, she assumes characteristics of the divine in a vicarious way. Her role in conveying both, the efforts of the women in helping others, and the divine natures they possess. As Dorice Williams 58

Elliott tells us: “Based as they were on commercial and political principles, the new philanthropic ventures [during the mid-eighteenth century]…were usually organized, supervised, and managed by men” ( 536). Thus the divinity that Mrs. Maynard helps to establish in the women endows them with the will and authority to engage in philanthropy, in spite of the gendered restrictions of the activity. This divinity additionally gives them the ability to criticize the a-religious trend of mercantile capitalism. Men cannot be offended by the actions of the women because their right to act comes from a higher power that men are required to acknowledge. This divinity additionally gives them the ability to criticize the a-religious trend of mercantile capitalism.

The philanthropy that the ladies engage, however, is only a subtopic, if an extremely important one, to the overarching theme of the novel. The ladies are adored and venerated because they are concerned with the lives of others, activity that endows them with saint-like qualities that in turn, enables them with power in the eyes of the men, Sir George and Lamont, who witness the scope of their endeavors. The religious associations are so powerful, it can be no wonder that the novel came to be recognized as the “fullest literary expression of the first wave of ‘bluestocking’ feminism” (Kelly 11).

Millenium Hall is a text that expresses ideas about the condition of society, how to address such conditions, and how women can participate in a society-fixing endeavor alongside men: the pervading references to religious principles and the sense of duty such principles require tends to spotlight how men come off as failures in their versions of intervention. Thus a duty to society is what the ladies of the Hall espouse, but if the terms

“veneration” and “adoration” draw readers to think of the irgin Mary, then a 59

scrutinizing textual eye reveals an alternative aspect to the role they play with regard to such duties.

The numerical amount of women, six, is the principle guiding factor that leads away from thinking about Marian divinity and towards the Vestal Virgins, but other analogies are worthy of consideration. For example, if the estal irgins have “dedicated their lives” to esta, the same kind of dedication applies to the ladies. This can be found in the innumerable times references to the Christian God is made, and the various ways in which he is referenced. When considering the inhumane nature of confining a wild animal for show, Louisa Mancel believes that such an animal should be in its natural habitat, that in which “the all-wise Creator has placed it” (Scott 71). Mrs. Maynard observes the immense beneficence of her counterparts at the Hall and tells Sir George pointedly: “I am overwhelmed with gratitude to the Almighty disposer of my fate” (120).

She additionally observes the connection between the ladies and “Him, who enables them thus to dispense innumerable blessings” (120). Upon the impending ruin of Louisa at the hands of Mr. Hintman, Miss Melvyn saw “no resource [to save her] except in the protection of the Almighty” (100). Miss Selvyn, upon realizing her mother will be forgiven in her penitence, tells her: “Blest you must be supremely by him who loveth the contrite heart,” and in speculating that the woman will go where there is “eternal felicity,” she prays that she will “be received into the same place” (217). Lady Mary

Jones experiences guilt when she suspects that her lifestyle effects karmic circumstances, and “could not forbear thinking that she was indeed the care of that Being, who had hitherto employed so little of her thoughts”; she subsequently realizes that this “Being” is

“the supreme Disposer of all human events” (191). In considering the social problems 60

involved with a “depraved” lifestyle, Mrs. Trentham tells Lamont, “we shall perceive a great difference in the comforts arising from the reflections on a life spent in an endeavour to obey our Maker” (246). Use of the term “God” itself is applied nine times throughout the text; Louisa sums up their relationship to him with clarity: “God’s mercy and bounty is universal, it flows unasked and unmerited; we are bid to endeavour to imitate him as far as our nature will enable us to do it” (244-245).

The analogy is further visible in that the Vestal Virgins utilize their connection with a higher power to facilitate their devotion to the Roman state. “Their service, based on strictly prescribed behavior and ritual, was for the benefit of Rome, the city, and the

Empire” (Tak cs 81). In understanding Millenium Hall as the social problem novel that it is, in all of its depiction of London as a spiritually corrosive hotbed of vice, the philanthropic endeavors of the ladies functions in service to the country of England, the city of London its source of pride and wealth. But London’s citizens have spiraled into a vortex of dissipation; it is for the ladies of the Hall to clear a path to redemption.

