In Our Time - The Bluestockings

Episode Date: June 5, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Bluestockings. Around the middle of the eighteenth century a small group of intellectual women began to meet regularly to discuss literature and other matters, inviting some of the leading thinkers of the day to take part in informal salons. In an age when women were not expected to be highly educated, the Bluestockings were sometimes regarded with suspicion or even hostility. But prominent members such as Elizabeth Montagu - known as 'the Queen of the Bluestockings', and author of an influential essay about Shakespeare - and the classicist Elizabeth Carter were highly regarded for their scholarship. Their accomplishments led to far greater acceptance of women as the intellectual equal of men, and furthered the cause of female education.With:Karen O'Brien Vice-Principal and Professor of English at King's College LondonElizabeth Eger Reader in English Literature at King's College LondonNicole Pohl Reader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the middle of the 18th century, a group of aristocratic women formed an informal club which met regularly at their homes in London. This group became known as the Blue Stockings, and at their gatherings, they discussed intellectual matters with the leading thinkers of the day. At a time when women had little access to formal education, the achievements of the blues stockings were considered remarkable. Leading members, such as Elizabeth Montague and Elizabeth Carter, were celebrated for their erudition and their success,

and their success led to greater acceptance of women as the intellectual equals of men. But as the 18th century due to a close, the blues stockings started to attract suspicion. Eventually their name even became a pejorative term. With me to discuss the blues stockings are, Karen O'Brien, Vice Principal and Professor of English at King's College London, Elizabeth Eager, reader in English literature, also of King's College London, and Nicole Pole, reader in English literature at the Oxford Brook University.

So Karen O'Brien, can you give us some idea of where the word blue stockings came from in the first place and what they were? Yes, certainly. The blue stockings were, as you said, a circle of brilliant, clever women, scholars, literary critics, novelists, and educational writers, who flourished in the second half of the 18th century and who coalesced around the homes of three London Society hostesses, Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Bivasi and Francis Boscawain. And the social gatherings of these women provided remarkable opportunities for cultural and literary exchange.

They were informal and yet serious, and they famously excluded the fashionable pursuits such as card playing and drinking alcohol, the drinks were tea and lemonade, and people were encouraged to mix an informal, way and part of that informality was that some of the male members came along in their blue woolen stockings instead of their more formal white silk stockings. Why did they were blue stockings, these dashing, garing men? I think they were cheaper and more comfortable, and they also denoted

that these were not courtly gatherings, and I think these gatherings were trying to signify their difference from the more courtly ritualistic gatherings that you might have found. Just one more question, it was clearly a trivial thing, the name, but still, why did they pick a name from chaps rather than have a name of their own? I'm not absolutely sure about that. It was actually a word that was used pejoratively about Cromwell's bare-bones parliaments in the mid-17th century, which is even worse. But as you said, initially the term was not pejorative. It just became so later in the 19th and 20th century.

So we have these aristocratic women a different, right, well, you go, sorry, interrupted. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think, so partly this is about a social gathering, a kind of social, an English version of the French social salon, but also more broadly, this was a network of intellectuals who fostered female scholarship, women publishing, creative endeavor, through their friendships, through their patronage, and through their letter writing. And they were very, very voluminous letter writers. And they were extraordinarily successful in achieving cultural visibility

for women writers in the 18th century. We're getting ahead of ourselves, so just let's stop there. What precedent was there any precedent for these sort of gatherings of women? There were. I mean, obviously women have got together to talk, but this is much more formal, it's much more public, It gets more we are doing this and we are seen to be doing it. Was there anything like that happened before?

There were precedents and they were principally continental precedents. So in the late 17th century in France, there had been gatherings of these kinds and there were French salons throughout the 18th century. And the more intellectual salons in France were inspired by the philosophy of Descartes and a group of women scholars formed salons around those, discussing those kind of philosophical ideas.

But I think nevertheless, there was something new about the idea of the female intellectual in late 17th century. in early 18th century of Britain. When we say we meet, they're meeting in very substantial houses, in one or two cases, among the most substantial houses in London. Are we talking about meeting every week, every four night, every month? Roughly monthly, sometimes more frequently,

but also the virtual meetings that take place through letter writing and visits and country houses during the summer season. Did they know that they were a sort of, I was about to say gang-out group, really? They were a group that had to keep going. Did they think of... we're in for the long haul here. We are doing something that will hold us together and have influence elsewhere.

