Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century

Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn and Elizabeth Carter

M. Bigold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137033574
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.

1

Letter-writing, Community, and Virtuous Exemplarity: Elizabeth Rowe’s Theatre of Happiness

Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) was one of the most lauded and idealised woman writers to appear on the literary scene in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Extolled well into the nineteenth century for her piety, virtue, and reclusiveness, Rowe’s biographical exemplarity has been the primary legacy of her literary career. Often identified as one of the significant links in a chain of female exemplars, Rowe’s role as part of the virtuous opposition – held up in antithesis to the scandalous female writer who wrote for profit and fame – has buried her works under the potentially uninteresting image of the pious and enthusiastic recluse.

Margaret Ezell’s work has helped to explain why Rowe and others like her failed to ignite the critical imaginations of twentieth-century feminist literary historians. Recent studies of Rowe have sought to resuscitate her image by distinguishing her as a writer replete with romantic, feminist, and politicised possibilities. Sarah Prescott has argued that Rowe’s use of the seduction narrative in her prose works marks her out as a follower of the popular amatory novelist, Eliza Haywood.⁷¹ Sharon Achinstein has found evidence of a latent feminism in Rowe’s spiritual expressions, arguing that she used it as a powerful register of female sexuality.⁷² More recently, Prescott has noted that ‘the accepted image of Rowe obscures the aspects of her authorial persona for which she was initially applauded and brought to public attention: her political and religious affiliations’.⁷³ She particularly focuses on Rowe’s ‘whiggish poetic agenda’ in her poems published in John Dunton’s periodical, The Athenian Mercury (1691–1697), and her Poems on Several Occasions by Philomela (1696).⁷⁴

The purpose of this chapter is to supplement such work with an account of Rowe’s identifiable literary practices and goals as they appear in the manuscript evidence still available to us. A comparison of contemporary transcriptions taken from Rowe’s manuscript letters and versions of those letters published in Friendship in Death, Letters Moral and Entertaining, and the Miscellaneous Works foregrounds the importance of letter-writing and the formative impact it had on her fictional compositions.⁷⁵ The comparison also reveals the relative continuity of her moral, religious, and literary concerns across her literary career. Central to my argument is the notion of Rowe as a key figure in the creation of a community of writers dedicated to the reinvigoration of the language of religious devotion and ethical philosophy. Hopefully this approach will help to clarify Rowe’s own agency in the construction of her authorial image and her literary works.

Elizabeth Singer

Elizabeth Singer was born on 11 September 1674 in Ilchester, Somerset, to Walter and Elizabeth Singer, née Portnell. Her father was a dissenting minister who had been imprisoned during the reign of Charles II, but later prospered in the wool trade and who, at the time of his death in 1719, could afford to leave Elizabeth substantial property in Frome.⁷⁶ From the last decade of the seventeenth century until her death at 62, in 1737, Rowe spent the majority of her time at her father’s house in Frome and many of her literary productions were composed and then sent to London from this residence. She lived in London from 1710 to 1715, the years of her brief marriage to Thomas Rowe, but there is almost no record of letters or fictional writings from this period.

The standard description of Rowe’s public, that is print, productions consists of poetry, published for the most part before 1710, and prose fiction and devotional literature published from 1728 onwards.⁷⁷ The major sources for Rowe’s poetry and prose are: Poems on Several Occasions, by Philomela (1696), published anonymously by John Dunton and compiled by him from poems she submitted to the Athenian Mercury from 1693 to 1696; Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions (1704); a number of miscellanies, notably Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies (5th and 6th parts, 1704, 1709), Matthew Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions (1709), Pope’s edited miscellany for Bernard Lintot, Poems on Several Occasions[…] (1717), and Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, 2nd edition (1720); Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728); Letters on Various Occasions (1729);⁷⁸ Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse, in two more parts (1731 and 1733); The History of Joseph in Eight Books (1736); The History of Joseph in Ten Books (1737);⁷⁹ Devout Exercises of the Heart (1738); and, finally, The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Mrs Elizabeth Rowe (1739). Of these works, the combined volumes of Friendship in Death and Letters Moral and Entertaining would be reprinted the most over the course of the next century, appearing in over forty editions.⁸⁰

