BLUESTOCKINGS

Elizabeth Montagu was not engaged by the prospect of being able to participate in the Royal Court of King George III.

The Bluestockings tended to gather in the homes of three women: Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Boscawen, and Elizabeth Vesey. The Classical and linguistic scholar Elizabeth Carter was another leading member.

Bluestockings engaged in rational conversation not in a civic context but also an orthodox Anglican one. A number of the group s members were close to senior Church of England bishops. They were aware of social activism as an aspect of their faith.

The term bluestocking was coined by the botanist and translator Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702-1771). It referred to the fact that the more formal white stockings were not being worn. White would have been worn had the gatherings been royal court occasions.

French salons tended to be more formal than London ones. Vesey's gatherings tended to be more informal than Montagu s. Dr Johnson preferred Vesey's gatherings to Montagu s.

Lord Lyttleton was an attendee. Montagu was an anonymous contributor to his political work Dialogues With The Dead (1760). Gilbert West was a cousin of Elizabeth Montagu. Lord Bath was an attendee.

The Bluestockings were interested in the Scottish Enlightenment. Montagu visited Edinburgh. She was friendly with Lord Kames and James Beattie. The Bluestockings were wary of religious scepticism, therefore, Hume was treated with a degree of wariness, as were the French salons.

Elizabeth Montagu's intellect and humour enabled her to develop a friendship with Margaret Duchess of Portland. She met her husband through her. She increased his wealth by astutely managing his Northumbrian coal interests.

Voltaire wrote an essay in which he stated that Shakespeare could not be regarded as being a first-rate playwright because he broke with the forms of Classical drama. Elizabeth Montagu wrote a riposte. She pointed that his technical flaws as a translator meant that he had misunderstood much of the material upon which he had based his arguments. She argued that women, like him, had not had a formal high-level education in the Classics, and that women were more receptive than men were to wayward, rather than formal, approaches. Her piece was well-received. In 1776 she visited Paris and was welcomed. She was invited to address the Academia Fran aise. She declined to do so. She justified this decision on the grounds that only twenty years before the institution had debated the value of Homer.

Hannah More was a second-generation attended. She wrote poetry. She embraced evangelism and extended the interest in religiously-based social activism into opening schools in Somerset for poor children. / Fanny Burney was also a second-generation member. She wrote The Witlings, a play that was never performed during her lifetime; Hester Thrale recommended that it should not be. In it, Burney satirised Montagu.

From the 1770s onwards the female aspect of the Bluestockings came to be stressed more.

In the 1780s the more feminised group became increasingly subject to adverse comment. There is a theory that men who were seeking to commercially exploit the growth.

Following the French Revolution, female learnedness became associated with radical politics. Byron, Coleridge and Hazlitt were hostile towards.

In the 1790s the circle declined.

Location: Montagu House, 22 Portman Square, W1H 7BG. Montagu's home. (purple, yellow)

David Backhouse 2024