The analogy continues as Tak cs further informs, “ estals had religious powers that ordinarily belonged to men” (83). That London has gotten to this point is peculiar because the associative principles of the text align men with that space; thus if women are required to espouse principles of divinity in order to gain attention and by proxy, power, then it must be men who have lost their power from God. In other words, men hold themselves as authority figures in a patriarchal world by virtue of the patriarchal nature of their holy books, yet they falter and flounder from any sense of holiness so that the space they live in becomes corrupt. The ladies of the Hall expose a sense of hypocrisy by adhering to the religious principles intended to bring about the well-being of the 61

populace. Because they claim this religious principle, and that they adhere to it with the

“dedication” as observed in the text, it gives them the power and authority to act in the eyes of men; for men to protest such action would be to highlight the nature of their own inadequacies.

The analogy to the estal irgins doesn’t stop with the matching numerical amount of its members, adherence to divine principles, and dedication to the state. That the Vestals dressed as married women is additionally noteworthy. The ladies of the Hall, too, are known for their domestic way of dressing, indicative of a lack of pretension and more of devotion to duty. Sir George observes that the “dress of the ladies was thus far uniform, the same neatness, the same simplicity and cleanliness appeared in each, and they were all in lutestring night-gowns…free from any trumpery ornaments” (Scott 61).

The imagery of “lutestring night-gowns” calls forth the imagery of the last of the Vestal

Virgin statues at the Atrium Vestae. Here the draping cloth set in stone reminds of an age when a society relied on the powers of feminine divinity to facilitate the betterment of that society. Nanette Morton views this kind of dress as indicative of the Hall’s ladies to establish authority for social action via the right of divine principle, stating that in the case of the way they dress, “clothing becomes a mark of a woman’s morality, a quality closely allied with her social utility” (198).

That the estal irgins dress as though they were “married” seems rather oxymoronic, yet as Tak cs explains, during their tenure they were to remain in a “virginal state.” As far as the text makes clear, there is no sexual activity at the Hall, as matters pertain to the six ladies themselves. In fact, the history of Mrs. Trentham is the only textual reference to sexual behavior, informing us that her fall into dissipation and her 62

beauty “procured her many lovers” (Scott 240). As she was not connected with the Hall at this point, her past actions become aligned with the behavior that the Hall’s principles seek to extinguish. Mrs. Maynard, we learn, had been married, but upon her husband’s death, she joins the Hall out of need for the philanthropy they provide, and a desire to be a part of the active endeavor. The remaining four ladies, as far as the text is concerned, have been virginal for the entirety of their lives. When Miss Melvyn learns that she is to be forcibly wed to Mr. Morgan, we learn that “such a lover could excite no emotion…but disgust” (106); after the wedding, evidence suggests they never slept together: “Even in the night he would frequently call to her; if she appeared at his bedside, he was then contented, being sure she was in the chamber” (157). And after he dies, she becomes the sole inheritor, indicating that the two never conceived a child. Her marriage to him, on the contrary, espouses Vestal virginal qualities. To prevent the scandalous rumor that incited the forced marriage, Miss Melvyn had complied, feeling “that to preserve her reputation was not only necessary to her own happiness, but a duty to society… Example is the means given universally to all whereby to benefit society” (124-25).

The other three ladies, Mrs. Mancel, Lady Mary and Mrs. Selvyn, appear to have lived their entire lives as virgins as well. Louisa barely escapes a sexual advance, only to come to live a life of being accosted by men from all directions because of her beauty.

She assumes a kind of divine power in her ability to fend off these advances, an aspect that serves to show how such feminine divinity is of the angelic kind of which harbors no sexual interest. Lady Mary, by contrast, had experienced dissipation, but was too young and under the care of older women to have been ruined. In the one case where she does face sexualized danger, she, too, escapes ruin by an innate sense that tells her the 63

behavior of her assailant is immoral. Mrs. Selvyn’s innate divine sense is augmented by the nature of the education she has received from her adopted father. When the same sexual predator that went after Lady Mary goes after her, she is protected by both, the innate divine sense that guides her, and her education: she, in fact, lectures the man, Lord

Robert, on the imprudent manner of his actions. These three, as their lives are conveyed by Mrs. Maynard, are essentially virgins who have come to live the life of virginal quality. The distance they maintain from the immorality of sexual behavior renders them chaste and thus, fit for divine service.