The two most complete biographical studies of Rowe are the ‘Life’ that prefaces the Miscellaneous Works, which was partly written by her old friend, the dissenting minister and academy tutor, Henry Grove, and completed at his death by her brother-in-law, Theophilus Rowe, and Henry F. Stecher’s Elizabeth Singer Rowe, The Poetess of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Pietism. There are considerable problems with both accounts. Despite Theophilus Rowe’s contention that, ‘when you have the history of one week, you have the history of the whole’ (MW, I: liii), Elizabeth Rowe’s life and works are much more idiosyncratic than either study suggests. Theophilus Rowe, to his credit, realised his inadequacies as her biographer and relied almost entirely on a pseudo-biographical construction of her through her familiar letters; many of his quotations about her character are her own protestations and self-deflecting asides written to the Countess of Hertford. Stecher provides an admirably thorough biography, but does not consider some of the manuscript evidence. In particular, he fails to draw attention to the discrepancies between the Alnwick manuscripts (amongst which are manuscript transcriptions of Elizabeth Rowe’s letters and poems to the Countess of Hertford) and the letters that appeared in Letters Moral and Entertaining and the Miscellaneous Works.⁸¹

Neither biography confronts the confusion that crops up amongst contemporaries regarding Rowe’s religious biases or the exact degree of devotional enthusiasm evident in her works. She is alternately labelled an evangelical, a mystic, a prophetess, an enthusiast, and a lover of ‘Cant & Nonsense’; appellations she sometimes perpetuates and at other times repudiates, but all of which hail from members of her (mostly Anglican) coterie. Are these just friendly accusations or do they speak to the difficulties contemporaries had with Rowe’s ardent style? The documentary evidence is contradictory and inconclusive, and seems to support Jeremy Gregory’s observation that, ‘it may be misleading to draw too hard and fast a line between nonconformity and conformity in this period, given that it was not unusual to attend both the nonconformist meeting-house and the parish church’.⁸²

In 1945 H. Bunker Wright discovered and printed a series of manuscript letters which Matthew Prior sent to the young and single Elizabeth Singer. Bunker Wright characterises the exchange as both gallant flirtation and professional networking, but the letters also contain some hints about her nonconformity and enthusiastic leanings.⁸³ In one letter from 1703 Prior writes to Singer that, ‘You want a quarrel mightily when you tell me I am a high Churchman, & I never knew before that you could like Cant & Nonsense in a Barn, rather than Harmony & reason in a Cathedral, but I have nothing to do with your Religion.’⁸⁴ Susan Staves interprets Prior’s letter as playful teasing at the expense of Rowe’s dissenting affiliations.⁸⁵ Rowe’s father was, of course, a dissenter, she was a close friend of the ‘most prominent representative of Georgian Nonconformity’, Isaac Watts, and she was active herself in the Congregationalist church in Frome.⁸⁶ Unfortunately, we do not have Rowe’s replies, but in other letters Rowe is more generous to writers of various denominations. In a letter to the Countess of Hertford written around 1727 Rowe disavows any bias in favour of the writings of dissenters and praises instead the writings of William Law, the non-juror.⁸⁷ She champions the deist James Thomson against the pious rectitude of her companion, enthuses, albeit ironically, about the writings of Shaftesbury, but also finds great comfort in the corrective works of Bishop Berkeley.⁸⁸ She repeatedly denies enthusiastic tendencies and never writes anything that would suggest that she was anything but an orthodox Christian (as dissenters believed themselves to be).

Nevertheless, we can identify Rowe as an ‘enthusiast’ in many respects. As R.A. Knox identifies it, the term ‘Enthusiasm’ was used to describe a group who attempted to cultivate a life less worldly and a heart more attuned to the Holy Spirit.⁸⁹ In the eyes of many contemporaries (whether Anglican or nonconformist), this is something Rowe epitomised in a very positive sense. It is, however, harder to judge the degree of her enthusiasm when even admirers like Watts accuse her of exhibiting the ‘language of the mystical writers’ and having an ‘evangelical turn’ in later life.⁹⁰ According to Prior and Watts, and despite the 35 years separating their remarks, Rowe’s religious tendencies could verge towards the extreme. However, in her letters to the countess throughout this period, her interest in and acceptance of writers of various religious persuasions suggests that she read authors of different creeds with a catholic acceptance, though with an eye for sentimental affect and persuasive reasoning. Given her wide circle of friends and the popularity of her works, it seems reasonable to assume that many of her contemporary readers approached the issues in a similar matter. Indeed, Watts makes clear in his preface to Devout Exercises that the affective nature of Rowe’s expressions is precisely what makes them of use to those who find that their own devotions fall short of the inspired ideal.

