EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S COOKBOOKS: AUTHORS AND COPYRIGHT
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, SPEECH, AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
BY RANAE UNDERWOOD B.A.
DENTON, TEXAS AUGUST 2017
ABSTRACT
RANAE UNDERWOOD
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S COOKBOOKS: AUTHORS AND COPYRIGHT AUGUST 2017
Women-authored cookbooks from the eighteenth century exemplify the economic ethos of the time: commodification of knowledge and ownership of intellectual property.
Despite this, little research has been done on early copyright law and cookbooks. This thesis examines the increase in value of women’s knowledge by, first, establishing an enumerated bibliography of women-authored cookbooks first published between 1745 and 1800, and, second, analyzing the title pages of the texts. Due to the subject of this thesis, this thesis is interdisciplinary, with a grounding in bibliography and feminist rhetorical studies. An analysis of the data reveals that texts published outside of London were more likely to have authors retain the copyright for the first edition than texts published in London, suggesting that community practices impacted what rights women had to property while living under coverture.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii
ABSTRACT ...... iv
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
II. METHODOLOGY ...... 13
Selection of Texts ...... 14 Book History Practices ...... 16 Feminist Rhetorical Practices ...... 20
III. WOMEN IN CONTEXT ...... 24
Expansion of Women’s Roles within the Economy ...... 26 Women and Property ...... 31 Text as Property ...... 35
IV. FINDINGS ...... 47
The Author on the Page ...... 48 The Author’s Identity ...... 52 Location ...... 57 Copyright Ownership ...... 60
V. CONCLUSION ...... 68
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 71
APPENDIX
List of Women Authored Cookbooks 1745-1800 ...... 80
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Raffald (1733-1781), an English author during the latter part of the eighteenth century, achieved widespread popularity by publishing a book about managing and working in the kitchen of a noble household. She capitalized on her expertise in domestic work to build an empire comprised of a servant registry office, confectionary shop, catering service, and a newspaper.1 Alluding to her empire on the title page of her first cookery book, The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), she calls attention to her experience, credentials, and knowledge. She assures the reader that her book comes out of her service to a lady of noble rank, that she “wrote [it] purely from practice,” and that the book contains, as the title page notes, “near 800 original receipts, most of which never appeared in print.”2 Looking at these statements it appears that Raffald felt a firm ownership over the information in her book. The recipes stemmed from her years in service, and now, with the publication of her book, she was sharing with readers the knowledge that had led to her success. In order to further assure her readers of the authenticity of her book, Raffald signed every copy of the first edition.3 Elizabeth Raffald serves as an example of how women used the written word as a way to take part in their
1 Eric Quayle, Old Cookbooks: An Illustrated History (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 102-03. 2 Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester, UK: J. Harrop, 1769). 3 Quayle, Old Cookbooks, 103-4. 1 society and economy like female novelists, poets, and playwrights. There is little doubt that she was an extraordinary businesswoman. Raffald possessed a shrewd understanding of retail, established a personal brand, protected her intellectual property, and built a successful publishing venture based on her personal authority and command of the subject. Furthermore, she is noteworthy for selling her copyright of The Experienced
English House-keeper in 1773 for £1,400, a copyright under her name—not her husband’s.4 In fact, Raffald’s sale places her copyright among the most valuable copyrights sold during the eighteenth century.5 When considering the legal and cultural restraints on women during this time, her achievements become extraordinary. Women of the upper and noble classes were seen to have four duties: obey their husbands, produce heirs, run the household, and be ladylike.6 In addition to these social expectations, laws also forced women to be dependent upon men by stripping them of their names and property upon marriage. Married women like Raffald lived under the practice of coverture, the common law that essentially combined the husband and wife into one legal entity, that of the husband’s.7 But coverture was not the only to cover women and property, and the development of copyright law during the eighteenth century gave
4 Ibid., 100-03. 5 David Fielding and Shef Rogers, "Copyright Payments in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1701–1800," The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 18, no. 1 (2017): 16. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed June 22, 2017). 6 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 24. 7 Ibid. 2 authors rights over their texts. The written word, and especially the published word, allowed women to participate in the society and economy of England.
Unfortunately, the push in recent decades to reclaim women’s writing has largely ignored authors like Raffald. Reclamation of female authorship has primarily focused on women who produced traditional modes of literature, whether in the form of drama, prose, poetry, letters, pamphlets, or diaries, yet the works of women who wrote technical literature, literature that instructs on a particular subject, should also be recognized by scholars of the eighteenth century for normalizing the concept of women as writers and authors. As women began to innovate the cookbook genre, their readership grew. Women readers supported these women authors, leading to more opportunities for women to publish.
Women became successful in writing during the eighteenth century, in part by reinforcing their authority in the domestic realm. And for household and domestic women workers, their class standing and experience may have benefited them when deciding to publish their works. For women authors of this time, as Cheryl Turner notes in her examination of the subject, there were “two key features of their authorship: its function as a source of income for impecunious, literate women without apparently posing a threat to their respectability; and the ascendancy of the middle class amongst literary women.”8 The acceptance of women as authoritative cookbook authors, as I claim in this thesis, is a direct result of the growing readership of women. If we acknowledge
8 Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 3 the importance of understanding the growth of female readership during the eighteenth century,9 then we also must address and recognize the women on the other side of the text, even if it is not traditional literature. That is, to understand fully the growth of female readership and writing, we must examine all aspects of it.
Although she is an exceptional example of a successful woman writer during this time, Raffald was not the only woman to build a name for herself through cookery books.
The growth of women publishing cookery books during the eighteenth century deserves to be researched. Questions regarding what publication of cookery books offered women informs my research. Did writing cookery books allow women a way to subvert the laws and customs? How did female authors of cookery books in eighteenth century England use published domestic writing intended for use in the home to establish a personhood that was legally denied to them? By answering these questions, I hope to demonstrate that although writing about subjects that further delegated women to the home, by engaging in the very male-dominated world of publishing these women authors were undermining dominant beliefs about women’s roles in society.
Reconceptualizing eighteenth-century domestic manuals as works of liberating female action is central to my study. Broadening the field of what scholars read as disruptive rhetoric, through the process of reclamation and recovery, allows for a reconceptualization of history containing more than only the dominant culture. For a long
9 For example, see James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870 (Springer, 2007). 4 time, women were relegated to a silent role, constrained by their culture. Social mores and a lack of education restricted women to write only on acceptable subjects: motherhood, religion, and deportment. And women who did publish on other topics were often considered suspect or amoral.
In the seventeenth century women were expected to be quiet and pious, and interpretation of biblical scripture became a means through which they could speak.
Margaret Fell argued for the right of women to speak by quoting scripture in Womens
Speaking Justified (1666).10 As more women began to share their thoughts, the focus of the argument shifted. Although reluctant to challenge the accepted social hierarchy of her time, Mary Astell, in her A Serious Proposal to Ladies (1694), called for some women to focus on the betterment of their minds and souls within a supportive community of women by forgoing marriage.11 Six years later, Astell’s tone would become more strident as she critiqued the authoritarian nature of the marriage relationship in Some Reflections on Marriage (1700).12 Her evolving view on marriage reflected the discussion during the late seventeenth century on the nature of marriage. While she, and those like her, hoped for equality and respect for the wife in a marriage, they found that possibility only to exist for women within friendship. On the other hand, some saw marriage as an institution only concerned with property and interest, an enemy to love.
10 Joy Ritchie and Kate Arnold, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 66. 11 Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 83-85. 12 Ibid., 89. 5
Astell’s conservative beliefs prevented her from imagining marriage ceasing to exist, so she concentrated on strongly cautioning women to be careful in their choices.
Her plea was echoed by Daniel Defoe in his Good Advice to the Ladies: That as the
World Goes and is Likely to Go, the Best Way for Them is to Remain Unmarried (1702) where he concludes that women should value themselves and avoid marriage.13 This was not Defoe’s only comment on women and their affairs. Earlier, he had advocated for an
Academy for Women, in his An Essay upon Projects (1697), by arguing that educated women make better wives.14 Although not calling for a revolution against society, Fell,
Astell, and Defoe helped to advance women’s thinking about themselves and their beliefs which led to other means of arguments. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), argues for women’s equal education because of their roles as mothers.15 Whether through motherhood, scripture, or conservative ideals, working within an acceptable means to argue for progressive advancement is a convention of women’s rhetoric. The context of their argument resides in the same spaces they were expected to inhabit: the kitchen, the church, and the home. In writing a cookbook, these women authors remained within an acceptable space and subject.
Although their writing reinforced women’s delegation to domestic work, eighteenth-century female cookbook authors engaged in a subversive act. Denied personhood legally, they found an opportunity to establish a public identity through their
13 Ibid., 95. 14 Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London: Cassell, 1887), 164-175. https://books. google.com/books?id=0L40AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. 15 Ritchie and Arnold, Available Means, 92. 6 books. Establishing a persona through the acceptable female domestic sphere allowed them to participate more fully in the broader culture and economy. For example, after building an empire providing domestic goods and services, Raffald, not content to being relegated as wife and mother only, named herself a business woman and an authority on the domestic arts in her cookbook. Joy Ritchie and Kate Arnold discuss the importance of this act in their collection of women’s rhetorical works, Available Means. To challenge the subjectivity of being a woman, women, they argue, “must claim the right to name themselves rather than to be named.”16 By naming herself, a woman asserts the right to speak in public and claims full personhood for herself.
The inspiration for this study of women who “named themselves” through the publication of domestic technical literature comes from two sources. The first is Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in which she proved that the personal diary of Martha
Ballard, a woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, could provide details about that woman’s community that would otherwise be unknown. Although
Martha Ballard’s diary had been known to scholars since the late nineteenth century,
Ulrich was the first to see the possibility contained within it. Her ability to look beyond the mundanity of the everyday entries provides us with a deeper understanding of
Ballard’s community, of the roles that women and men assumed, and of the changing field of midwifery at the time.
16 Ibid., xvii. 7
The second source is Elizabeth Raffald’s sale of her copyright for an extraordinary sum of money. How, I wondered, could a woman do so in a time when women were unable to own property? This question led to my preliminary study of early copyright law, and the realization that, first, little research has been done on women and early copyright law and, second, no research has been done on cookery books and early copyright law. It seemed to me a perfect opportunity.
In addition to these two inspirations, I was struck by the dramatic shift in the gender of the authors of cookery books occurs during the eighteenth century.17 What was once a genre dominated by men becomes the domain of women. As the literacy rate of women grew and the cost of books decreased, women saw an opportunity and began to write and publish cookery and household books written in a simpler style in order to reach women of different classes.18 Upper-class women were still targeted for aspirational instruction manuals, but also for manuals they could use to direct their servants. Additionally, as the middle class began to grow, women in that class were sold books that informed them on custom and proper behavior when hosting dinners.
Cookbooks focused on servant-class women gave advice on how to be a good servant, taught simple math, and provided instruction for learning how to write. The success of women cookbook authors in particular did not go unnoticed, and male authors began to
17 W. Carew Hazlitt, Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine (London: George J. Coombes, 1902), pt. IV. 18 Gilly Lehmann, “Women’s Cookery in Eighteenth-Century England: Authors, Attitudes, Culinary Styles” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 305 (1992): 1737-38. 8
adapt their style to resemble that of female authors.19 Thus, the transition of cookery
books into a feminized genre is an action of empowerment caused by women’s demands.
