‘Lasting Associations’ The Material Psychology of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Hamilton Joanna Wharton PhD University of York English and Related Literature July 2014 i Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations Abstract This thesis uncovers theories and applications of psychology in the work of three women writers of late eighteenth-century Britain: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Hamilton. It traces their engagement in discourse on the nature of mind through analysis of the texts they produced between 1770 and 1815, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to establish the significance of what I identify as ‘material psychology’ in their cultural and social activity. I argue that their textual and material uses of philosophy transformed disciplines, shaping early psychology in far more thoughtful, varied, and influential ways than has been acknowledged. The introduction outlines feminist applications of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), and discusses the challenges facing women who sought to harness the potential of his tabqula rasa hypothesis. It maps out the increasingly contested politics of psychology in the years following the French Revolution, considering misogynistic representations of the ‘Female Philosopher’ in the context of Mary Hays’ materialist feminism. I demarcate the often vexed or unclear gender politics of Barbauld, More and Hamilton, and propose a material and sensory reassessment of their domestic strategies for reform. This study contributes to the literary history of women by re-evaluating their place in the Enlightenment ‘science of man’, a full understanding of which demands innovative reinterpretation of interdisciplinary perspectives on gender and science in the late eighteenth century. My argument challenges the notion that women’s engagement with medical and philosophical discourse at this time was contained by the gendered nervous paradigm, and rethinks the potential for women writers in the culture of sensibility. It resists notions of uniformity in women’s writing by providing a comprehensive account of the continuities, divergences and conflicts between them, and opens up a richly discursive philosophical field for closer investigation. ii Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations Contents Abstract....................................................................................................... i List of figures ............................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgements ................................................................................... 2 Author’s declaration .................................................................................. 4 Introduction ............................................................................................... 6 1. Inscribing on the mind: Anna Barbauld’s ‘sensible objects’............... 58 2. ‘Things themselves’: Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose........ 95 3. Sense and social reform: Hannah More’s Mendip ministry.............. 135 4. More vs the New Philosophy: suicide, memory and dis/association 180 5. Sense and speculation: Elizabeth Hamilton’s female philosophy..... 207 Conclusion............................................................................................. 251 Appendix ............................................................................................... 257 Bibliography.......................................................................................... 259 1 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations List of figures Illustrations 1. ‘The Female Philosopher, smelling out the Comet’. Etching. R. Hawkins, 2 30 February 1790. British Museum. 2. Ivory note-book, 1826-1875 (?). British Museum. 61 3. Mahogany and softwood pole screen, c. 1740. Geffrye Museum, London. 82 4. May Foster’s house, ca. 1800. Victoria and Albert Museum. 125 5. Toy book. May Foster’s house, ca. 1800. Victoria and Albert Museum, 127 London. 6. ‘Urn to John Locke’, Barley Wood, Somerset. Masonry. 138 7. Inscription, ‘Urn to John Locke’, Barley Wood, Somerset. Masonry. 139 Tables 1. Search results for ‘soul’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ in Eighteenth Century Collections 257 Online (Gale CENGAGE). 5 February 2013. 2. Search results for ‘soul’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ in subject area ‘Medicine, Science 258 and Technology.’ ECCO. 3 July 2014. 3. Search results for ‘soul’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ in subject area ‘Literature and 258 Language.’ ECCO. 3 July 2014. 2 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations Acknowledgements I feel privileged to have been part of the research community at the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. I am indebted above all to my supervisor, Harriet Guest, for her expert advice, ongoing support and unwavering patience. I am also grateful to John Barrell, Kevin Gilmartin and James Watt for their help as members of my Thesis Advisory Panel. I thank Emma Major, who co- supervised the final stages of my research, for her feedback and guidance. The staff at CECS continue to be a great source of inspiration, and I wish to thank Mary Fairclough, Mark Jenner and Jon Mee in particular for sharing ideas and approaches that have shaped this study, whether given knowingly or not. Fellow CECS students, past and present, have been brilliant associates; I am especially grateful to Sophie Coulombeau, Jessica Haldeman, Lucy Hodgetts, Ruth Mather, Adam Perchard, Ruth Scobie, Dillon Struwig, Darren Wagner, and Jenny Wilkes for enriching my time at the Centre. The first two years of this project were assisted by the University of York’s Departmental Postgraduate Award. A travel grant from the British Society for the History of Science enabled me to undertake archival research at Dr Williams’s Library, and a second visit was funded by a short-term fellowship from the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and Queen Mary, University of London. I am grateful to David Wykes and Isabel Rivers at QMUL for being generous with their time and expert knowledge of Dissent, and thank Jane Giscombe for her vital assistance in accessing the resources at Dr Williams’s Library. Participation in the AHRC-funded training programme ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine’ helped shape the approach of this thesis, and I thank Sharon Ruston for her orchestration of the events I 3 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations attended. I am much obliged to Gary Halliday for allowing photographs of the grounds of Barley House, Somerset. The University of York’s Graduate Research Support Fund and FR Leavis Fund enabled me to attend Bluestockings: The Social Network at Swansea University in 2011, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting in 2012, and Anna Letitia Barbauld in Twenty Hundred and Twelve at Chawton House. I am indebted to audiences and participants at each conference for providing helpful feedback on my work. I also wish to thank members of the Dissenting Communities Research Network for their vibrant conversation on Dissenters and Evangelicals at the University of Leeds and The Leeds Library in 2013. Numerous members of the wider research community have been generous in providing feedback and sharing unpublished work; I wish to thank Richard Allen, Isobel Armstrong, John Christie, and Richard De Ritter in particular. I am especially indebted to Bill McCarthy, whose help has been crucial to my research on Barbauld, and I thank him for his ongoing support and encouragement. I am profoundly grateful to my family and friends. In particular, I would like to thank Katie Markham and everyone at Café Concerto for their kindness and cake; Harry Wood and Rebecca O’Neal for their correspondences; and my brother George, who only rarely complained that I neglected him. My deepest gratitude goes to Frank Brennand and Ruth Wharton for making things possible, and finally to Kate Nicholas, who can make anything endurable. 4 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations Author’s declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at the University of York or any other institution. An early version of Chapter One was published as ‘Inscribing on the Mind: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Sensible Objects”’ (Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Winter, 2012). A substantial part of Chapter Two appears as ‘“The Things Themselves”: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns’, in William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (eds.), Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2013). 5 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net – danced up and down in Lily’s mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree… —Woolf, To The Lighthouse 6 Joanna Wharton Lasting Associations Introduction I want you to propose a metaphysical question to your Society, which Mr. B. and I have had great debates upon; and I want to know your opinion and my sister's. It is this: If you were now told that in a future state of existence you should be entirely deprived of your consciousness, so as not to be sensible you were the same being who existed here, — should you, or should you not, be now interested in your future happiness or misery? or, in other words, is continued consciousness the essence of identity?1 The conundrum presented by Anna Letitia Barbauld is familiar in more than one sense. Writing from her home in Hampstead to her brother, Dr John Aikin, living over a hundred