A point in favour of the Grove/Rowe biography is its distinct unwillingness to categorise Rowe, but the contested nature of the terms they use to describe her religious expressions and habits causes more problems than it solves. A close reading of the contemporary or immediately posthumous records of how Rowe’s religion was characterised only affords insights into the elaborate construction of her exemplary image. Stecher, presumably not interested in perpetuating Rowe’s image, nor caught up in eighteenth-century poetical-religious language wars, never adequately explores Rowe’s remarks on Dissenters, Deists, non-jurors, and Anglicans, or what Dissenters, Deists, non-jurors, and Anglicans had to say in turn about her. Interestingly, he places her within a tradition of German Pietism, finding the Pietist interest in nature and concern for the inner emotional life as a means to religious knowledge perfectly aligned with her personal theology.⁹¹ However, he admits that he is wary of attributing emotional evangelicalism to her and agrees with H.N. Fairchild’s assessment that Rowe was much too sentimental to be a mystic.⁹²

Stecher is excellent on the subject of Rowe’s extensive social and intellectual connections, including those with John Dunton, the Thynne family, Matthew Prior, Bishop Ken, Isaac Watts, and many others. It is this community of writers and public figures which crucially influences Rowe’s specific religious, aesthetic, and philosophical reasons for publishing her manuscript works.

Coteries and letters

My discussion of Rowe’s works focuses on what I consider the most important aspect of her literary output: her familiar and fictional letters.⁹³ Rowe’s prose works, that is her letters and many of the devotional pieces, far outnumber her poetic appearances in print. She often embedded the poetry she did write within her fictional and familiar letters, which suggests that poetry was an integral part of the composition and exchange of literary letters and not necessarily a separate exercise. Rowe’s letters, beginning with Friendship in Death (1728), the three parts of Letters Moral and Entertaining in Prose and Verse (1729, 1731, 1733), and her familiar letters published in the second volume of her posthumous Miscellaneous Works (1739), make up the most voluminous portion of her literary compositions. Her epistolary prolixity has, however, been overlooked as part of a general lack of interest in women’s letters as representative of anything other than biographical appendages to the private lives of women.⁹⁴ All of the women in this study were prolific letter-writers, and a crucial tool in the construction of their posthumous images was the evidence for virtuous exemplarity found in their familiar letters. In contrast to this retrospective exemplification of their lives through epistolary biography is the contemporary manuscript evidence for their letters as a type of social, literary, and intellectual performance. These performances were then transformed into various published texts, suggesting that the writing of certain kinds of coterie letters was a gesture towards authorial ambition in the wider realm of the republic of letters. Specifically, they were the genre in which Rowe chose to actively and repeatedly publish, whilst her poetic pieces only appear in a few select miscellanies after the early Dunton publication. Thus Rowe’s ‘agenda’, if we can describe it as such, is most likely to be found in the epistolary works which she took such care and interest in submitting to public censure.

A number of critics have surveyed Rowe’s epistolary fictions as part of the miscellaneous genres that pre-date the rise of the novel, but they have little to say about her besides the fact that she wrote didactic prose fiction in epistolary form.⁹⁵ Likewise, evidence attesting to the popularity of her epistolary works in Britain, Europe, and America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has yielded no detailed assessments of the eighteenth-century editing of either her private or fictional letters.⁹⁶ The explicit connection between Rowe’s autograph missives, addressed to a coterie audience, and her epistolary productions for a wider public escape all but passing comment.⁹⁷

Composition

My research on Alnwick MS 110, a letter book belonging to Frances Thynne Seymour (1699–1754), the last Countess of Hertford, later Duchess of Somerset (1750–4), and one of Rowe’s primary correspondents, has yielded new material in relation to the editorial processes under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Transcriptions
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Letter-writing, Community, and Virtuous Exemplarity: Elizabeth Rowe’s Theatre of Happiness
• 2 A Saint Everlasting: Elizabeth Rowe and Biographical Exemplarity
• 3 ‘The new and untrodden path’: Catharine Cockburn, Philosophy, and the Republic of Letters
• 4 ‘[H]ow Obscure her Lot’: Catharine Cockburn’s Double Afterlife
• 5 Elizabeth Carter: ‘a very extraordinary Phaenomenon in the Republick of Letters’
• 6 Elizabeth Carter and the Theatrum Mundi
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index