Despite this expansion in authorship and readership, the codified histories on the
history of the publishing industry makes few mentions of cookery books in the eighteenth
century. One of the earliest studies of English food customs, W. Carew Hazlitt’s Old
Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine (1886), provides an overarching look at the
beginnings of manuscript and published recipe collections. Hazlitt’s study functions as a
seminal work on English cookery books and includes in his listings books authored by
women, but he spends the majority of his discussion on books by men.
Similarly, the first mention of cookery books in Frank Arthur Mumby’s history is
not until well into the nineteenth century when he relays an anecdote about the Longmans
publishing house. A woman appeared to the publisher, offering a book of verses, but the
owner replied, “it is no good bringing me poetry; nobody wants poetry now. Bring me a
cookery book, and we might come to terms.” The woman, Eliza Acton, did as he asked
and returned with her book, Modern Cookery (1845). In return, Longman agreed to
publish her book of poems. However, Longman was correct in his assessment of the
market, and Modern Cookery, not the book of poems, was the successful seller.20 With
Acton’s appearance as the first mention of cookery books, almost a century of women
authoring these books is written out of the history of publishing.
19 Ibid. 20 Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 138. 9
One notable absence is Elizabeth Raffald. Raffald sold her copyright in 1773 for a noteworthy sum, but her name does not appear in books about the history of publishing or the history of copyright. Raffald was one of the first women to benefit from selling her copyright since English copyright law formed in the eighteenth century. In 1709, with the passing of the Statute of Anne, publisher rights were limited in time. At the expiration of those rights, works would pass into the public domain.21 Although the legal battle defining copyright terms would continue well into the twentieth century, the creation of a public domain made it vital that books contained new and original information, guaranteed by the author. Some women saw this as an opportunity to sell the knowledge gained from their work in the service industry.
In studying these forty-two writers, I am contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of women during the eighteenth century and their role in both consuming and producing printed artifacts. In the past thirty years, researchers have begun to reclaim and reread cookery books and recipe collections as feminist works.22 In addition newer research into the practices of the time has revealed a paradoxical effect of restricting women’s right to property. Amy Louise Erickson suggests that the constraint of coverture
21 Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 69. 22 Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, eds., The Recipe Reader: Narratives-Contexts- Traditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003); Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 10 forced women to find creative legal ways to participate in the economy.23 The writing of books and the selling of one’s copyright may have provided another avenue for women to speak and name themselves.
It is my goal here to provide both a brief and accurate enumerative bibliography of first editions of women cookbook authors in late-eighteenth-century England (see
Appendix), and to examine how they published their works. There already exists bibliographies of cookbooks, such as Virginia Maclean’s A Short-title Catalogue of
Household and Cookery Books published in the English Tongue 1701-1800 (1981), but no studies focus specifically on women authors or the context surrounding the publishing of the cookbooks. D. F. McKenzie states that “any history of the book which excluded study of the social, economic, and political motivations of publishing . . . would degenerate into a feebly degressive book list and never rise to a readable history.”24 Not only do I seek these motivations, but I do so specifically from a feminist stance. To continue to overlook these women in the history of publishing does a disservice to the modern reader and also the women who wrote cookbooks.
In the next chapter, I further explain the methodology of my research: bibliography and feminist rhetorical studies. In addition to my methodology, I provide my method of selecting texts for the list of women-authored cookbooks from 1745-1800
(see Appendix). In the third chapter, I place these women within their time period. To
23 Amy Louise Erickson, “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal, no. 59 (2005): 2-3, accessed May 9, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472782. 24 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 11 establish the social, economic, and political factors influencing these women and their copyright decisions, I provide a brief explanation of both the laws and social expectations affecting these women. In the fourth chapter, I analyze my list of women cookbook authors to discern whether there are any patterns found in the copyright or publishing decisions of these women. Finally, I conclude my thesis with suggestions for future research. My aim in this study is to provide an initial set of data on which future study can be performed, thereby providing a more complete understanding of the intersection of women, authorship, copyright, and the role cookbooks played in bringing them together.
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CHAPTER II
METHODOLOGY
Records about the female cookbook authors considered in this thesis are scarce.
Thus, to hopefully draw some conclusions about them, I am dependent upon the evidence available to me: copyright rolls and title pages. Since these are associated with the book as an item, I am using bibliographical methodology. For the bibliographer, both of these sources are to be approached with a degree of caution for errors can be found on both.
Despite these reservations, I believe revealing any information about these women to be important to our understanding of book history and English culture during this time. For these women have been excluded from many studies of the history of the book, and in my study of them I draw on the approach used in feminist rhetorical studies.
In this chapter, I explain both how I chose the texts of my study and the methodology behind my research, which draws on two primary methodological approaches: bibliography and feminist rhetorical studies. To begin, I describe my method of selecting texts for my enumerative bibliography of women-authored cookery books. In the next section, I provide a brief explanation of bibliography and how it informs my work. In the third section, I explore the ways feminist rhetorical studies influence my research and the recent scholarship on eighteenth-century cookery books. The past thirty years has seen a reclamation of cookery books as subjects of interest, but the scholarship surrounding it has stayed mostly within the rhetorical analysis of the recipes and texts.
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This study builds off the work of these feminist scholars, and positions the study of cookery books in the field of book history.
Selection of Texts
In addition to images on film, online technology has made possible databases that provide images of older texts. To ensure thoroughness in my own study, I used both print and electronic collections to compile a list of cookbooks written by women during the time period 1745-1800. I focused primarily on this time period because of the dramatic increase, beginning around 1750, of cookbooks written by women. I chose to end my list at the century mark because the nineteenth century is often regarded as the beginning of the modern publishing industry, with dramatic changes in production and prices of books.
In order to perform my research, I relied on the work of scholars before me who have preserved and catalogued texts from this time period.
To locate title pages I could view electronically, I searched the Eighteenth
Century Collections Online (ECCO) database. I looked for the terms cook, cookery, cook’s, receipt, and housewife in the title field.25 I chose these terms because my earlier research indicated a tendency for at least one of these words to appear in titles of cookbooks during this time period. To ensure the database returned a comprehensive set of results, I limited the period of publication to 1700-1800 but also included items with no publication date attached to their data. I did not limit the search to a specific subject area as I wanted to ensure the searches would return as many records as possible.
25 Search string: cook OR cookery OR cook’s OR receipt OR housewife 14
The search in ECCO returned 728 records. I combed through the records and discarded returns that fell outside my parameters, for example, reports written on Sir
James Cook’s travels, cookbooks written by men, and cookbooks written outside of my specified time period. I also excluded cookbooks published outside of England, meaning
I left out any published in Ireland, Scotland, or America. I was left with thirty cookbooks written by women and first published during this time period.
With this list in hand, I then turned to Virginia Maclean’s seminal work A Short- title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books published in the English Tongue 1701-
1800 (1981). I compared Maclean’s findings to my own and added sixteen more cookbooks. I did not include the entries I found in Maclean’s book that were based only on advertisements with no extant physical copy of the text known to have existed. After cross-referencing ECCO and Maclean, I identified forty-five cookbooks authored by women and first published during the period between 1745 and 1800 (see Appendix). As
I looked through the records, I recorded the publishing year, publishing city, publishing agent, author, title, and any edition notes. For title page information of those texts not available on ECCO, I relied on Maclean’s transcription of title pages.
This project relies on the copyright information provided on the title pages of the individual cookbook, but confirms claims that books were entered into the Stationers’
Company records when possible. The registers of the Stationers’ Company provide the best evidence of copyright ownership, but access to those records for scholars outside of the United Kingdom is limited. According to the United Kingdom’s National Archives
15 website, no index for entries from 1710 to 1842 exists. To verify copyright registration with the Stationers’ Company, the date of publication must be known to find the entry in the original registers.26 Microfilms of the records at libraries in the United Kingdom and the United States make possible verification of copyright registration despite researchers not having access to the original Company records.
Book History Practices
In her study of the publication history of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782),
Catherine M. Parisian reveals how inextricably linked the fields of bibliography and book history are. Although Burney and Cecilia have been examined by literary critics, Parisian argues that the plethora of extant records, including a large portion of the manuscript, page proofs, copyright records, and Burney’s own writings about the novel, provides book historians an opportunity to use bibliographical methods in order to better understand the publishing industry and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.27 Parisian’s research resides at the intersection of book history, bibliography, and literary criticism, an intersection acknowledged by G. Thomas Tanselle in his look at
26 See “Copyright records of the Stationer’s Hall,” The National Archives, accessed March 10, 2017, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research- guides/copyright-records-stationers-hall/. 27 Catherine M. Parisian, “Intersections in Book History, Bibliography, and Literary Interpretations: Three Episodes in the Publication History of Frances Burney’s Cecilia,” in Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650- 1800, ed. Laura L. Runge and Pat Rogers (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 135. 16 the history of bibliographical study: “Indeed,” he states, “the history of all scholarship that involves the use of books is ultimately tied to the history of books.”28
My study on copyright practices of women cookbook writers during a time in which women had little right to property is informed by this definition of book history as a discipline concerned with all aspects of material texts: creation, circulation, and reception. Copyright records are a valuable resource to book history scholarship, as they provide valuable information about books and publishing practices. In his call for bibliographers to consider copyright records, Tanselle offers some ways that the records can be used as a secondary source. For example, he suggests that copyright registers can help establish publication dates, supply publication details, and help locate anonymous or pseudonymous works.29 Although these are not the original reason copyright registers were established, the information contained within can help verify and expand book history research.
In my own study, I use copyright registers to verify several facts about the author: their existence, their claims about copyright, and their complete ownership of the text.
These women were not professional authors or writers and little record of their lives survives outside of their books. In studying their copyright practices, I hope to find out more about how the book industry and women interacted with one another. Additionally, any confirmation of copyright registration will verify the author is, first, a woman, and
28 G. Thomas Tanselle, "Bibliographical History as a Field of Study," Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 36. 29 G. Thomas Tanselle, "Copyright Records and the Bibliographer," Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 81. 17 second, is real. Reclaiming women from history requires not only uncovering their works, but also how they produced their works.
Unlike many bibliographical studies, an examination of the text is not a part of the scope. In bibliographic studies that focus on the text of the work, limits are placed on researchers by the physical books. To definitively make a claim, a researcher gathers and compares multiple copies of each edition. This standard practice helps bibliographers make decisions about which text of a novel should be considered the copy text, or the particular text that reflects the final authority of the author.30 In contrast to this practice, the portion of the book germane to this study, the title page, is not considered a part of the book over which the author had much influence in the eighteenth century. To the bibliographer, as R. B. McKerrow states, title pages are “not as part of the work to which it is prefixed, or as a production of its author, but rather as an explanatory label affixed to the book by the printer or publisher.”31 As such, the title page reflects the book history aspect of the work. It cannot be looked to for authorial intent, but rather it speaks to the social and economic conditions of the contemporary book industry in which it was produced. The title page was composed after the book was purchased or an agreement made for its publication, and it was written in order to advertise and sell the work to the reader. Consequently, the title page of cookbooks should be viewed as reflecting the publisher’s intent, whether the publisher is the author or another agent. That is, title pages
30 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2012), 338. 31 As quoted by Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth- Century Novel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 61. 18 more often reflect the publisher’s intention, and a study focused on title pages is “a study of publishing’s practices and desires.”32 It is through the title page that the publisher could speak directly to the reader.