Over time, they did develop quite a distinctive group self-consciousness, so they would refer to themselves as the Blue Stocking Club. So I think it probably started without any deliberate intent. But in terms of the kinds of spaces that they tried to create and their sense of themselves as a group, that was something that coalesced quite definitely and that other people recognised. Was this a late afternoon enterprise? You talked about tea?

I'm not sure, actually. Elizabeth might be on to answer that from terms of the time. No, come in a second. I'm poking why. Just like an image. How many of them? Where did they turn up? Four o'clock in the afternoon. How long did they stay?

I think it was the late afternoon and numbers varied. Sometimes it went on after midnight. So it really depended. I think it started as a very intimate gathering, but then it became something more public. Elizabeth. Elizabeth Hager has come into the Congress South Africa. Elizabeth Montague was one of the central figures,

the one we know about. we know most about apart from her 8,000 letters and her essay on Shakespeare and her massive wealth and she was a central hostess or controller. Could you tell us a bit more about her? Yes, well she was known as Queen of the Blue Stockings but like Karen said

she didn't really hold court she created a space for the life of the mind and I think going back to what Karen was saying about the meetings they were referred to as the Blue Stocking Club but also as a Lyceum and Academy, a college and we have to remember that women couldn't go to university at this time

and they were expected not to speak, to be seen and not heard. To be clever as a woman was very difficult and to display it in a fashionable metropolitan context was very new and she was determined to make her house accessible to men and women who were interested in discussing ideas and it was interesting because she brought together people of different politics and different intellectual backgrounds, particularly as her life progressed.

Where did she come from? How did she get to be the woman covered in diamonds who had these great, I was about so as far as, meetings? Well, she was born into the gentry and married into the aristocracy, and it was through her great friendship with Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Portland, who was the daughter of Edward Harley,

whose wonderful collection of books forms the basis of the British Library. And it was through this friendship when she was a very young girl about 12 or 13 and the earliest letters to the Duchess of Portland are mischievous, witty, subversive and highly entertaining. She makes fun of all the contemporary rituals of courtship, the prejudice against women.

And she really finds herself through this friendship and it's through the Duchess that she meets her husband, Edward Montague, who is much older than her a tendency towards solitude. and mathematics. And he has coal mines in Newcastle. And she takes charge of his business, really, and makes a lot of money. And I think it's a very important point because, as Karen said, she bans the aristocratic sins of gambling and drinking.

But she's very careful with her money. She never goes into debt in her lifetime. By the end of her life, the coal, Montague-Maine, is the best-selling coal on the market. and she has one of the largest bank accounts for an individual at Horan Co in Fleet Street. And you can go and look at the archives now, and it's fascinating to see how carefully she manages her money. It's an extraordinary social rocket, isn't it?

She's 12 or 13, she writes writing letters to extremely powerful eminent. Then he's taken up by her. That's what happened, isn't it? Because there's the Duchess of 20 years old, she's 13, and then introduced to the Earl of Sandwich, or the grandson of the Earl of Sanjew, sorry. as you say, solitary in mathematician and much older than she is. Marys,

do you have anything else to say about it? I'm suggesting quite wrongly, obviously, that there was some calculation involved. Definitely, she was very determined and ambitious, which are qualities which don't are always remarked upon if it's a woman, I think,

and if she had been the man of her day, this would not have really been so remarkable. She was very proud of the number of she played. She wrote in a letter to her sister Sarah Scott, I am a critic, a co-owner, a land steward, a sociable creature. And I think she enjoyed enabling people to do things. She was at the heart of a network. And she was interested in social progress, really. So she was seen to be a snob by some people and she was quite manipulative at times. But it's interesting when you think back to her youth,

there was some sense in which she was perhaps expected to be a lady's companion to the Duchess of Cavendish, but it was through her intellectual brilliance that Margaret Cavendish accepted her as an equal. And so she rose through the power of her wit, and I think she always remembered that. Do you, we speak about many, many letters, and you start the one, which he was when she was 13, about 8,000 letters. Was there a letter that says, I am going to form this sort of group, I want this to happen? Or a few letters, I mean, 100 people. I don't think so because I think it was

it evolved naturally from the social context in a way I think later in the group I mean women are inevitably aware of I mean Hannah Moore put it they're constantly having their sex taken into account I think they were self-conscious of being seen as a group by other people

but I don't think they necessarily planned it it happened and it is fascinating that the word blue stocking as you say we could compare it to other words used of Lenin societies like dilatante virtuoso it's a very specific English word and it's only it was very fashionable at first actually and it only becomes derogatory when it's associated purely with women which is interesting in terms of the history of prejudice against women yeah

