British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

S. Schmid

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137063748
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, and Thackeray, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. Using a number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - Schmid paints a vivid picture of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s.

C H A P T E R 1

TRADITIONS AND THEORIES

SALONS AS NON-PLACES

When the Countess of Blessington, who lived in Naples between 1823 and 1826, ventured on an excursion to the ruins of Paestum with her friends, the company found instructive entertainment, later chronicled in Blessington’s travelogue The Idler in Italy (1839):

A collation, that would not have shamed the Sybarite inhabitants said to have once possessed Paestum, was spread in the temple of Neptune; to which, after ample justice had been rendered, succeeded a highly intellectual treat, as Mr. George Howard complied with the pressing request of the company to recite a poem, written by him when at college, on the ruins we were then contemplating. The poem was admirable, and so spirited as to convey an impression that it must have been written on the spot, and under the inspiration which the actual scene, and not merely a classical description of it, had created. (I 2:181)

In the 1820s, the notorious Marguerite Blessington presided over a fairly informal “traveling” salon in Italy, which is well documented through her Conversations of Lord Byron (1832–1833) and The Idler in Italy, and this was later followed by several more formal and acknowledged salons in London in the 1830s and 1840s. British salons, veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation, often cosmopolitan in their outlook, were gatherings of mixed-gender conversation and resembled earlier, similar formations like the bluestocking circles and the French aristocratic salons. They were headed by hostesses. Blessington’s circle of wits and literati, likewise Holland House, the Whig political and cultural center, and Mary Berry’s drawing-room, a meeting-place for famous as well as neglected conversationalists, were well-known landmarks in and around London. These three salons spanned more than 60 years, from the Berrys’ first sociable encounter with Horace Walpole in 1788 to Blessington’s death in 1849, and counted Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Joanna Baillie, and George Canning, writers, editors, reviewers, painters, scholars, and politicians among their guests. Whereas scholarship on French and German salons is blooming,¹ English Romantic salon sociability is regrettably under-researched, possibly because the lonely subject often dominates the “mental theatre”² of the major Romantic poets, who relished a cult of male solitude exemplified in poems such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor (1816). However, 1798, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads and the beginning of Romanticism proper, meant no caesura in terms of sociability, which was all-important to cultural alliances. Sociability not only enabled the production of these “lonely” poems but also a cultural exchange that did not necessarily have the great literary text at its center but rather a chain of communicative acts, some of which have left traces in print, whereas others have disappeared for good.

Research into salons faces a methodological problem because their central activity, conversation, is elusive: The spoken word evaporates immediately. The leftovers, sketchy diary entries, letters, dedicatory poems, or episodes in novels, resemble the ruins where our party finds itself, which inspire intellectual as well as culinary treats, a poetry recital and a picnic, all of which are ephemeral and perishable, too. Marc Fumaroli’s famous essay about French conversation as a site of cultural memory, published in Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, the grand récit of French cultural history, begins with the reflection that his project of writing a history of conversation is condemned to be considered as foolish as maybe “a history of tears, farewells, or first encounters.”³ If the French salon, despite Fumaroli’s gesture of modesty, has been considered the cradle of French thought, academics as well as literati have been surprisingly silent about its English counterpart. If, in France, conversation and thus the salon, is a “lieu de mémoire,” a major site of memory, has been allocated space, in fact constitutes a space, hardly anyone would list the British salon among the nation’s formative cultural sites. However, as salons, mixed-gender gatherings presided over by women, existed in Britain, my study aims to remedy this omission by restoring British salon sociability to the pantheon of culturally relevant sites, which has hitherto displayed coffeehouses, museum spaces, theaters, clubs, associations, and churches. It will also show that the bluestocking tradition continued well into and beyond the Romantic period. Oscillating between historical and theoretical reflections, this introductory chapter will define salon space, explore its traditions in France, link it to the eighteenth-century bluestocking tradition, map out its place between the public and the private spheres, consider its fundamentally theatrical dimension, and reflect on the methodological paradoxes of research into a “non-place.”⁴

Why do the Countess of Blessington, Lady Holland, and Mary Berry merit further investigation? Mary Berry (1763–1852), a conservative feminist, introduced into society in 1788 through her friendship with the then nearly octogenarian writer Horace Walpole, ran several salons and is close to the British bluestocking tradition, both through her learning and her ideals of female companionship. She was famous for her “drawing-room” sociability, which she conducted on a comparatively small scale. Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland (1771–1845), was the hostess of Holland House, one of London’s leading cultural and political hothouses, gathering Whig politicians, reviewers, and writers around her. She was famous not as an author but as a Whig hostess presiding over one of the most prestigious London salons of her time. Marguerite Blessington (1789–1849) ran an informal traveling salon in Italy in the 1820s as well as several London salons after 1830 and is known today because of her friendship with and her publications about Byron, her silver-fork novels, and her editorial work for the Book of Beauty and other annuals. All three women stand in varying degrees in the bluestocking tradition and emulated the sociability they had encountered on their journeys to the continent, particularly to France. Since their salons were linked to larger publishing ventures, like Holland House to the Edinburgh Review, these cosmopolitan institutions also contributed in a much wider sense to Romantic-era culture.