For scholars researching copyright agreements between publishers and authors, title pages also function as a source of evidence. For bibliographic scholars of eighteenth- century texts, the title page is central to the study of a book as it was, according to Janine
Barchas, “the sole required element in a text’s packaging.”33 Publishers also employed frontispieces, illustrations, and half-title pages in order to entice readers to purchase books, but unlike title pages, which were standard to all books, these paratexts were not standard. Title pages summarize the book, or advertise the contents within, in order to persuade the reader to purchase the book. They also serve as records of who paid for the publication, who printed the text, and who sold it. It is generally accepted by publishing historians that those who pay for the printing process are identified with the term printed for, those who printed the text are identified with printed by, and those who sold the text are identified with sold by.
In an effort to entice the eighteenth-century reader, publishers often depended on verbose titles that enumerated the beneficial knowledge contained within the text. It is difficult to know how much input authors had over these titles. For novels, the title and other title page information may have been included in the fair copy, or the final corrected draft before publication, but the details of the typeface, font size, and
32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 19 decoration were set by the compositor.34 The title pages of cookbooks most likely also followed this standard publishing practice of allowing the compositor the final decision over aesthetics.
In addition to the lack of authorial control over the title page, as with the rest of the text, the possibility of compositor and transcription errors mean title pages are not always accurate and should be verified when possible. They are secondary sources put together by compositors who were working from handwritten texts. Williams and Abbott cite multiple examples of title page errors including errors in dates and a misleading title page on the first edition of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728), which claimed that the poem was an earlier reprint of a Dublin edition.35 However, for the most part, title pages do reflect accurate information. After all, since title pages also functioned as advertisements and helped sell the book to the public, it was in the publisher’s best interest that they be error-free.
Feminist Rhetorical Practices
By necessity, the study of early female writers and their works is interdisciplinary.
This intersectional approach lends itself to a more complex analysis such as found in feminist rhetorical studies. Feminist rhetorical studies does not merely recover the words of women from obscurity; rather, it also entails cross-disciplinary methodological concepts: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and
34 Gaskell, A New Introduction, 52. 35 William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 16. 20 globalization.36 Feminist rhetorical study is not defined by the gender of the subject or the researcher, but by the interaction and cooperation of different views in order to gain a better understanding of the perspectives put forth by the subject.
The basis of this study is a critical imagining—an opportunity to rethink and reexamine people, practices, or genres who have gone unnoticed or have been overlooked37—of eighteenth-century women cookbook authors. The popularity of cookery books is substantiated by their multiple printings, but this written work produced by and for women has long been ignored by those authoring the history. Due to their domestic nature, early feminist scholars did not want to perpetuate the idea that a woman belongs in the kitchen, so research centered on works of a more literary nature. More recent feminist scholars, however, have embraced the diversity of women’s experience and the necessity to reclaim all women’s work from history.
As a result of this reclamation, the past forty years have seen an enthusiasm in performing textual analysis of cookbooks and domestic manuscripts. Using these works scholars have been able to study women who were not only of the upper class but who were also members of the working class. This has provided a broader understanding of women’s roles within their culture and has expanded our understanding of society at the time. These studies reveal that women were involved economically and politically, and
36 Patricia Bizzell, foreword to Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), x-xi. 37 Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch, eds., Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72. 21 their choices in food and dishes often served as code for their beliefs.38 However, little work has been done about how these female cookbook authors came to be published.
These women took the domestic manuscript out of the home and into the marketplace resulting in a feminization of the genre. Although they were not the first women to publish cookbooks, their collective work and market success changed the face of who was considered to be an authority of domestic knowledge. To fully understand how these women published their books, a comprehensive examination would incorporate the many stages of textual production, including advertising, sales campaigns, and distribution. However, any reclamation project must start at the beginning, and by identifying these forty-five texts, I begin the work of incorporating these women more fully into our understanding of the eighteenth century.
Taken as a whole, my list of women authors appears to provide no discernable pattern in their copyright decisions. However, dividing the list by the cities in which they were first published revealed trends in how these women published their work. The majority of cookbooks, thirty-eight of the forty-five, were first published in London. Four were published in Newcastle, two in Leeds, and one each in Doncaster and Manchester.
The choices these women made about financing and protecting their work is found in the copyright information. Those who sold their right to a publisher were not required to
38 See Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Past & Present 198, no. 1 (2008): 71-109 and Gilly Lehmann, “Politics in the Kitchen,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 2 (1999): 71-83. 22 finance the printing. The women who remained in control of their work had to find a way to finance and protect their investment in order to succeed.
In the following two chapters, I establish a frame of reference for understanding how these women were affected by their society (Chapter Three), and then analyze the copyright practices of these authors using that frame of reference (Chapter Four). In absence of biographical information about the authors, it is necessary to situate these women in their own time. Doing so helps to ensure that we, as researchers, resist imposing an ahistorical motivation to these women. Despite their accomplishments, we must be careful in attributing a feminist ambition to their lives. In analyzing their choices about copyright, we must rely on the data at hand and our historical understanding of their circumstances.
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CHAPTER III
WOMEN IN CONTEXT
In James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, the author recounts a dinner conversation in 1778 in which the great philosopher commented on Hannah Glasse’s popular cookery book, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Simple (1747). Johnson defended Glasse’s authorship and refuted the claim that her book had actually been written by a man, Dr. Hill, not because Johnson believed in her ability, but because of an error in the text referring to saltpetre and salprunella as two different substances. No learned man would ever make such a mistake, he believed. The approach women took towards cookery was complex because they did not understand the nature of ingredients.
Without this knowledge, any book of cookery written by a woman would be inferior to what a man could produce. “Women,” Johnson concluded, “can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of [c]ookery.”39
Johnson’s conclusion stems from his observation that women writers lacked the ability to approach cooking from the perspective of a philosopher. In order to provide the best ingredients, methods, and recipes, the book, he believed, should be written in a philosophic manner with all of the components of a meal reduced to their essential nature. What Johnson does not acknowledge, however, is that women cookbook authors
39 James Boswell and Edmond Malone, The Life of Samuel Johnson . . . , (London: J. Sharpe, 1830), 415. https://books.google.com/books?id=VbtcAAAAcAAJ&
24 were not writing to impress learned scholars or men. They were writing for other women.
Johnson’s desire for a cookbook grounded in philosophy ignored the pragmatic viewpoints these women showed in their cookbooks. Most were not interested in the metaphysics of the subject but in accurately relaying their practical experiences to a paying audience.
As Johnson’s dismissal of Glasse’s popular book demonstrates, women were not only restricted by the law but also by community expectations. Johnson dismissed
Glasse’s years of experience in running a household because she was not educated in a classical manner. Rather, her education came from personal experience of performing household tasks. Similar to her ability to provide for a household, Glasse would supply a new way to instruct women on the art of cookery. Changes during the eighteenth century created a new consumer-driven market demanding practical advice. Women cookbook authors, calling upon their own experience and knowledge, provided the consumer with clear writing about domestic subjects. Following Glasse’s success, books such as
Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (c.1765), Ann Peckham’s The Complete
English Cook (1771), and Eliza Melroe’s An Economical, and New Method of Cookery
(1798) satisfied the reading public’s demand for household guides. In doing so, these women were able to impact the cultural conversation to a point where even the great philosopher Samuel Johnson felt obligated to weigh in on a book written to teach ladies how to prepare dishes.
25
How did these women come to dominate what had previously been a male- authored genre? I claim that the rising role of women as consumers changed the market demand of published cookbooks. What follows is an examination of the changes that occurred in English society throughout the eighteenth century, particularly in regards to women. In the first section, I review the changes in women’s roles and in expectations of their behavior. The shift from an agricultural economic model toward a more market- based industrialized system affected how women were perceived as citizens and as part of the economy. This change also appears in the cookery books written by and for women. As upper-class women began to assume the part of consumer, new positions for women of the middle classes emerged. Although women’s places in society may have expanded, the legal restrictions on them remained. The second section will explore the social and legal limitations women faced and how they maneuvered within those strictures. In the third section, I argue that despite the overarching denial of legal equality the legal formation of copyright provided some women a way to act as independent agents. In the summation of the third section I provide a contextualization for my bibliographic study of copyright practices of eighteenth-century women cookbook authors.
Expansion of Women’s Roles within the Economy
Although women were more often seen as consumers rather than producers in the changing economic system of the eighteenth century, there is no doubt that these changes had a profound effect on the opportunities available to them. As the English economy
26 moved toward industrialization, a disruption in the clear delineation of class divisions occurred. In the first half of the eighteenth century, there was a shift in income benefiting those in the middling-classes.40 One result was that more people than ever before found they now had disposable income to spend on luxuries. In particular, women began to shop for commodities previously unattainable to them. In her study on the rise of women as consumers, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace notes that shopping as a concept began with the desire to acquire tea, sugar and coffee, luxuries not found in regular markets but rather in specialty shops. These special trips became informally known as shopping. It also became an activity women could do together. As the purchase of these items became more habitual and common, the suggestion of moral opposition to luxury lessened. Thus, consumption of goods and commodities, and time spent selecting and purchasing them, became an acceptable activity for the eighteenth-century women of the middling- and upper-classes.41
Furthermore, the new demand for fashion, decor, and housewares eroded divisions between the upper and middle classes. Those in the middle class and the burgeoning business class could acquire items of fashion in a manner reminiscent of the landed aristocracy and gentry. In the same way that consumables previously relegated to the upper classes—such as sugar, coffee, and tea—came to be within reach of the middle class, luxury items such as china, carriages, and furniture also no longer belonged only to
40 L. D. Schwarz, "The Standard of Living in the Long Run: London, 1700-1860," The Economic History Review, New Series, 38, no. 1 (1985): 29-30. doi:10.2307/2596642. 41 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 76-7. 27 the upper class. As the homes of the middle classes began to reflect those of the upper classes, the need to employ servants to maintain these households grew.
Along with upper-class aspirations came a desire not only to purchase their objects and fashions, but to live like the upper class, that is, like a leisured class. By the mid- eighteenth century, women of the upper classes were no longer expected to take a hands- on approach to household duties. Instead, those who could afford servants were encouraged to pass off the drudgery of housework while still overseeing the household accounts and general management. As Porter notes, the “domestic situation changed . . . .
Lavishing too much time on household management, a magazine ambiguously warned in the 1740s, might win a lady ‘the reputation of a notable housewife, but not of a woman of fine taste.’”42 Women of the upper class were expected to be consummate hostesses, displaying refinement and grace in their actions and taste in their household articles. For women in the aspirational middle class, hiring servants also allowed them to live a more leisured life.
Although many people now felt the benefits of a broader economic system, not all citizenry benefited from the growth in capital markets. The shift in income helped elevate the living standards of the middle classes to reflect the comfort and leisure found in the upper class, but those in the lower classes saw no gain in disposable income. They did see an increase in opportunities for employment, however. As middle-class women were aspiring to the luxuries of upper-class life, women from rural areas were given new
42 Ibid., 29. 28 opportunities in the urban centers. The major employment area for single women in
London during the eighteenth century was in domestic service.43 While presenting single women some sort of choice in situation and economic independence,44 domestic service also offered the larger London population from which to find a husband and the opportunity to learn new crafts, like needlework or cookery. In learning new skills, a young woman could procure a place of her choosing.
In answer to the professionalization of domestic work, cookbooks of the eighteenth century began to reflect the changing roles of women across all classes of society.