The Vestal Virgin analogy is well-fitting for its correlations of divinity and duty, yet if we consider Elliott’s argument, Sarah Scott wrote Millenium Hall as she was “faced

[with] the problem of reclaiming women’s traditional prerogatives from a new kind of philanthropic practice that threatened to exclude them” (536). Elliot suggests that by

“casting it in the form of a philanthropic tract, she strips philanthropy of its specifically masculine component and makes it hospitable to nonsexualized women” (537). Elliott’s article, however, functions only to show how women were in need of a philanthropic role to address the problems of society, as opposed to discussing the means by which they could attain that role. In addition, she situates the text as a woman-to-woman project in which the problems that women faced were solved by the actions of women. While

Scott’s novel does present itself as a tract on philanthropy, it additionally presents itself as a way of endowing women with the kind of power needed to operate in a patriarchal society. The Marian and Vestal traits that the ladies acquire throughout the progress of the text is largely a source of that power. By moderns standards, the need to attach divine significance in order to gain the right to participate in matters of society would seem 64

discriminatory. The question to ask in this light would seem: Why should anyone need to be seen as divine in order to excercise such a right? But in the eighteenth century, the prevalence of religion presented a different dynamic to the way society functioned. There is irony in the notion that men revered matters of religious principle, and yet the city of

London fell into the state that it had in the first half of the century. Francis Place provides perspective on the progress that London made from that era: “We were a better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state” (George 4). It should come as no surprise that his comments follow on the influence that the Bluestocking movement had on the situation. In this light, we see that the gendering of the city space situates men as culpable for the corruption. The logic follows, that if patriarchy lies at the root of England’s sociocultural issues, and that religion underlies this very patriarchy, then the pathway for women – in this case, the ladies of the Hall – to participate in solving the problems of society, would be to imbue them with divine significance.

This attachment of the divine to the ladies does great work in that it forces male readers to consider the work being done. To the patriarchal man, a woman in her own right may not hold much socially active weight, but a woman operating under the dictates of God, putting pressure on the people responsible for society’s ills, is a woman to be listened to. This imbued divinity not only allows for the women of the Hall and by proxy, women in the real world, to be viewed as interested and entirely qualified to perform acts of philanthropy in a patriarchal world that “threatens to exclude them,” but situates the ladies themselves, so far as the text is concerned, as wholly qualified for the didactic process by which the text is constructed. 65

* * *

Millenium Hall is unusual most primarily for its utopian theme that is intended to outline an alternative to a society that has become corrupt. A utopia is a system of society where egalitarian practices flourish so that the broadest range of its members may benefit in their attempts to create and sustain a livelihood. The irony of utopias is that they exist only in fiction; they are products of the imagination composed under the pressures and realities of socioeconomic inequality. A utopia is featured in Millenium Hall because the novel is a product of just such circumstances; it functions as a focal point throughout a text that reads, as Elliott tells us, like a philanthropic tract, unto which readers become enlightened unto potential solutions to a society stricken by dissipation. Yet for the novel’s utopian element to ring through at its clearest pitch, it relies on a unique didactic structure to convey its potential as an educative, transformational text.

One of the elements to this structure is reminiscent of the form popularized in

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), for both entail the task of writing letters. Richardson’s novel is a fitting text for comparison in that he, too, was writing with didactic intentions, stating in his introduction:

If to inculcate Religion and Morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable to the young Class of Readers, as well as worthy of the Attention of Persons of mature Years and Understandings…If to paint ice in its proper Colours, to make it deservedly Odious; and to set irtue in its own amiable Light…the Editor of the following Letters…ventures to assert, that all these desirable Ends are obtained in these Sheets. (Richardson 3-4).

66

Thomas Keymer tells us, however, that Richardson was writing on account of his

“attempts to appropriate and convert the risky immoralities of scandal fiction and seduction narrative” (xxi). Pamela is a story about a young girl who exhibits virtuous behavior and in this manner, the implication is that Richardson is trying to set an example for young girls, and the young men who pursue them. By contrast, Sarah Scott’s novel seeks to educate on larger social matters; but more specifically, and “as Jane Spencer suggested in the introduction to her edition of the novel, the text ‘really aims to educate men’” (Pohl 55). Millenium Hall differs from a novel such as Pamela in that it sought to do more than influence the minds of young people, it sought to influence the minds of those who controlled the reins of English society, said society being deeply patriarchal in its nature.