Nicopal can we just be a bit more specific now what do you see the aims of the blue stockings and what would happen in a typical meeting it because there were several houses but that's there was several houses yeah so if you start off with the aims if you want to Elizabeth Want to you kind of nicely summarises this in what you call the blue stocking doctrine

so you can see that eventually they developed the kind of concept behind this and the doctrine was a rational conversation now rational conversation in the 18th century is a term that needs to be unpacked a bit because it refers back to the classical period it refers back to the Renaissance in terms of conversation In a way, that's what we're doing here, interestingly.

So rational conversation in the 18th century refers back to this idea of as convalizations in the Renaissance, also the classical philosophical debates, but debates that were not only intellectual, but led to moral improvement. So there was a sense of that if you exchanged conversations with other people, you improved each other as well. So there's a kind of social aspect to the conversation. conversation. Rational conversation, as appropriated by the blue stockings and meant that they bridged the kind of public and private in many ways because they brought the public into the

private homes. We could talk about the homes in a minute. It also meant intellectual and moral improvement. So Elizabeth Vizi talks about we are the guardians of virtue and we are the instructors of our minds. But virtue in the sense meant civic virtue, right? So it's a political, there's a political element in it. If you think about all the pamphlets that were written in the 18th century about rational conversation, we have someone like fielding, the art of conversation. And he talks back to this idea of the on it on, where, you know, the chivalrous idea of conversation where you say, okay, in a conversation, an on it on will

strive for truth, but also be charitable, benevolent, and share something. You also says something I've always thought, that if somebody speaks about something they know a great deal about, but they know nobody else knows much about it all the time, it's extremely bad manners and bad conversations. Yes, exactly, exactly.

We've come across that, didn't they? But also, in a way, that's a really good point, because, of course, if you look at conduct books in the 18th century, it always, always stipulate, they always stipulate that women must not show off intellectually at all. Main code, do you mean? Pardon? Men could. Oh, yeah.

No problem for that. Women, if precisely they knew a bit more than men, they would hold back, right? So the blue stocking said, well, nonsense with that. We are going to appropriate the idea of rational conversation. We can be irrational as women. Can I just ask you, you said you'd unpack this notion, Nicol. Can you just define, was there a set, almost like a formal conversational dance about this rational conversation? did you say we start at point A, this is the proposition,

what's the opposition to it, what's your view of that? Was it as formal as that? No, it wasn't. You mean like platonic dialogue. Now, what you're referring much more to is the French precedent. You will find that in the French salons, often the themes were prescribed or certainly there were themes that were not allowed to be spoken about.

The blue stocking assemblies, and we come to the point now about what happened in the evenings, was much more loose. But what was really important is to look at what the changes were that the blue stokings brought in. Now, if you look at contemporary accounts of evening assemblies or evening dues, dinner parties in the aristocracy or the middling classes at the end of the meal,

the women went to one corner and the men to the other. The men talked about, as Elizabeth Carter said, about the old English poets. And the women were titill-tatting, and doing their embroidery or something. And this is what the blue stockings were against. They wanted to bring the men and women together and all talk about literature, all talk about politics,

all talk about philosophy, in an unstructured way, in a way, but what was excluded was, as Karen said, the drinking, the card playing, the gossip. It was there to improve intellectually. Karen, Ibaran, back to you. Nicolz alluded to Elizabeth Vasey and another Elizabeth Carter.

Can you just briefly tell us a little about those two other Elizabeths? Elizabeth Carter was the leading scholar of the group. She was a phenomenal scholar of Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and numerous of languages. Educated by whom? She was more or less self-educated at home. She was the daughter of a clergyman. She had good access to books when she was growing up, but she forced herself by staying awake half the night to really learn these languages.

and when she was quite a young woman she made a name for herself as a poet. She came to know Samuel Johnson. She wrote a little bit for one of his periodicals, but her major project was to translate the Stoic Greek philosopher Epictetus. His works had never been translated in their entirety, and she embarked on this huge translation of all of his works,

which she published with an introduction and with notes, and it sold exceptionally well. So she is one of the blue stockings who made her mark as a scholar publishing and really claiming to be a first in this kind of endeavour. Elizabeth Bezier was another, I hesitate to use the word hostess, gatherer of a group together. She was rather different from Elizabeth Montague.