Cookbooks began to address women and appeal to their roles as ladies, wives, mothers, housekeepers, and domestic servants. Manuals such as the anonymously authored The
House-keeper’s Guide, in the Prudent Management of their Affairs (1706) and The
Compleat Servant Maid: or, The Young Maidens Tutor (c. 1702) advised those in domestic service on how to be good servants and perform accurate and honest market transactions. The Housekeeper’s Guide clearly delineates roles within the household. For example, the author provides chapters on the duty of the husband toward his wife, the wife toward her husband, the parents toward the children, and the servants toward their masters. Protecting the master’s money was a good characteristic in a servant, and servants were to aspire to be good and honest even when their masters were not around to
43 Leonard Schwarz, “English Servants and Their Employers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Economic History Review, vol. 52, no. 2, (May 1999): 236- 256. 44 D. A. Kent, “Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London,” History Workshop, no. 28 (1989): 115. 29 watch them. For the women who were hired to run the household, lessons in how to select good produce and meat was found in manuals like the anonymous The
Accomplish’d Female Instructor (1704) or The Compleat English Family Companion
(1769). While the first part of The Accomplish’d Female Instructor teaches the reader about the manners of a lady, the second half devotes itself to more practical matters, such as pickling and stain removal. The chapter on marketing promises to tell how to choose good provisions and how not to be imposed upon.
Although some books focused on training servants, others focused on clarifying proper upper-class customs surrounding meals and food. Women of the middle and upper classes could purchase books demonstrating royal fare such as the anonymously authored
A Modern Bill of Fare for Seven (1751) or Patrick Lamb’s Royal Cookery: or, The
Complete Court-cook (1710). Both of these manuals were meant to demystify the meals of the aristocracy. Lamb, himself a professional cook, provides recipes in a celebration of
English court custom and offers some recipes in both the English and the French manner.
In sharp contrast to Lamb’s culinary neutrality, A Modern Bill of Fare for Seven embraces the influence of French cuisine on the changing English palate. Although it provides no recipes in its short eight pages, it inventories a typical feast held by the nobility. In the author’s attempt to demonstrate the effect the French have had over
English cooking, the pamphlet lists the choice of dishes of the nobility for all readers, including domestic workers and ladies of the house, who are interested in knowing such things. Nevertheless, the titillating and amusing peeks into the appetites of the royals
30
Lamb and his anonymous colleague provided did not provide clear and easy-to- understand instructions for preparation of dishes. Not finding help within the pages of these books, women may have begun to organize and publish their recipes derived from their years of experience in running a household.
In challenging the trend in cookbooks being focused on royalty eating, some women’s domestic service expertise proved to be a useful commodity. Educating the new class of servants transformed into a business opportunity, with cookery schools opening up throughout the cities. Additionally, a dramatic increase in cookbooks and domestic manuals written by women begins in the middle of the eighteenth century. Women who had served as housekeepers for most of their careers found an opportunity to financially benefit from sharing their knowledge with those who needed it. The skills and expertise which had previously passed privately between small groups of women in manuscripts, household journals, letters, and face-to-face teaching now became commodified. Women like Sarah Martin and Elizabeth Raffald, both experienced housekeepers, and Ann Cook, a teacher of cookery, called upon their skills to move into a new role as authors of published texts.
Women and Property
Much as the class system evolved, so too did ideas of property transform during the eighteenth century. According to Susan Staves, property evolved from an emphasis on a valued object, such as land (real property) and silver (moveable property), and expanded into a general description of having the right, or ownership, to exchange the
31 object for something else of value.45 That is, property became more about the possible exchange value, rather than about the natural value of an item. Earlier laws about property focused on the nature of the item and restricted its use for the common good, but emerging ideas about property meant individuals began to take control over how their property could be used to profit themselves.
Ironically, even though women had limited access to property, it played a large part in their lives. The strict legal restrictions on their ability to own and interact with property meant men controlled women’s owning, buying, and inheriting land and goods.
Simply put, the legal status of a woman and her power to control property in eighteenth- century England depended on her marital status. Upon marriage, a woman lost her individual legal identity and became a part of her husband’s. Under strict adherence with the law, married women were unable to sign contracts or own property, a practice known as femme covert. These restrictions meant women could not control property in the same ways as men.
Of course, the practice of coverture and its implications on a woman’s right to property affected other aspects of a woman’s life during the eighteenth century. For those in the upper classes, for example, the marriage contract included an obligation of the husband to provide payment to his wife for her maintenance, known as pin money.
Staves, in her examination of married women and property at this time, addresses the legal complications of the tradition of pin money under coverture. If a married women
45 Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 147. 32 purchased items other than clothing with her pin money, did the items belong to her or her husband? If the husband refused to pay his wife, was she legally entitled to sue him for the arrears of pin money?46 Additionally, the practice of dower, securing one-third of a husband’s real property to his widow in a life estate upon his death, fell out of practice during the eighteenth century. It was replaced by jointure, a guaranteed annuity to the widow for her life, a way to strip widows of their land. Jointure also served as a way to lessen the amount owed to the widow by the heirs. Despite the previous practice of allowing widows to own property, the eighteenth century also saw a restriction of that right.
Changes in the law regarding property for women were challenged in the courts by those who had the fortune and support to do so. Unfortunately, the legal actions of some women over these very questions led to further restrictions on a married woman’s right to property. For example, judges, without a coherent legal definition, interpreted pin money as a contract debt and limited collection of arrears to no more than one year. In addition to this temporal restriction for redress of unpaid pin money, if a woman bought items other than clothes with her pin money, the property may have fallen under coverture and become the husband’s property.47 Although these disagreements over pin money were mostly contained within marriages, the broader societal movement toward jointure often left women with less money than the older dowry system would have afforded her. These debates over the dowry system and pin money, however, remain strictly among those
46 Ibid., 134-6. 47 Ibid. 33 who could afford them to have them. Upper-class women often benefited from their ability to call upon those who knew the law and the protective legal actions of their families. The upper-class women who chose to challenge a legal system they found unfair did so within the conventional confines of the court.
The difference between what is codified and how people live their everyday lives may be in part due to ignorance of the law as written, irrelevance of the law, or repudiation of the law.48 In the case of coverture, however, those in the middle and laboring classes experienced an irrelevance of the law. Without the privilege afforded by family status and money, some women and men had to earn a living in order to prosper.
Traditionally, men of the lower and middle classes expected that a wife would earn enough to cover her expenses.49 However, in contrast to single women, married women were restricted by minimal opportunities for training and apprenticeships, expected housewife and child-rearing duties, and living under coverture.50 These limitations confined married women to work either in a job in which they had been previously trained or in a job that they could conduct close to home.
Women’s interactions with and adherence to the law depended upon the community in which they lived. Factors such as the community’s application of the law, view of a woman’s role in society, and attitudes toward property determined the level of
48 Ibid., 25-6. 49 Kent, “Ubiquitous but Invisible,” 114. 50 Amy Louise Erickson, “Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Continuity and Change, vol. 23, no. 2 (August 2008): 268. 34 participation allowed women.51 One alternative some women in the middle and servant classes discovered was authorship. For those who decided to author a cookbook, writing an expert opinion on domestic services drew upon their experience and enabled them to perform their expected marital duties. On the one hand, then, women writers of cookbooks produced textual property that they could manage and sell; on the other, their ability to own any sort of property was strictly controlled by the laws of England.
Text as Property
Although property rights were limited for women, the attitudes and activity of the city afforded married women of the working and middle classes rights that they would not normally enjoy in more rural settings. Urban married women were allowed to practice as femme sole traders.52 This special class—permitted because of the attitudes of the urban citizenry towards women’s roles, property, and the law—enabled women to operate and participate in business practices. This special class was probably a holdover of customs from previous centuries when women had a larger role in the marketplace as traders and operators. It is unclear how a woman was declared femme sole trader, but she generally had to operate a business different than her husband’s business to achieve this title. If not, she was assumed to work for him. Men also benefited when their wives were femme sole traders as they were not liable for her debts. Women who operated as such were responsible for their own contracts. In addition, these women could bring and
51 Staves, Married, 198. 52 Tim Stretton, “Women, Property and Law,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), “Customary Law”. 35 defend suits and buy and sell goods without their husbands’ permission.53 Put another way, local customs could provide women privileges they were denied under common law.
One of the industries where women both operated as femme sole traders and worked for their husbands is the print industry. Often deemed to have been merely small actors, unwelcome, or prohibited, new research shows women played a larger role than previously imagined in the production, writing, and selling of print. For example, the
Quaker printer, Tace Sowle, inherited her father’s printing business in 1695. She continued to operate it with assistance from her mother, then her husband, and finally a foreman until her own death in 1749.54 Sowle appears to be an extraordinary case, but in fact the expanding print industry is one community that allowed women to operate as femme sole traders as both authors and printers of written works.
Furthermore, changes in the printing industry would also come to affect women’s roles as authors, booksellers, and printers. As the industry grew and public demand for printed material increased, changes to the law affected the practices of print, especially in regard to ownership of the text. The importance of copyright—“the practice of securing marketable rights in texts that are treated as commodities”—rose from the
53 Ibid. 54 Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 35-37. 36 commodification of the book.55 Those who owned the right to the text profited from the sales. Texts, like other types of property, were emerging as valuable assets controlled by an individual.
Not surprisingly, then, this increasing value of text also corresponded with the emergence of the debate over ownership of texts. The modern understanding of copyright developed during the eighteenth century in England out of legal and cultural changes surrounding the bookselling and publishing industries. In 1695 the bill protecting the
Stationers’ Company, the printing guild, lapsed, ending their monopoly over the ownership of copy text. Following the civil wars, monarchical control over the press had begun to weaken. As the two major political parties, the Tories and Whigs, developed in the last part of the seventeenth century, neither wanted to be seen as an impediment to a free press. The failure in 1695 to renew the Printing or Licensing Act was a result of inaction and effectively ended the pre-publication censorship of the seventeenth century.
Prior to this lapse, only members of the Stationers’ Company could secure copyright by formal entry of a work into their registry and payment of a small fee.56 Registration with the Stationers’ Company gave legal standing to sue over plagiarism, guaranteeing legal rights to sole publication of a text. It also guaranteed those who owned this right could do so in perpetuity. Perpetual copyrights served as a property for these guild members. It became a commodity that they benefited from financially and that they could pass down
55 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. 56 Turner, Living by the Pen, 99. 37 to their heirs. After the lapse, however, the guild members feared for their control over the market.
In an effort to regain control, Stationers’ Company members petitioned the government to pass laws concerning publishing. The booksellers approached Parliament twice, once in 1703 and again in 1706, but it was not until the third petition, in 1709, which included a plea from the London printers and papermakers, that a new Act passed and took effect in 1710.57 After over a decade, parliament passed the Act for the
Encouragement of Learning. According to L. Ray Patterson’s seminal work on the history of copyright, this Act in 1710, also known as the Statute of Anne and considered to be the beginning of copyright law, specifically targeting booksellers and was written to prevent monopolies from forming around the book trade in the future.58 The Act began a century of debate about copyright, with authors and booksellers battling in both the legal courts and the court of public opinion. The passage of the Act also served as an end to the unregulated printing following the lapse of the Printing or Licensing Act in 1695.
The Act was written to end the perpetual ownership of and sole right to publish a work through the establishment of time limits. Works currently held under copyright were limited to a protected term of twenty-one years and new texts to a term of fourteen years. If the author of a new text remained living after the original fourteen year term,
57 A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being a Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publisher and Public, 1726-1780 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), 8. 58 L. Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 144. 38 copyright would revert to or remain with the author for another fourteen years.59 Put another way, if the author sold his or her copyright to a publisher, after a term of fourteen years, the author would regain control of the work again if still living. At the expiration of these terms, the work would then be considered free, effectively creating a public domain.60
Benefit to authors came unintentionally from the Act’s allowance of any person being able to acquire the copyright for a work.61 Although authors were still not granted automatic ownership over works they created, or natural copyright, they now had a way to retain more control over the publication of their work. The Act established that copyright of a work could now be gained prior to publication by either registering with the Stationers’ Company or advertising the work.62 Nonetheless, the advantage still remained with the publishing guild as legal rights to challenge plagiarists remained only with those works registered with the Stationers’ Company. Large and powerful publishers counted on their reputations and the threat of legal action against plagiarists, but for smaller publishers registration offered a guaranty of legal rights.