Though Scott unites didacticism with the epistolary form as did her contemporary

Richardson, Millenium Hall sets itself apart from the structure of Pamela by both, restricting the content to a single letter – as opposed to a series of exchanged letters – and by tempering the overall structure with a series of embedded narratives. These embedded narratives tend to complicate the temporal dimension in that the past comes to vie for narrative space with the present, yet they perform useful, even powerful work in that they draw specialized attention to the characters. The embedded narratives are comprised of the lives of the women who have contributed to the founding of the Hall; in the telling, their life circumstances and personality traits are staged for examination by the narrative recipients, Sir George and his counterpart Lamont. This activity of narration and examination in turn functions as discussion material, but also additionally incites an interesting process, where the discussion is intended to direct the introspective lens on the 67

narrative recipients themselves, to expose the nature of their dispositions. In this sense,

Sarah Scott’s use of characters is essentially utilitarian. They are constructed and developed not to inspire a sense of reader intimacy and emotion, but to make a tactical point. As we come to find, the utility of character blended with a unique narrative pattern that oscillates between storytelling and topical discussion, it serves to facilitate Millenium

Hall’s pedagogical imperative.

In line with the idea of “tactical” writing, Scott’s method involves immediately establishing her target audience by introducing flawed characters, men who will stand in contrast to the divine female characters that will follow. Sir George Ellison is a man in his declining years who is writing to an unnamed friend about a chance encounter he has had with a place he entitles himself, Millenium Hall. In his correspondence, he is immediately self-humiliating for esteeming this friend as one whose “constant endeavours have been to inculcate the best principles into youthful minds” (Scott 53).

Identifying this sense of constancy as it pertains to doing the right thing is meant to contrast with Sir George’s low perception of self: he writes that in spending time among the ladies of the Hall, it will accuse “me of my own deficiencies, and lead me to make a humiliating comparison between these excellent ladies and myself” (54); he additionally makes an admission to a lifetime preoccupation with “mercantile gain” (54). In this self-denigration and sense of confession there lies the appearance of shortcoming, the idea that he is unworthy of social reverence, and the understanding that his interests lean towards the pursuit of wealth over altruism. Sir George Ellison is thus staged to have his character molded, a sounding board for principles to be explained.

68

Before the didactic mode can proceed, a second character is introduced who will not only share in the reception of the Hall’s principles, but will be the more primary means by which the didactic action will take place. Mr. Lamont is described as a man who is much younger than Sir George, twenty-five to be exact, with traits historically referred to as one of a coxcomb: he has allowed himself to get involved in circumstances lacking in basic virtue, yet he somehow possesses characteristics worthy enough to be forgiven for his seemingly trivial misdeeds. The word “superficial” is used in the description of him, that “[f]ashion, not reason, has been the guide of all his thoughts and actions” (55); but because he does not come off as overtly arrogant on a personal level – a candidate for the repair of his reputation and thus, his moral character – this is enough for Sir George “to accept him as a fellow traveler” (55).

With the two principle recipients of the didactic action established, replete with their less-than-desirable traits, descriptions of the glory of the Hall are conveyed as preparatory to an instructional setting. They pass the flute-playing shepherd and happy women and children in the fields, commenting on the otherworldliness of it all, until a storm forces them to take shelter at the Hall on the insistence of the housekeeper. Here a scene of women of various ages engaging in an assortment of activities – reading, writing, carving, drawing, etc. – leads Sir George to feel as though he has encountered the “Attick School” (58-59); from this point, Sir George and Lamont are introduced to the five principle founders of the Hall, though an encounter with a woman, Mrs. Maynard

(who turns out to be his cousin), stages the situation as having six primary women who appear to be in charge of the operation. After an evening meal, the two guests are treated to a concert performance of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabeus. Early next 69

morning, Sir George meets an old woman living close by on the premises of whom, her and her neighbors are “happy as princesses,” and they attribute this happiness to “these good ladies, heaven preserve them” (65-66); after breakfast Sir George and Lamont are treated to the sights of the landscape, where they encounter perfected gardening endeavors that encompass a “temple dedicated to solitude” within distance of the ocean, next to which runs a “gentle murmuring rivulet” (69); and before lunch, the two companions are marveled by an enclosure of rescued people, “poor creatures who are rendered miserable from some natural deficiency” who had once been “exhibited as public spectacles” (72-75).

The scene with the “poor creatures” is significant because it specifically characterizes Lamont as something of a naïve, pupil-type figure. Because these enclosed individuals were not openly visible at first, he states with a kind of crass glee that he feels as though he is about to behold a zoo. It is for Mrs. Mancel to inform him that no such exhibit would be allowed on the estate, for it would go against the governing moral framework. To house animals for show would be, in the eyes of the ladies, immoral.

Lamont recognizes the nature of his mistake and declares, “it is most advisable for me not to attempt to defend what I have said” (72). In this instance the didactic structure of the novel takes its shape. The wrongful thoughts of a man – a coxcomb whose mind has up to this point been led by a lack of reason – are corrected by a woman of whom, her character as a morally upstanding person is being established.