She was somewhat different, and I think probably self-consciously differentiated her salon from that of Elizabeth Montague. So she was another London Society hostess, but she almost obsessively tried to make her gatherings even more informal than those of Elizabeth Montague. So Montague's gatherings consisted often of a kind of arc of chairs where Montague would sit at one end of the room

and the conversation would kind of cascade down the room in a somewhat structured manner, a rational conversation, as Nicole said, whereas Vasey would deliberately scatter her chairs all around the room ahead of the salon to try and create these subsets of rational conversations and this spark of ideas during her salons. Elizabeth Lesteragher, can I come to you again?

We've alluded to literature, his civic virtue has been mentioned by Nicole. Can you tell us about, not necessarily naming them, if you do, you do. What other areas they went into? They represented. What did they bring to the table if there was a table,

these different women who turned up? There'd be about what, 20 turning up, that sort of thing? 15. Sometimes many more. Sometimes many more. I mean, I think they wanted to create interaction between different kinds of art and music. and so on.

But I think also it's important to see their emphasis on conversation in terms of commercial culture and the energy of the Enlightenment. And it's very difficult to know what they said because the conversation is notoriously. Now we have podcasts on the website of in our time. But we only can hear 18th century conversation in quite formal representations of it. But there is a wonderful poem by Hannah Moore,

who is one of the second generation figures who came to Montague's salon, and she writes a wonderful poem called Conversation. And I think it really epitomises this connection. Yes, just as a short extract, yes. Well, it's very forceful and concise definition. Our intellectual awe must shine, not slumber idly in the mine. Let education's moral mint the noblest images in print.

Let taste her curious touchstone hold. To try of standard be the gold. but tis thy commerce conversation must give it use by circulation, that noblest commerce of mankind, whose precious merchandise is mine. And I think that's an extraordinary bringing together of all sorts of historical transformations of the 18th century. And it's precisely because of that commercial energy.

I mean, Montague's home is a great, she's a great patron of new techniques in interior decoration. So people praise her use of Ormalu or her wonderful interior paintings and her own feather screens at the end of her life were an extraordinary site in London. Angelica Kaufman worked on one of her interiors in Portman Square. It's about being modern and fashionable, but also somehow being morally virtuous at the same time.

I think that that's very difficult for, contemporary people to understand because conspicuous consumption on that level doesn't go with intellectual. No, it does seem, doesn't it, really? That the masses of money coming out of the coal mines of Northumbria, a lot of it landing around the neck of Elizabeth Montague in the form of her addiction to diamonds and this building of this new house. But that's almost to one side of she's driving through this. I suppose a lot of listeners would be associating in their minds now,

so it's worth turning to as a salon. We know of it in the terms of the French salon. And there was a relationship, Nicole, but will you tell us more about it? The relationship was quite interesting and complicated in many ways. So contemporaries like Roxel called Elizabeth Montague, the Madame du Defend of the English capital, so making immediate references to 18th century French saloniers. and Elizabeth Montague was very aware of French salons.

She went herself in 1776 to Paris to visit Madame Dufant, Madame Geoffran, all the kind of famous saloniers themselves. Is it worth saying, I'm interrupting only to add to it, that she would be very welcome there because of her essay on Shakespeare. Exactly. She wrote an essay on Shakespeare, attacking Voltaire. Can you take that, of course, attacking Voltaire? Well, can you take that, of course, attacking Voltaire was the key to her popularity.

It was attacking Walter and engaging with him. And actually, it was about re-establishing Shakespeare's reputation in the 18th century as a main English playwright. So this was the project. But she did it say it said only a woman could do this way. Yes. Could you say a bit more about that? Because it's fascinating. I think Elizabeth probably knows more about the essay in Shakespeare.