As the protections of the 1710 Act began to expire for new works in 1738, guild members took action to protect their hold over the book trades and reestablish their monopoly. For the next three decades, from 1743 to 1774, they engaged in what would be coined the “Battle of the Booksellers.” Although it might appear strange that members of
59 Raven, “The Book Trades,” 16. 60 Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain,” 69. 61 Patterson, Copyright, 145; Rose, Authors and Owners, 4. 62 Patterson, Copyright, 146. 39 the printing guild would argue for an author’s natural copyright, the members believed the Act implied perpetual copyright. Therefore, if they could establish that authors had natural copyright, then the purchase of said copyright would once again grant them perpetual ownership of a text. The guild members continually pressed parliament to pass bills and gradually built a more restrictive legal understanding of copyright.
In anticipation of their victory in securing an author’s natural copyright, guild members often insisted on purchasing the copyright of a text before agreeing to publish it. If the author held out, the member would often withhold advertisement of the book or generally fail in selling it.63 Poor sales of a first run would entice the author into agreeing to sell his or her copyright to the bookseller, a trend many authors found to be tantamount to blackmail. For example, A. S. Collins, in his work on authorship during the eighteenth century (1928), reports complaints from authors who chose to retain their copyright. He shares an anecdote from John Lindsay, a translator, who, in a 1728 letter to his friend, appealed for help in advertising his work: “Your promoting its sale will be a great obligation to me: for you know the booksellers will not promote any thing which is not their own property.” Similarly, in 1742, Reverend Francis Wise writes of his astonishment at the behavior of the booksellers: “It is incredible what mischief the booksellers are capable of doing to an author, by discountenancing the sale of this book.”
Twenty years later, in 1764, Horace Walpole complains about the booksellers that “if I do not allow them ridiculous profits, [they] will do nothing to promote its sale.” Even at the
63 Patterson, Copyright, 152; Turner, Living by the Pen, 99. 40 end of the century, James Lackington, a bookseller himself, notes: “In general, where authors keep their own copyright they do not succeed . . . . [Authors] should sell their copyright, or be previously well acquainted with the characters of their publishers.”64 As these examples show, authors often felt coerced by the power that booksellers had over their book sales.
Despite the destruction of their monopoly, the booksellers of the eighteenth century maintained a strong hold over the publishing industry—and over authors. After numerous bills and court cases, the battle came to a close in 1774 with the establishment of copyright as an author’s natural right, but with an end to perpetual copyright.65 An individual’s right to own his or her text as a property was established.
Due to the tradition in documentation by the courts, the debate around copyright is understandable to modern legal scholars. The emergence of copyright law is well documented in court cases and legal records, but the developing book industry remains obscure. Unfortunately, the history of the book trades during this time is complicated and incomplete due to a dearth of adequate records and a lack of universal terminology. This gap in the knowledge complicates our understanding of the business as it was practiced.
Contemporary writings about the eighteenth-century book trades commonly refer to the publisher and bookseller. No standard definitions were agreed upon, however, and these
64 Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, 43. 65 Patterson, Copyright, 148; Raven, “The Book Trades,” 17. For a succinct report of the three most influential copyright court cases during the eighteenth century (Tonson v. Collins, Millar v. Taylor, and Donaldson v. Beckett) see Patterson (165-79). 41 terms were sometimes used interchangeably. To further complicate matters, a printer may be someone entirely different from a bookseller or publisher.
James Raven attempts to distinguish these terms in his overview of the eighteenth century book industry. A bookseller could “be a publisher or retailer of books, or a retailer acting as an agent for a wholesale publisher.”66 Thus, the term bookseller functions as an overarching umbrella term for many professions within the book trade. It could be the person who financed a printing, performed the printing, sold the books, or did all three of those actions. A publisher “was sometimes retained to describe those issuing rather than financing publications.”67 For the purposes of this paper, I will use the term bookseller as a general term for a person participating in the manufacture and selling of books, the term publisher when specifically referencing the person or persons financing the publication of the book, and the term author to refer to the creator of the text.
Despite the legal restrictions placed upon them, women were involved in the book trades. As more women began to write and publish books, the legal questions around who owned and profited from the texts related to them. The passage of the 1710 Act established an author’s rights over their text and, although Act referred only to male authors, women working in the publishing industry as femme sole traders also benefited from its creation of authorial rights. In the case of copyright, women were not legally
66 Raven, “The Book Trades,” 15. 67 Ibid. 42 excluded from protection. This stands in direct contrast to the exclusionary nature of laws surrounding other property.
In a time when women had little control over their assets, the Act gave women a right to ownership over their texts.68 They could choose to sell their copyright outright; they also had a stronger basis for negotiating the terms during the process. Women who before did not know or understand the law could easily grasp the concept of selling their text as a good. Furthermore, the Act provided a support for women from less privileged backgrounds to conduct business with booksellers and publishers. This especially proves true in the case of cookery books where women who worked as housekeepers for the upper-class could turn their experience into a commodity. In other words, authoring a book could turn service work into an advantage.
The law of the land still applied, however, and married women were femme covert. Women wrote, negotiated, and secured publication of their texts, but if she were married, any financial profit legally belonged to their husbands. Technically, the text itself was also the property of the husband. However, in her study of women writers during this period, Cheryl Turner finds that “on the whole, the work of female authors was treated by publishers, the public, and by the authors as their own, to dispose of as profitably as they could and to acknowledge if they chose.”69 Thus, despite occupying a lesser legal status, the women negotiated fair deals with the booksellers. Furthermore, women authors began to dominate genres of writing. The novel, cookbooks, and
68 Turner, Living by the Pen, 99. 69 Ibid., 100. 43 domestic manuals became feminized in their authorship and readership, and the publishers recognized profit to be made. Despite their lack of legal standing, women were receiving equal pay for their work. In her review of copyright payments paid to novelists,
Turner finds no meaningful difference between the amounts paid to men and women.70
And this matters because it demonstrates that booksellers viewed authors not based on their sex, but on their ability to produce a profitable piece. With valuable commodities to sell, in this case their texts, women had options in their publication practices.
In addition to deciding whom to work with, women, like male authors, also had a choice in how to finance the publication of their works. They were pressured by booksellers, as were male authors, to sell their copyright directly. If they chose to retain copyright, they could publish a first edition, and based upon the success of the run negotiate a higher price for subsequent editions. It was the same decision male authors needed to make when negotiating with the booksellers.
In an effort to earn the most, retaining copyright over a text was an author’s best choice. As women from the middle class began to write cookery books, however, the oppressive costs of financing a publication meant not all authors could do so. In much the same way as women authors during the seventeenth century depended upon circles of financial support, some in the eighteenth century also used patronage or subscription to finance their works. Patronage depended on the largesse of a person who admired the work of the author. Confined in the past to those of the aristocracy, patronage could now
70 Ibid., 114. 44 be found throughout all levels of society. An admirer may send money or provide lodging for an author.71 The downside to patronage arises from the expectation of the patron. An author may find he or she is bound by what the patron desires, rather than what he or she would like to produce. It is difficult to imagine that many cookery books were funded by patronage as most of these relationships seem to occur strictly within the creative genres.
To help defray the cost of publication, some cookery book authors turned to the reading public for help. Subscription, the “procuring of sufficient advance sales of copies to fund a projected work,”72 replaced the patronage system and its limited number of financiers with the idea that any citizen could help fund a work they wanted to see published by contributing a small amount to the author. Donors, or subscribers, could be found by advertising in newspapers, in public, and in social circles. Funding a publication by subscription could financially benefit authors since they had a better chance of retaining the copyright of their text through this means. On the other hand, the work of finding subscribers could be substantial and very time consuming. The act of selling a work to others for money led some women creative authors such as Francis Burney to feel that subscription commercialized their work, but who saw no other way to afford the printing costs.73 Since cookery books were written to sell, it seems unlikely this fear of commercialization would have been a complaint of those authors.
71 Ibid., 104. 72 Ibid., 109. 73 Ibid., 111. 45
For some of these women authors, Samuel Johnson’s observation that women could not produce a good cookery book would have been ludicrous. While Johnson contemplated the essential nature of ingredients and ate elaborate dinners, women were in the kitchens and sculleries actually preparing food. For a few of these culinary workers, the changes in England during the eighteenth century proved to be advantageous. The knowledge from their work in upper-class households provided women cookbook authors a skill set they could monetize in another way.
The work of cookbook authors has not always been recognized as important or feminist in nature by researchers. However, these early women cookbook authors not only assumed authority over household kitchens from male professional cooks, but they also assumed control over a genre of books within a male-dominated industry. The commercialization of books forced publishers and booksellers to look beyond the gender of the author in order to find what would sell. Although most of the books did not see more than one printing, a few—Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (1747), Susannah
Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (c.1765), and Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced
English Housekeeper (1769)—were printed well into the next century, becoming a part of and influencing people’s lives for generations.
46
CHAPTER IV
FINDINGS
To better understand how women during the eighteenth century interacted with the laws surrounding property, namely coverture and copyright, I performed a bibliographic study of the forty-five cookbooks authored by women first published between 1745 and 1800. Any attempt by these authors to retain copyright under their control or protect their work in some way provides insight into how women participated in the economy and the publishing industry during this time. For a married woman, coverture prevented her from owning or controlling property, unless she operated as a femme sole trader. To operate under that special status, a woman needed to work in a business separate from her husband and live in a community that allowed woman to operate a business. Thus, three factors outside of the law that impacted a women’s ability to control property during this time—marital status, class standing, and community practices—may have also affected how a woman would participate with the publishing industry.
In this chapter, I examine the publishing and copyright practices of my list of female cookbook authors using the factors above to analyze how and why these women controlled their intellectual property. In the first section, I focus on the author herself and how she is visually represented on the title page of her book. Where on the page is her name positioned? Is her name highlighted or made apparent in any way? Is her role of
47 author used as a selling point for the book? In the second section, I attempt to discern the marital status of these authors. Is the author’s marriage status made apparent? Is her first name included? The representation of the author’s name on the title page may reflect her class standing and her marriage status, two important indicators of what privileges a woman had during the eighteenth century. In the third section, I discuss where these women are from in England. Does location matter when publishing and retaining control over one’s textual property? Finally, I discuss copyright ownership of both publisher and author. Did any of these women retain legal copyright over their work? Is there a discernable pattern in the decision of retaining copyright? If so, what can that tell us about women and the publishing industry? Are there connections between marital status and retention of copyright? By using the factors that allow a woman to operate as a femme sole trader, I hope to better understand how these women treated and controlled their intellectual property.
The Author on the Page
The title pages of the books where the author retained control over the copyright are more likely to draw attention to the author’s name than the title pages of the books where the publisher purchased the copyright. Of the twenty-seven first editions available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online, twenty-five have viewable title pages. On the title pages of these twenty-five, author bylines typically appear after the title of the book, in a space demarcated by lines above and under the author section. For the majority of the twenty-five books, the standard of author presentation is followed with the author not
48 given priority on the title page. In each case where the author’s name is given prominence or special consideration, the author has retained control over their copyright. Of course, industry practices of the time period left the details of the title page—typeface, font size, and decoration—to be set by the compositor, and it is unknown how much input authors had over the design of the title pages. Still, differences between the title pages of those authors who retained control over copyright and those who did not may reveal some authorial influence over the design.