Such scenes as observed, nevertheless, are striking for the men. In light of his feelings of wonderment, and on behalf of himself and Lamont, Sir George poses the question to his cousin, whether or not she will tell him about the origins of the Hall. 70

Because Mrs. Maynard feels both, that there is no reason to hide the details, and that she knows her friends are “above wishing to conceal any part of their lives” (76), she acquiesces to his request. What follows is a complex narrative scheme in which the lives of the Hall’s founders are presented in the form of a long and drawn out conversation. In this manner, the present day action of the overarching narrative, that Sir George and

Lamont have stumbled across a location that is strange and new to them, becomes interwoven with the past. This aspect of the novel maintains its momentum through a series of interruptive discussions to the storytelling, and it is here that we observe the instruction of Lamont.

The first of these mid-storytelling discussions, or narrative interruptions, occurs when we learn that Mrs. Mancel, known to us at this point as Louisa, had been orphaned and adopted by a wealthy stranger, Mr. Hintman. He was a deceitful, licentious man who raised her from this childhood to become a potential mistress. Upon learning that Mr.

Hintman died before she could become debauched, leaving Louisa with absolutely nothing in the inheritance, it is Lamont who initiates the interruption with his appalled feelings, though for the wrong reason, for “though he [Lamont] is too fashionable to think intriguing very criminal, yet he is naturally generous, as far as money is concerned”

(102). The note to the text defines “intriguing” as “carrying on a sexual liaison,” thus we are presented with more of the faultiness that contributes to our understanding of Lamont.

His concern for Louisa’s financial situation seems only to add to his moral naiveté: he does not express concern about a woman’s potential to be sexually victimized, he wonders about monetary predicaments. It is for Mrs. Maynard to spell out the moral of the story. Because Mr. Hintman spent his life in nefarious pursuits, that of chasing 71

women through the power of his money, his potential to harbor a genuine concern for others had become non-existent. “When a man neglects his own soul, and deprives himself of all hope of everlasting felicity, can we expect he should take any trouble to provide for the temporal convenience of another person?” (102). Of note is the sense of culpability involved in relation to that of a higher power. Mrs. Maynard refers to the matter as unfolding according to the “laws of God” and thus, Lamont is “touched by what she had said” (103). Because Mr. Hintman had died, incapable of seeing the damage he left behind, it is for Lamont to absorb and react to the consequences of this man’s actions; and it is for Lamont to recognize a higher authority as Mr. Hintman could not.

The next narrative interruption occurs when a bell rings, signaling throughout the community grounds that the noon time meal is about to be served. Proceeding the after-lunch tradition of taking tea, a stroll to an adjoining house associated with the Hall makes the occasion for more didacticism, found in a conversation on the philosophies underpinning how the Hall’s society functions. The stage is set for a pedagogical atmosphere, and it is for Lamont to pose questions of which, as depicted, he cannot conceive of the answers. On the topic of “reciprocal communication of benefits,” the idea that people exist who “are continually endeavouring to serve and oblige each other,”

Lamont is dumbfounded. He has no option but to ask, “[W]hat service can a poor man do me? I may relieve him, but how can he return the obligation?” “[I]n giving you an opportunity of relieving him,” answers the present day Mrs. Mancel. “The pleasure he has afforded you, is as far superior to the gratification you have procured him, as it is more blessed to give than to receive” (113-14). One of the Hall’s beneficiaries participates in coloring the moment. She suggests that if Lamont has never been exposed 72

to this kind of ethical behavior, he should not be blamed, and that, by contrast, Mrs.

Mancel is “certainly very deep in this knowledge, and her opinion may be received as almost an infallible decision” (114). Lamont’s ignorance on matters of reciprocal communication allows for an explanation of what it means to materialize, where the exchange proves useful in identifying a key principle upon which a utopian community should stand. The infallible nature of Mrs. Mancel opinion additionally serves to mark the distinction between pedagogue and pupil.

A side note to this particular discussion segment rest in the nature of Lamont’s extended reaction. Upon hearing the statement of Mrs. Mancel’s infallibility, he makes the admission that “he was well convinced of the justness of what Miss Mancel had said”

(114). Being “convinced” is generally the intended result of a persuasive argument. In this case, the effect suggests that the instruction of Lamont is enacting a psychic change.

