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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North ZoobRood Ann Arbor, Michigan 481 OS 76 - 24,685 SCHWARTZL Kathryn Carlisle, 1926- THE RHETORICAL RESOURCES OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU. The Ohjto State University, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, English Xerox University MicrofilmsAnn , Arbor, Michigan 48100 ©Copyright by Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz 1976 THE RHETORICAL RESOURCES OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU DISSERTATION Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1976 Reading Committeet Approved By Professor James Battersby Professor Edward P. J* Corbett Professor John Sena Adviser /1 Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am Indebted to Professor Edward P. J. Corbett for constructive criticism and advice on ail aspects of this dissertation, and most particularly for his invaluable assistance in establishing the large- scale structure of the chapters and for his close attention to my style. Professor Corbett's unfailing patience and encouragement assured a steady progress toward what at times seemed an infinitely receding goal. Professor James Battersby's many challenges to the smaller phases of my arguments were constantly stimulating, and Professor John Sena's thoughts on the possible ramifications of my discoveries about Lady Mary's rhetoric were important in determining my focus. Without my family's unflagging support and their faith in a successful outcome I could never have completed this dissertation. 11 VITA November 17, 1926 . , . Bora - Blltaore, North Carolina 1947 • • . • B.A,, Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York Graduate Study, Department of Philosophy, New York University, New York, New York 1948 • * . , . Graduate Study, The Kenyon School of English, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio 1967 . * . M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1970 . , , Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1974-5 .... Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio 1974-6 • * * . Teaching Associate In Plano, Department of Music, Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Literature of the Eighteenth Century* Studies in Rhetoric. Professor Edward P. J. Corbett Studies in Prose Style. Professor Ruth Hughey Studies In Swift and Pope, Professor Thomas E. Maresca lit TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii VITA H i INTRODUCTION ............................................. 1 Chapter I. ARGUMENTATION "If we go to Naples" Letter of 12 August 1712, to Edward Wortley Montagu .... 17 II. DESCRIPTION "What I 8aw remarkable at Sophia" Letter of 1 April 1717, to Lady . 58 III. GENERALIZATIONS AND PARTICULARS "This is the General state of Affairs" Letter of 31 October 1723, to Lady Mar ...... 100 IV. EXPLANATION "Telling you that I love you" Letter of 10 September 1736, to Francesco Algarotti . • « • • 136 V. NARRATION "An Adventure exactly resembling and, I belelve, copy'd from Pamela" Letter of 8 December 1754, to Lady Bute 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................. 221 iv INTRODUCTION Letter-writing was long recognised in the English rhetorical tradition as an important branch of applied rhetoric, if only because it was the one form of written rhetoric that every literate person was almost certain to engage in at some time in his Ilfe.^ Although popular interest in the art and skills of letter-writing has waned in recent times, the modem student of rhetoric can find a fertile field of inves­ tigation in the correspondence of accomplished letter-wrlters. The present study will undertake a rhetorical analysis of five letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762),2 one of the great practitioners of the Golden Age of English letter-writing, as Robert Halsband, Lady Mary's most recent editor and biographer, has called the eighteenth century.^ l-The importance attached to letter-writing can already be seen in the first English rhetoric, Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), where Wilson illustrates deliberative rhetoric anT"the rhetoric of “comfort" with letters. The most popular instructional rhetoric of the later sixteenth century, Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586), was completely devoted to letter-writing. ^The letters are available in an authoritative edition: The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 Vo Is*, ed. Robert Halsband* (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1967). **In "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Letter-Wrlter," PMLA, 80 (1965), 163. 1 In the broadest tease* I understand rhetoric to be "that art or talent by which the discourse Is adapted to Its end,"4 and for the narrow purposes of this study, I consider the rhetoric of a given letter to be the sun of the strategies Lady Mary enploys In that letter as she adjusts her discourse to suit the correspondent, the subject, the occasion, and her Intent* This approach to the art of an esteemed letter-wrlter was suggested to me by the long rhetorical tradition In which letter-writing vaB treated from the stance of the writer and handled as a problem In applied rhetoric: how to affect a given correspondent In a definite way through the use of specific strategies.^ Such an approach seemed particularly appropriate In the case of an eighteenth-century letter-wrlter, for that period Is generally agreed to be the culmination of two centuries of Intense and wide-spread interest in the epistolary art, evidenced by the publication of much instructional material on how to write letters and of numerous collections of letters, many of which were Intended to serve as models for the aspiring letter- wrlter; and, of course, the epistolary form was employed in a host of *The definition is from the eighteenth-century English rhetorician, George Campbell, In his Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 1. Campbell presents the definition as a quotation from Quintilian, citing "Dicere secundum vlrtutem oration!*'1 (Instituto Pretoria. II, xv, 36) and "Scientia bene dicendl" (II, xv, 2)4).Campbell's definition la more in the nature of a free rendering than a translation. ■*Tvo works by Wilbur Samuel Howell cover the material in this tradition exhaustively: Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 (Hew York: Russell and Russell, 1961) and Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 197lV. other genres.6 That Lady Mary herself was avare of this tradition la clear from the number of collections of letters In her library,^ Includ­ ing those then most esteemed as models, from references In her letters to other letter-writers, and from her allusions to conventions taught in the instructional manuals;6 *nd that she often consciously viewed her own letter-writing in terms of how she is affecting her correspondent is apparent from frequent asides and statements to that effect throughout the correspondence, examples of which will be seen in the letters that are analyzed in the body of the dissertation. An approach to the art of letter-writing that carefully scrutinizes individual letters as rhetori­ cal documents has been neglected by modern scholars, for though scholars have recently treated the works of esteemed letter-wrlters in a variety of ways, none of their methods of dealing with personal correspondence 6The state of all these manifestations of epistolary activity just before and during Lady Mary's formative years is succinctly described by James Sutherland In English Literature of the Seventeenth Century (Oxfordt Claredon Press, 19^9), pp. 230-3. The epistolary novel is, of course, the moat important purely literary manifestation of the Intense Interest in epistolary form. ^A copy of the 1739 catalogue of Lady Mary's library w s b kindly supplied to me by the Department of Local History and Archives, Sheffield Central Library, Sheffield, England. ®For example, in her letter of April 1751, Lady Mary speaks of "the common place Topics that are us'd (generally to no purpose) in Letters of Consolation," a remark showing familiarity with standard rhetorical terminology and with the kind of categorisation of letters cossaonly found in the manuals and formularies! see Complete Letters.

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