In examining the author’s byline on these books, we can see that authors who retained control over their copyright may have had input about the title pages of their books. The impact on the title page is best demonstrated by Hannah Glasse’s two books—The Servant’s Directory, or House-keeper’s Companion (c. 1760) and The
Complete Confectioner (c. 1760). Glasse retained copyright for The Servant’s Directory, but her publisher owned The Complete Confectioner. These books were published after her ground-breaking publication The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) making Glasse’s name on these books a known commodity. Both books follow the standard delineated author block, but with some noticeable differences. On the Glasse owned The Servant’s Directory, her author block consists of two lines: her name and that she is the author of The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. Beneath this is a double line that gives greater visual weight to what came before it. On the other hand, the publisher owned The Complete Confectioner combines Glasse’s name and her author status into one line, buried after the extended title of the book and with the title of her
49 previous work shortened. Although the font of the author line is slightly larger than the other type around it, the byline is given little space and is not predominant when first looking at The Complete Confectioner. The difference between these two books, which came out around the same time and by the same author, shows that an author who retained their copyright may have had influence over the title page of their book.
In contrast to drawing attention to their names with decorative elements, some authors may have experimented with a minimalist title page. In sharp contrast to the lengthy and verbose title tradition, two author-owned books—Elizabeth Marshall’s The
Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery (1777) and Susanna, Elizabeth, and Mary
Kellet’s A Complete Collection of Cookery Receipts (1780)—stand out for their simplicity and abundant white space. Both title pages have a short title, the author block, and the publisher information, with the only decoration on the page being the lines above and below the author information which sets it off from the rest of the text. Simplified title pages do not appear in any of the publisher-owned cookbooks from this time.
Authors who retained copyright over their works, or printers who worked with these authors, may have felt more freedom and power to break from tradition with their title pages.
The use of different fonts on title pages also helped to draw attention to author names. For all of the authors, both those who retained their copyright and those who sold, the most common presentation of an author’s name is in all uppercase letters. For four of the authors—Amelia Chambers, Mary Holland, Eliza Melroe, and Margaret Taylor—the
50 name is italicized. Interestingly, only Eliza Melroe owned the copyright to her book, the other three were printed for the respective publishers. In one case, the typeface for the author’s name is unlike any of the other examples. Sarah Martin’s author-published The
New Experienced English-housekeeper (1795) presents her name in script. The use of a script font sets her book apart from others, draws attention to her name, and lends her an air of elegance and refinement. Through the use of different fonts, the designer of the title page could draw attention to the author’s name.
Rather, what seems more important than the author’s name is conveying the experience and practice of the author to the reader. On Elizabeth Raffald’s title page for
The Experienced English House-keeper (1769) the word practice in her extended title is in larger type than her name. Above Elizabeth Moxon’s name on her English
Housewifery (1749) title page, the words practice and experience are italicized to emphasize the result from her thirty years of work. Over and over again, these authors lay out their time in service and experience in domestic management as selling points. For these women authors, their knowledge and experience is more important to the reader than their names.
Ultimately, readers in the late eighteenth century were looking for recipes from women who could guarantee their skill in domestic work. The title pages of late eighteenth-century cookbooks demonstrate that overall readers were not buying books based on the author’s name, but rather on what was offered inside and how much authority and experience the author could claim. For those women who did retain control
51 over their work, there may have been an opportunity to experiment with the presentation of the title page, but in this traditional and domestic genre not many authors or printers chose to do so.
The Author’s Identity
The manner in which the names of authors appear on the title page of eighteenth century cookery books may serve a rhetorical purpose, but it does not explicitly assist in further understanding of how these women operated in the publishing industry. To understand this, it may prove helpful to look at how these authors were addressed on the title pages of their books. Using titles and names, we can attempt to discern social standing, class status, and, perhaps, marital status. By knowing this information about our authors, we may begin to draw conclusions about the role these predominantly middle- class women played within the publishing industry.
Despite their growing literacy rates and increasing economic consumption, women were not taken as serious readers or authors. At the beginning of the century, professional women writers, writers who made their livings selling their work, were often equated to prostitutes, and in an effort to protect their social standing and reputation, some authors published under a pseudonym. The perception of the professional writer and professional female writer changed slowly over the century, but women were still to be relegated to non-serious works and often suspect genres like romances and novels, not serious genres like history and philosophy.
52
One of these non-serious genres, but not suspect like novels or romances, was that of the domestic manual and conduct book, which, as the century progressed, became more and more feminized. In the last half of the century, forty-five cookbooks authored by women were published in England. Of the forty-five books, twenty-six are published under a first and last name. Of the remaining twenty, sixteen use the title Mrs., with two of the sixteen choosing to have only their last name after the title, and four use pseudonyms. The four pseudonyms all occur within the first ten years of the list, and the final book published under a pseudonym is The Ladies Companion (c. 1756) by a
Gentlewoman. Despite being unable to verify the sex of the author, I have included these four books in my study because the pseudonyms used—a Gentlewoman, a Lady, and
Madam Johnson—are female. By the end of the century, no female cookbook author was going to unusual means to protect her identity.
Regardless of whether it was the author’s or publisher’s decision to conceal the identity of the author, the pseudonyms chosen for these four books not only reflect femininity, but they also reveal class consciousness. Two of the books, The Compleat
Family Companion (1753) and The Ladies Companion (c. 1756), are authored by “a
Gentlewoman.” Although not a title associated with an official rank, gentlewoman signifies high social status. A gentlewoman during the eighteenth century would be someone from a good family, a person of good breeding, familiar with the trappings and tastes of the nobility, even if she were not nobility herself. Thus, as a pseudonym for a
53 cookbook, gentlewoman appeals to both readers of the upper class and readers who aspire to the upper class.
Similarly, The Art of Cookery (1747) was first released with the author simply known as a Lady. “Lady,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, denoted the female head of the house, who would have been in charge of the servants.74
Eventually, the Lady of The Art of Cookery revealed herself on the title page of the fourth edition (1751) of her book to be Hannah Glasse (c. 1708-1770), one of the most famous cookery book authors of the latter eighteenth century.75 According to Glasse’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, although from a respectable family on her father’s side, she was one of three children born to her father’s mistress, not his wife. In
1724, at the age of sixteen, she married John Glasse, an estate steward to the earl and countess of Donegal.76 The Glasses’ proximity to nobility would have exposed Hannah to the practices of the noble classes. Although she could not claim the rank of Lady in her own life, her publishing under this title was a shrewd attempt to distinguish her book from others. Her book, in claiming authorship by a Lady, signaled its appropriateness for women of the noble class and those who wished to live in a similar manner. The prevalence of using these titles as a pseudonym is difficult to ascertain. Modern
74 “lady, n.” OED Online, March 2017, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/105011?rskey=XKA8zy&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed May 29, 2017). 75 Virginia Maclean, A Short-title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue, 1701-1800, (London: Prospect Books, 1981), 60. 76 A. H. T. Robb-Smith, “Glasse, Hannah (bap. 1708, d. 1770),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. David Cannadine, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10804 (accessed April 14, 2017). 54 electronic databases often replace pseudonyms with known author names in their searchable records. For example, a quick search of Eighteenth Century Collections
Online, returns only four results for anything authored by “a Lady” or “a gentlewoman,” with Glasse’s The Art of Cookery not included in the results.
Those who could not claim kinship with the upper-classes used other forms of address in their pseudonyms. One such author chose to be addressed as Madam Johnson.
Her Madam Johnson’s Present (1755) offers no additional clue as to the identity of the author. In her examination of terms used to address women, Amy Louise Erickson notes that in the eighteenth century “madam” was mostly used outside of London to denote someone of social standing. The Oxford English Dictionary specifically denotes it as the title used by servants to address their mistress.77 The author’s use of Madam speaks to her authority over servants and may have appealed to readers.
To appeal to the reader and establish their authority as an author, these women presented themselves with a focus on their experiences, not their marital status. Although our modern use of the title Mrs. implies a woman is married, the use of that particular title by fifteen of the authors leaves us with no further knowledge about their marital status. In her examination of the history of Mrs. as a title, Erickson finds that until the nineteenth century there was no connection between use of the title and marital status.
Rather, Mrs. denoted an economic status equivalent to that of Mr. Women who used Mrs.
77 “madam, n.” OED Online, March 2017, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/112007?rskey=oeUkwj&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed May 29, 2017). 55 often had access to large amounts of capital, whether land, social, or commercial.78 The title was not tied to marital status, but to the woman herself. By using Mrs., these women cookbook authors identify themselves as persons of economic activity and respectability in their own right. Put another way, the use of the title elevates them to a rank of importance in business and society without relying on their marital status.
In addition to economic status, Mrs. also denoted respect. For example, in Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela the housekeeper is known as Mrs. Jervis. Although she does not have commercial or economic capital, she is addressed with a respectable title. In checking the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, only one of the fifteen, Martha
Bradley, has an entry. Despite meriting inclusion, Bradley’s entry is devoid of personal details. Other than her work as a professional cook in Bath, no information about her personal life is provided including her marital status.79 While it seems unlikely that a professional female cook would have access to land or economic capital, perhaps
Bradley’s use of the title comes from her social capital. She may have been from a respected family—she certainly was educated enough to write her book The British
Housewife (c. 1760)—but without additional details of her life, we can only speculate on her use of the title Mrs.
78 Amy Louise Erickson, "Mistresses and Marriage: or, a Short History of the Mrs," in History Workshop Journal, 2014, 14. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbt002 79 Gilly Lehmann. “Bradley, Martha (fl. 1740s–1755),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50433 (accessed April 15, 2017). 56
As the eighteenth century progressed, the author names on women-authored cookbooks reflected a middle-class identity. By the mid-1750s, these writers no longer felt the need to obfuscate their identities or use upper-class titles to describe or sell their work. Rather, most of the women used the standard authorial practice of their first and last name and, sometimes, a title—Mrs.—not associated with class, but with respectability and competence. Additionally, none of these authors refer to themselves as the wife of someone, choosing instead to highlight their own identity. The feminine genre of domestic manuals and conduct books, although part of the less-serious genres during the eighteenth century, allowed middle-class women to author books under their own names in a respectable fashion.
Location
Legal restrictions placed on married women during the eighteenth century prevented them from owning and dealing with property, but community practices and beliefs sometimes allowed women to circumvent the law. The location of publication for these cookbooks shows a sharp divide in whether a woman retained or sold her copyright before publication of the first edition. In general, the forty-five books on the list can be split into two categories: those published within the city of London and those published outside of it. What we can tell from the list is that publishers in London purchased copyrights from women cookbook authors before going to print at nearly double the rate of women who retained their copyright. Outside of London, seven of the eight women owned the copyright of their first editions. Clearly, the women who lived in developing
57 industrial areas—Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, and Doncaster—had a greater chance at retaining control over their intellectual property. The greater likelihood of an author retaining their copyright occurring outside of London may reflect a more lenient and tolerant attitude of those communities towards women owning property.