This is further solidified in the notion that he was initially characterized as a person of whom “fashion, not reason, has been the guide of all his thoughts and actions.” Such mental change underscores the point that a learning process is underway while serving to depict Lamont’s original mentality and lifestyle as antithetical to the benefit of society; but in addition, the process serves to acknowledge how a lack of education in such matters contributes to society’s problems.

What follows from this second narrative interruption is a stop-and-go pattern in which Lamont’s role as pupil becomes an element of the narration to be expected.

Lamont repeatedly asks his questions as a man who has not previously understood such principled behavior, and the ladies of the Hall continue to educate him accordingly. In the process, and to add to topics already discussed such as Lamont’s inadequate 73

understanding of the plight of women and reciprocal communication, a number of other topics are also discussed. They range from what it means to engage in deceptive practices, to the mentality involved with recognizing one’s duty to society; and from engaging in any of the corruptive components of dissipation, to realizing the religious principles that serve to provide healthy alternatives to such modes of life. The topical range and how the discussion tends to lead back towards the religious aspect is important in that for every measure of wrongdoing, every measure of social impropriety that serves to corrupt, the women are viewed with credibility in their ability to contend with these negative aspects by espousing their adherence to the biblical principles they stand by.

This phenomenon is seen from the very first narrative interruption in which Mrs.

Maynard declares in defiance to the problem of womanizing: “I look on it as the most dangerous of vices, it destroys truth, honour, humanity, it is directly contrary to the laws of God, is the destruction of society, and almost as inconsistent with morality as with religion” (103); this kind of commentary is seen throughout the text, ultimately to end with Mrs. Trentham’s denunciation of dissipation itself: “Should we do wisely in quitting a scene where every object exalts our mind to the great Creator, to mix among all the folly of depraved nature” (246).

And yet within this activity it is important to remember that Sir George is never very off, though the role we understand him as playing from the beginning tends to morph into something different. Though he had been presented as originally self-nullifying and in need of the instruction the ladies are to provide, that he is much older than Lamont renders him not wholly fitting as the pupil type. If we consider that both of these men are stand-ins for the patriarchal society at large, then their roles can be 74

split into pupil and approver. Lamont represents the typical young man of London caught up in the life responsible for the corrosive properties that persist while Sir George, he represents the section of the patriarchy that is to judge how matters unfold. For example, when taken to one of the homes annexed to the estate, he examines the books collected in the library only to remark, “I found they consisted of some excellent treatises of divinity”

(196). Statements like these are peppered throughout the text, and they participate in the didactic structure by serving as signals of approval. The Hall’s ladies, in their divine essence, are qualified to instruct on matters of ethics and morality, but it is for Sir George acting on behalf of the established patriarchy to sanction the overall operation.

Thus it is the union of these three character types – the ladies as instructors,

Lamont as pupil, and Sir George as overseer – that binds with the oscillation of the narrative that comprises the didactic structure of the novel. The didactic activity, as it is formed in this unique way, functions to impact readers, for it is the readers who are learning through the creation of Scott’s character interactions. The significant factor to this entire process is that it is women who are doing the instructing, and that their instruction is based on principles of divine authority. In the happiness declared by the old woman, the adoration they receive from the disfigured individuals, and the veneration they receive from their other beneficiaries, the operation at the Hall is conveyed as a success. So successful is the endeavor that Sir George finds Lamont, on the seventh day of their stay no less, reading a Bible, “convinced by the conduct of the ladies of this house” (248); and it is Sir George who informs the recipient of his letter, “my thoughts are all engaged in a scheme to imitate them on a smaller scale” (249).

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The novel’s didactic structure promotes social change by enabling a transformative experience to occur from within the text. In essence, the ladies of Hall represent a reaction to the effects that London’s mercantile enterprise had spawned. The atmosphere of immense trade and rapid growth created a situation in which the concentration of people induced a mass consciousness of corruption, a phenomenon as we have seen according the old miser’s son, was not alleviated in the slightest by the governing and aristocratic classes. In this manner, the moral breakdown that extended throughout the class structure induced an instability that affected the fabric of society.

Working to the advantage of a writer like Sarah Scott was the principle of religion. In the documentation of Bucholz and Ward, that churches could be found among concert halls and gin joints (3), this speaks to a society, clearly functioning by standards of hypocrisy, that is nevertheless steeped in a belief in God. Sarah Scott, through the ladies of the Hall and the community they form, takes advantage of this inescapable belief to offer a pathway in the restoration of a moral framework, to reintroduce a platform for stability in a country that has lost its way.

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