TRADITIONS I: THE FRENCH SALONS

One of the few early books on the English salon is a study dating from 1915 by Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who argues that the eighteenth-century bluestockings ran salons in imitation of the French model, a proposition that Deborah Heller has contested.⁵ Although some English literary hostesses were aware of Parisian salons,⁶ the French salonnières were not the bluestockings’ immediate institutional or intellectual grandmothers, nor was the French salon the sole root of the English bluestocking circle, yet the French salon, even if no major influence, serves as a point of comparison, first because critics have frequently applied the term “salon” to English formations, and second because numerous English guests to and organizers of “salons,” among them the famous hostess Elizabeth Montagu, or Horace Walpole, who later befriended the Berry sisters, likewise Lady Holland, and the Countess of Blessington, had traveled to France, had moved in elite Parisian circles, and had brought knowledge and news about the “salon” to Britain.

The great time of French salon sociability, which was situated at the intersection of the private and the public spheres, of orality and writing, were the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,⁷ while the nineteenth century is generally regarded as a period of decline. Initially founded in Paris as an alternative to the power of the French court, salons were nevertheless at the very center of “le monde,” of the French elite. In the salons of the Ancien Régime, the Marquise de Rambouillet, the Marquise du Deffand, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, and Suzanne Necker became the influential organizers of circles that were essential to cultural production. The salonnière invited guests and directed conversations, which might focus on literature, music, the fine arts, or politics. She was the center yet not the object of conversation. The gatherings occurred regularly, on a specific day of the week, the “jour fixe,” and were usually bound to one location, the salonnière’s private home, often a specific room like the Marquise de Rambouillet’s famous “chambre bleue.” Centered on the ideals of “honnêteté,” “bienséance,” and “l’art de plaire,”⁸ salons encouraged visitors from different social and national backgrounds, likewise authors and patrons, to mingle, creating coherence through conversation. Conversation, the chief activity, had numerous functions: exchange of ideas and information, education, acquisition of refinement, and display of politeness. As the salon was the backdrop for formal and informal writing, for example, epistolary exchange, the reading of one’s own manuscripts, or the debates surrounding new books, it was situated at the intersection of orality, writing, and publishing. If some critics like Dena Goodman argue that women and their salon activities were at the very center of all cultural exchange and essential for the understanding of the Enlightenment, others, for example, Jolanta T. Pekacz, question the women’s power but still see a major role for them within the context of this formation. Critics often declare that with the caesura of the French Revolution, the women lost their power, likewise the salon its greatness.⁹ However, due to their social, cultural, and sometimes political importance, salons did not come to an abrupt end with the French Revolution, neither in France nor elsewhere, even if their power to cause social and political change waned.

While in seventeenth-century France, the nobility metamorphosed into an aristocracy, its medieval code of valor was substituted by interaction, speech, and gesture, in short: social deportment was mounting in importance. As elite culture was based more and more on interaction, one’s behavior and the ability to interpret another’s became crucial for advancement.¹⁰ Those who wanted to climb up the social ladder or retain their place on it had to know how to move in elite circles and how to interact with those on the same, on a lower, or on a higher social level. Hence, conduct books and model letters instructed individuals about sociable politeness, as Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s study Exclusive Conversations shows. Triumph in the salons, where conversation stood at the center, was decisive for social success in the wider world.

While the term “salon” originally denotes a large and richly decorated room, built for reception, the use of “salon” meaning an institution only became current in the nineteenth century when the great pre-Revolutionary “salons” had become history; it is a nostalgic term applied in retrospect.¹¹ To contemporaries, a Parisian salon ran under the labels of “cercle,” “chez elle,” “société,” or “soirée.” Since it is hard to retrace the exact activities of any salon and since no detailed documentation of conversation exists, research into French salons has used conduct books, instructive dialogues, letters, memoirs, even novels, thereby setting a model for any study on similar formations in Britain. Although the bluestockings themselves did not necessarily consider French salonnières as their primary models, twenty-first-century researchers into sociability should be aware of scholarship on French salons, especially of its sources and methods.

Even though French salons were not copied in Britain, where court and crown were less domineering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than in France, the English were nevertheless aware of a special type of French sociability. In a comparison of English and French sociability between 1660 and 1715, Lawrence E. Klein shows that the English, while regarding France as “the nation of sociability par excellence,”¹² nevertheless began to claim a distinct English type of sociability built around a critique and mockery of French manners, while English plainness, moral fiber, and a subsequent lack of alienation were advocated as healthy alternatives by prominent Whig writers such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. Needless to say, this type of English sociability was not primarily woman-defined, whereas it was in France. Michèle Cohen’s seminal study Fashioning Masculinity show...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Traditions and Theories
• 2   Mary Berry and Her British Spaces
• 3   Mary Berry as a Learned Woman: Out of the Closet
• 4   Holland House and Lady Holland
• 5   The Holland House Set
• 6   The Countess of Blessington as Hostess
• 7   The Countess of Blessington as Writer and Editor
• 8   Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index