Although one of the eight women authors outside London sold her copyright for the first edition of her book, she published the next two editions under her name. Ann
Cook’s Professed Cookery (1754) was first printed for J. White.80 White is probably John
White, publisher of the local newspaper, Newcastle Courant.81 Despite having White as publisher for her first edition, Cook published her second edition a year later under her own name.82 This is the sole example on the list of a copyright reverting back to an author after previous publication under a publisher. It is unknown what arrangement
White and Cook had, but Cook’s ability to publish two more editions under her own name suggests some knowledge of the importance of retaining copyright and a willingness by White to enter into some kind of financial agreement with her. Cook authored and brokered a deal with White to print a successful cookbook and then was able to publish two more editions for her own financial benefit.
80 Ibid., 35. 81 Eneas Mackenzie. “Trade and manufactures,” in Historical Account of Newcastle- Upon-Tyne Including the Borough of Gateshead, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Mackenzie and Dent, 1827), 715-730. British History Online, accessed March 15, 2017, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/newcastle-historical-account/pp715-730. 82 Ann Cook, Professed Cookery . . . , 2nd ed., (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1755), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed January 15, 2017). 58
Cook’s deal with White for him to fund the first printing of her cookbook probably resulted from the fact that publishing in the eighteenth century was an expensive project that required access to capital. So how did the women who retained their copyright pay for their first edition’s printing? One answer is found in subscription lists. These supporters crowd-funded the publishing of novels at this time, such as Fanny
Burney’s Camilla, or A Picture of Youth (1796) and Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), and spreading the upfront printing cost to would-be readers would have been a viable option for cookbook authors also. Of the forty-five books, however, only four mention subscription lists. Three—
Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (1747), Susanna, Elizabeth, and Mary Kellet’s A
Complete Collection of Cookery Receipts (1780), and Sarah Martin’s The New
Experienced English-housekeeper (1795)—provide full subscription lists in their books.
Elizabeth Raffald, in the preface to The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), alludes to the hundreds of supporters of her book.
Again, the communities outside of London appear to have been supportive of women publishing their cookbooks. Three of the four subscriber lists included in or referred to in these cookbooks helped fund authors from the newer industrial towns outside of London. As subscriber lists were enrolled by the author, they reveal details about social networks that existed between women. Authors relied on both acquaintances and friends for help with funding their book, but also advertised their search for support and accepted payment from strangers. In two of the subscriber lists included in their
59 cookbooks, the social networks on display reflect both a narrow and wide reach. The
Kellet list provides intimate descriptions of the houses of their supporters in Doncaster.
On the other hand, the Martin list covers an area sixty miles in any direction from
Newcastle and gives city and county level descriptions of subscribers’ locations.
Subscriber lists were one way for women to fund the publication of their cookbooks and reflect the support of the community for these women to become authors.
From financial support to authorial acceptance, community practices affected the way in which women were allowed to own and interact with property during the eighteenth century despite the legal restrictions against married women doing so.
According to my list, it appears that larger industrial communities outside of London were more disposed to accepting women as owners of their own intellectual property. All eight of the women authors from outside of London retained their copyright for their first edition or purchased their copyright back following the first printing. An author residing outside of London strongly suggests that she will retain the copyright over her first edition.
Copyright Ownership
For the purpose of making a profit, selling a copyright was the easiest way to ensure some financial benefit from the work. An author was guaranteed her payment at purchase, without having to depend on whether the book would be successful in the marketplace. Most of the authors on the list, twenty-five of the forty-five, sold their copyrights to a publisher before publication of the first edition. For the remainder of this
60 section, I explore how the copyrights for these cookbooks were sold and protected by the publishers and authors.
Although selling had its benefits—money upfront, no solicitation of subscribers— it also led to the author’s loss of control over the text. For example, Charlotte Mason’s
The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table (1773) was published for
John Walter, a bookseller in London for over forty years.83 After the first edition, Walter released multiple editions with the eighth edition appearing around 1800.84 For his small payment to Mason for her work, Walter benefited for the next twenty-seven years. Not all publishers kept the copyright of a book, instead some used it as a commodity to trade and sell. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769) proved to be a valuable commodity. Upon her death in 1780, Raffald’s copyright was sold to Robert
Baldwin I. Baldwin had worked with Raffald from almost the beginning by selling her book. After he purchased the copyright, it then became a commodity for him to sell.
Thus, after seven editions in eleven years, Baldwin released four more editions by 1786.
After that time, the copyright was sold to A. Millar, W. Law, and R. Cater.85 According to Maclean, the trio published editions of Raffald’s book in 1787, 1788, 1789, 1791, and
1793. In 1794, the copyright reverted to Baldwin only to return again to Millar, Law, and
Cater for editions in 1795 and 1796. The trading carries on, with G. Bancks owning the
83 Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members, (Folkstone, Eng.: Dawson, 1977), 239. 84 Maclean, A Short-title Catalogue, 95. 85 Identities of the publishers are provided if they are listed in Maxted’s The London Book Trades 1775-1800. None of these gentlemen are found in his register. 61
Manchester editions, until H. and G. Mozley publish the last edition of the century in
1800.86 Raffald’s book would continue to be printed in the nineteenth century, but the way copyrights were treated as commodities is apparent from the publisher’s actions prior to 1800. Once the author sold control of the copyright, it became another item publishers could sell.
Similarly to the publishers, authors also used their copyrights as commodities when needed. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) was an immediate best seller and was still being reprinted as late as 1824.87 Glasse maintained her copyright for The Art of Cookery through six editions until sometime in the late
1750s, when she was forced to sell in order to settle her bankruptcy debts from her dressmaking shop.88 In an attempt to capitalize on her earlier work, Glasse released two more books following her bankruptcy, The Compleat Confectioner (c. 1760) and The
Servant’s Directory (1760). On the title page for the first edition of The Servant’s
Directory, Glasse includes a nota bene that “this book is entered in the Hall-book of the
Company of Stationers.”89 By including this fair warning to all on the title page, she shows her understanding about owning the rights to a text and warns plagiarist that she has pursued all legal actions necessary to protect her work. According to the Stationers’
Company’s rolls, Glasse registered The Servant’s Directory on December 12, 1759. The
86 Maclean, A Short-title Catalogue, 123. 87 Quayle, Old Cookbooks, 71. 88 Ibid., 82. 89 Hannah Glasse, The Servant’s Directory . . . , (London: 1760), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed January 14, 2017). 62
Complete Confectioner was sold to a publisher before the first edition was printed and could not be located in the Stationers’ Company’s register. Glasse’s ownership of of The
Art of Cookery turned out to be a commodity to be sold to pay her bankruptcy debt.
Five of the twenty woman authors who owned their copyright registered their texts with the Stationers’ Company, thus protecting their work to the full extent of the law. As one author registered two works, the six works are Hannah Glasse’s The Art of
Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) , Glasse’s The Servant’s Directory (1760),
Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), Ann Peckham’s The
Complete English Cook (1771), Sarah Martin’s The New Experienced English- housekeeper (1795), and Eliza Melroe’s An Economical, and New Method of Cookery
(1798). Following the public debates over copyright law, these five women knew the register was now open to everyone, even women, and that it provided legal protection for an author’s work. These five women entered into a legal contract with the publishing guild.
The relationship between author and publisher could also extend into ownership of the same text. The copyright of a book could be split into shares between an author and a publisher. For example, while Glasse owned The Art of Cookery in its entirety until she sold the copyright, she split the ownership of The Servant’s Directory. She was to have three-quarters of the share of the book, with the remainder belonging to William
63
Johnston.90 Johnston, a bookseller in London, was one of the leading shareholders in the book trade.91 The success of The Art of Cookery made her new text a wanted commodity in the hopes that it would be as successful as her earlier book.
The third London book to be registered with the Stationers’ Company also registered shared ownership between the author and a publisher. Eliza Melroe registered her book, An Economical, and New Method of Cookery (1798), with divided shares between her and a Robert Towns on December 29, 1797.92 Unfortunately, no Robert
Towns appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or in Ian Maxted’s The
London Book Trades 1775-1800. Like the note found in Glasse’s The Servant’s
Directory, at the very bottom of the title page of An Economical, and New Method of
Cookery is one line stating the book is “entered at Stationers’ Hall.”93 Melroe’s book was protected legally, but she did not own it outright.
The remaining three books registered with the Stationers’ Company belong to authors outside of the London area, and each author retains full control over the shares of her book. The best known of these authors is Elizabeth Raffald. After Hannah Glasse,
Elizabeth Raffald was the most popular cookbook writer in England during the eighteenth century. She was a domestic goddess, the Martha Stewart of the eighteenth century, with a confectioner’s shop, a servant’s registry office, and a newspaper. During the height of
90 Robin Myers, Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1554-1920, (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 1985), Part 1, reel 6. 91 Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800, 123. 92 Myers, Records, Part 1, reel 8. 93 Melroe, Eliza. An Economical, and New Method of Cookery . . . , (London, 1798), title page. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed March 8, 2017). 64 her success in Manchester, Raffald released her cookbook The Experienced English
House-keeper (1769), which would make her nationally known. She registered her book with the Stationers’ Company as sole owner on November 1, 1769.94 The remaining two books registered with the Stationers’ Company are Mrs. Sarah Martin’s The New
Experienced English-housekeeper (1795) and Ann Peckham’s The Complete English
Cook (1767). Peckham entered her book with the Stationers’ Company on April 3, 1767, and Martin entered her book on March 5, 1795.95 Although these three women hailed from outside of the major economic center of England—Raffald from Manchester,
Martin from Doncaster, and Peckham from Leeds—all three were aware of the protections afforded to their work by the Statute of Anne and the Stationers’ Company register.
The registration of the texts with the Stationers’ Company reveals that authors outside of the London area were more likely to retain complete ownership over their registered text. Of the six texts registered with the Stationers’ Company, the three printed outside of London were owned in total by their authors. In London, Glasse’s first copyright belonged solely to her, but the other two texts printed within the city split the shares of ownership between the author and a publisher. For the publisher and the author, the copyright of a book could prove to be a valuable financial asset. In deciding what was best for their financial benefit, these women authors needed to decide what would be the
94 Myers, Records, Part 1, reel 6. 95 Ibid.; Ibid., reel 8. 65 bigger benefit—selling the copyright outright for a guaranteed payment or taking a gamble on the book being a success.
For a woman cookbook author during this time period, location seems to be the most important factor in whether or not she would retain full legal copyright. The growing industrial spaces outside of London—Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, and
Doncaster—produced authors who retained control over the copyrights of their first editions. Additionally, if the author registered the work with the Stationers’ Company, authors outside of London owned the whole of its shares. In order to retain ownership over a text, the author had to fund the printing, and one way these authors outside of
London did so is through subscription lists. Overall, based on the copyright practices of those authors who reside outside of London, the growing and developing industrial areas appear to be more accepting of women as authors and owners of their textual property.
Although marital status decided whether a woman could control or own property, the marital status of these women is difficult to discern. Therefore, no conclusions between marital status and textual ownership can be drawn based on the information discovered in my bibliographic study. What can be concluded is that the author did not need to relay a marital status to the reader. Rather, authors devoted more time to explaining their experiences and qualifications in domestic service. By focusing on their own experience, the authors of these cookbooks revealed their middle-class status as a selling point. Respectability came not from being someone’s wife, but from being someone’s housekeeper.
66
Additionally, men were entering into property agreements with women who were not their wives at this time. Two of the authors—Hannah Glasse and Eliza Melroe—split ownership shares of their books with publishers. In all examples, the authors received the majority of the share, three-fourths, with the remaining portion going to the publisher. It is unclear whether there was a more formal arrangement or contract between these authors and their publishers, but they did enter into this agreement in the Stationers’
Company register. This further demonstrates that the publishing industry was willing to work with women authors if they thought the books would sell and that women could control their property in some way.
67
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
The feminist historian Gerda Lerner notes that “women have functioned in a separate culture within the culture they share with men.”96 For women writers in the eighteenth century, this separate culture within the eighteenth-century publishing industry meant mostly being relegated to non-serious genres, such as romances, novels, and cookery books. In spite of this confinement, women began to author and publish more, and, by the end of the century, the cookbook genre had been feminized. In total, women published forty-five cookbooks between the years 1745 and 1800, during a time when men dominated the publishing and reading industries.
Similar to their lives, the work of women writers has also been relegated to a separate space within the broader field of the history of the book. The exclusion of cookbooks and their authors from most histories of the book studies proves the point. The popularity of cookery books is substantiated by their multiple printings, but this written work produced by and for women has long been ignored by those authoring the history.
And this matters because it devalues women’s contributions to the field. The novel, romances, cookbooks—all genres seen as feminine—transformed the publishing industry of England from a male-dominated space to one where women could contribute. For
96 Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 119. 68 feminist book historians, reclaiming and recognizing the works of these women helps reveal the comprehensive history of the book.
Reclaiming reveals the economic ethos of women in England during the eighteenth century is revealed. A confluence of changes in the English economy and in laws affecting property ownership allowed women’s knowledge, especially knowledge of the domestic realm, to increase in value. As aspirational middle-class women grew to rely on working women to provide services enjoyed by the upper classes in their households, cookbooks written by women who served members of the upper ranks became a way to learn about the manners and customs of the elite. Despite being lower in rank, these working women found an opportunity to commodify their knowledge of domestic practices through this technical literature known as cookbooks. Thus, at a time when women’s skills were in demand and women could also expect equal protection under the law for publishing, these working-class housekeepers and cooks began to emerge as purveyors of domestic knowledge.
Additionally, these working-class authors accumulated a new social power. As workers in upper class households, they were relegated to working for the family. Now, with the increased demand for their skills, these women were in positions to give advice to women of equal and higher rank. They instructed aspirational middle-class and upper- class women in how to prepare food befitting their class station, to organize their households, and to behave as managers of servants. The women couched their authoritative voices in the language of experienced house-keepers and servants. Through
69 their publications, some of these working-class women were able to establish a new role as advisor to all women, regardless of class standing.
Due to an increase in the value of women’s knowledge, the women authors of cookbooks obtained greater social and economic power through their publications.
Publishing their books, in some cases, helped bring attention to the businesses they began after leaving a life of working for others. In Elizabeth Raffald’s case, her book helped to advertise the pans and molds she sold in her shop. For the Kellet women, their book helped inform new perspective students about their cooking schools. Even when these women did not have an outside business, they helped to establish the new trends in cooking during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Their books defined English cuisine and offered tips on how to frugally prepare meals to impress company and guests.
The favorable circumstances which allowed these women to publish also granted them greater social and economic power.
70
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APPENDIX
List of Women Authored Cookbooks 1745-1800
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The following is a chronological list of cookbooks authored by women in England from 1745 to 1800. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, more women than ever before began to publish cookbooks. Although there exist bibliographies of printed cookbooks from this time period, none focus only on those books published by women.
These women feminized the genre and helped normalize women writers in the minds of the reading public. This list gives them the recognition they deserve. The first column contains the date of the first edition of the cookbook. This is followed by the author’s name and then the publisher’s name as shown on the title page of the cookbook. The location of publication as found on the title page is located in the fourth column, followed by the shortened title of the text in the fifth column. The sixth and seventh columns report whether the image of the first edition of the cookbook can be found in the Eighteenth
Century Collections Online (ECCO) database and whether a bibliographical entry of the first edition is included in Virginia Maclean’s The Short-title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue 1701-1800 (1981). Finally, the eighth column contains notes on whether the book was published as multiple editions, on any change of publishers within the book’s printing run, and on any discrepancies found in the information provided in ECCO and the Catalogue. Additional information provided in column eight on publishers of books not found in Maclean’s Catalogue was found in Ian Maxted’s The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of
Members (1977).
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List of Woman-Authored Cookbooks 1745-1800
First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO? The Art of by a Lady 1747 Author London Cookery, Made No Yes Yes (Hannah Glasse) Plain and Easy Yes - sells copyright to Bradshaw's Bradshaw, R. Whitworth Yes - with 1748 Author London Valuable No Penelope before 6th different titles Family Jewel edition (1754) Moxon, English 1749 Author Leeds Yes Yes Yes Elizabeth Housewifery Yes - 2nd edition on ECCO, under title The Lady’s A Collection of Assistant in the Scarce and Oeconomy of the Battam, Anne 1750 Author London Valuable No Yes Table, printed Mrs. Receipts, Never for R. and J. before Printed Dodsley (1759). Author: the late Mrs. Anne Battam
Clifton, Eliza. The Cook c. 1750 Proprietors London Yes Yes No Mrs. Maid's Assistant
No date Fisher, Lydia The Prudent c. 1750 Author London on title Yes Yes Mrs. Housewife page
Yes - author The Compleat No title may be 1753 Gentlewoman Author London Family Yes page Penelope Companion Bradshaw
The Young 1753 Johnson, Mary H. Jeffery London Woman's No Yes No Companion
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First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO?
Yes - 2nd and Professed 3rd editions on 1754 Cook, Ann J. White Newcastle No Yes Cookery ECCO, printed for the author
J. Fuller Yes - for S. (at his The Director: Crowder and H. circulating or, Young 1754 Jackson, Sarah London Yes Yes Woodgate / for library) and S. Woman’s Best S. Crowder and Neale Companion R. Baldwin (bookseller)
Madam Yes - different Johnson’s Yes - has date publishers: for J. M. Cooper, C. Present; or, The of first 1755 Johnson, Madam London Yes Fuller / for H. Sympson Best Instruction edition as Owen / for W. for Young 1754. Nicoll Women The Cook’s Pocket- Honeywood, Yes - another for c. 1756 C. Henderson London companion, and No Yes Lydia Thomas Caslon Complete Family-guide The Ladies Companion; or, c. 1756 a Gentlewoman [unknown] London The No Yes No Housekeeper’s Guide
The Ladies Handmaid; or, Phillips, Sarah 1758 J. Coote London A Compleat Yes Yes No Mrs. System of Cookery
The Servant's Directory, or 1760 Glass, H. Author London Yes Yes No House-keeper's Companion
I. Pottinger Yes - no Yes - for J. The Compleat c. 1760 Glasse, H. and J. London date on Yes Cooke / for West Confectioner Williams title page and Hughes
The New Book Yes - no of Cookery; or, c. 1760 Price, Eliz. Mrs. Authoress London date on Yes Yes Every Woman a title page Perfect Cook
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First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO?
The New, Universal, and c. 1760 Price, Eliz. Mrs. Alex. Hogg London No Yes Yes Complete Confectioner
S. Crowder Yes - no Bradley, Martha The British c. 1760 and H. London date on Yes No Mrs. Housewife Woodgate title page
The New c. 1760 Butler, Caroline J. Cooke London London and No Yes No Country Cook
Yes - no Barker, Anne The Complete c. 1762 J. Cooke London date on Yes No Mrs. Servant Maid title page
**Yes - implied by the phrase The Complete “with additions” Brooks, English Cook; on the “2nd c. 1762 Authoress London No** Yes Catharine or, Prudent edition” title Housewife page. No copy of the first edition has been located.
The Frugal Housewife; or, Yes - for E. c. 1765 Carter, Susannah F. Newbery London No Yes Complete Newbery Woman Cook
*The Catalogue does not list the 1766 Palmer The Useful and edition. Instead, Thomas Entertaining 1766 Moore, Isabella London Yes Yes* it has a 1772 Palmer Family edition printed Miscellaney for John Smith as the only edition.
The Complete Cook-maid, or c. 1766 Ward, Maria Authoress London No Yes No Housewife’s Assistant
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First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO? Yes - for Griffith Wright and John Binns / for Thomas Wright, The Complete John Binns, and English Cook; 1767 Peckham, Ann Author Leeds No Yes William or, Prudent Fawdington / for Housewife Thomas Wright, and T. Wilson; and for R. Spence (at York) Yes - J. Newbery The Modern Art advertisement: Shackleford, 1767 and F. London of Cookery Yes Yes for T. Carnan Ann Mrs. Newbery Improved and F. Newbery (1771)
Yes - Copyright sold to R. Baldwin after 7th edition (1780). Raffald died in The 1781. Additional 1769 Raffald, Experienced Author Manchester Yes Yes editions for A. Elizabeth English House- Millar, W. Law, keeper and R. Cater / for G. Bancks [Manchester] / for H. and G. Mozley
The Ladies Yes - no Wilson, Mrs. c. 1770 Authoress London Complete date on Yes No Mary Cookery title page Yes - for S. The Complete Hodgson; and for House-keeper, G.G.J. and J. 1772 Smith, Mary Author Newcastle Yes Yes and Professed Robinson Cook [London] / for S. Hodgson
The Lady’s Assistant for 1773 Mason, Charlotte J. Walter London Regulating and No Yes Yes Supplying her Table
85
First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO? The Royal Cook; or, The Yes - no c. 1774 Pennington, Mrs. Richard Snagg London Modern Yes No title page Etiquette of the Table The Young Marshall, Ladies' Guide in 1777 Author Newcastle Yes Yes No Elizabeth the Art of Cookery A Complete Kellet, Susanna, Collection of 1780 Elizabeth, and Authors Newcastle Yes Yes No Cookery Mary Receipts
The New and c. 1780 Partridge, Ann Alex. Hogg London Complete No Yes No Universal Cook
The Fountain of c. 1781 Saunders, Sarah Author London No Yes Yes Knowledge Unknown. This book does not appear in the Catalogue. J. The Housewife. Dixwell is Being a Most Yes - no Montague, probably James c. 1785 J. Dixwell London Useful Assistant date on No Laetitia Dixwell of in All Domestic title page London who was Concerns an active printer from 1761-85. Dixwell died 1788. The Lady’s Complete 1788 Cole, Mary G. Kearsley London Guide; or, Yes Yes Yes Cookery in All its Branches
Yes - for A. Hambleton / for The Lady’s Best Henry M'Allum, W. Clements Companion; or, Cartwright, Auctioneer, 1789 and James London Complete No Yes Charlotte Mrs. Blackburn Sadler Treasure for the [M’Allum Fair Sex edition not in Catalogue]
86
First Publisher In Multiple Year Author Location Title edition in Name Catalogue? editions? ECCO?
Unknown. This book does not appear in the Catalogue. W. Lane is probably William Lane of London who was Mrs. Taylor’s Yes - no Taylor, Margaret active as a c. 1794 W. Lane London Family date on No Mrs. printer from Companion title page 1763-1814. He traded as William Lane from 1763-1802; thereafter, he worked with partners.
The New Martin, Sarah Experienced 1795 Authoress Doncaster Yes Yes Yes Mrs. English- housekeeper
An Economical, and New 1798 Melroe, Eliza Author London Yes Yes No Method of Cookery
Russell, The Complete 1800 Author London No Yes No Elizabeth Family Cook
West & The Complete 1800 Holland, Mary London Yes Yes No Hughes British Cook
The Ladies Best Companion; or, Yes - no Chambers, c. 1800 J. Cooke London A Golden date on Yes No Amelia Mrs. Treasure for the title page Fair Sex
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