But it was precisely that she took on board and saying, only a woman can do this. and I have enough intellectual strength and knowledge to defend Shakespeare against such a great thinker as Voltaire. And she became quite infamous because of this essay, which was very well received. I mean, Shakespeare's position in the 18th century was slightly underrated, if we think about it. And people ended, changed Shakespeare's endings, only Garrick, in the end, because of. of Elizabeth Montague and a couple of other writers picked up on Shakespeare again as his main English writer. So her Montague's reputation as an essayist, if you want to, and as a salon lady, as well as the lady of society, of polite society, preceded Elizabeth Montague when she went to Paris.

And of course, she herself received loads of French writers and thinkers herself, so she received in England the Neckers, she received the diplomat Masarini, the Duke de Nouvernais. She knew loads of important people. So when she went to Paris herself in 76, she went there to look for the salons of Louis XIV. Did she find something?

What did she copy from them? I don't think she copied anything from them, which is really important. The French salons were slightly more formal. They were devised, as I mentioned earlier, by themes much more. You had someone like the Madame de Scruiderie in the 17th century

who had her sum at ease, so every Saturday there meant. You had Madame de Defon who said, well, these are the people I will invite. Madame Geoffrey said on Tuesdays and invite these people on Wednesdays these people. The blue stockings didn't do that at all. Elizabeth Montague was incredibly

impressed by the politeness and the style of the 18th century French salons. However, she made a political comparison between France and England in the 18th century. She took England and English liberty and English rationalism as a yardstick against the French and said actually what we have in England is much more important, we have rationalism and proper rational conversation.

Which takes us, thank you very much, which takes us Karen O'Brien, I think to the Blue Stockers' connection with some thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yes, they were very very interested, obviously in the French, Enlightenment, but also in the Scottish Enlightenment, the home of the most advanced economic and social thinking of the day. Montague herself visited Edinburgh and she made friends with a number of lead thinkers. And I think elaborating on this idea... She always made friends with the leading thinkers, didn't you? Yes, she did.

She made friends with Lord Caimes, with James Beatty and with a number of thinkers and read a great many more. I think if we're thinking about this idea of rational conversation, it's very interesting in this context because the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers wrote about and thought about the extent to which a mixed gender public sphere, a more visible role for women, and the role of sociability in modern society defined Britain as an advanced civilisation. So I think she used some of those ideas to think through what it might mean to have women in a prominent public role

in British cultural life. I think the second thing to say is the Scottish Enlightenment was also home of some of the very advanced literary criticism of its day, Kames himself, wrote her an elements of criticism, a literary critical primer. and he incorporated into that work some of Elizabeth Montague's letters so she wrote him a very long letter

and he quite simply lifted it and incorporated so there was a sense of collaboration between the blue stockings. Well it was with her tacit permission but there was a sense of collaboration between her and the Scottish Enlightenment. And Hume, the ideas of Hume were brought into this group.

They were very well aware of the ideas of Hume I think an important thing to say and it's also a difference I think between the blue stockings and the French is that they were very suspicious of anything that had a tinge of religious scepticism. So Hume was a little bit suspect from that point of view. The French salons were a little bit suspect from that point of view.

There was a lot of covert talk about materialism and atheism and Montague and her friends did not like that kind of thing. Can we just, while we're on the view, just check a point with you here. Men were, it was mainly women, but men were admitted to the group. Oh, yeah. And again, it's Samuel Johnson turning up.

It's having Berg turning up. It's the top men. The top thinkers, the top thinkers that she ropes in to these, which is wonderful. I think they're attracted to her, actually. It is a really important point, I think, because actually, if you ask people nowadays, they think blue stockings are women. But actually, what's overlooked is that they were initially, from the 1750s onwards, there were loads of men.

So Benjamin Stillingfleet, he of the Blue Stockings, who gave the name to the Blue Stockings, was a botanist and translator and author. We had Samuel Johnson, who you mentioned, but he didn't get on so well with Elizabeth Montague. They ended up in fights. I think we had two big egos next to each other. That didn't work.

He preferred to go to Elizabeth Visey, who was much more relaxed about her conversation and her structure. Yes, that's the other thing, and didn't interrupt him. She was a bit more, to we say, relaxed about the whole thing. And we have Lord Littleton, of course, who was a correspondent of Elizabeth. of Montague but visited the salons as well. And he is really important because we talked about the essay on Shakespeare.

We shouldn't forget that she also contributed three sections to Littleton's Dialogues of the Dead. And that's a really important document. The Dialogs of the Dead were published in 1760, and Elizabeth Montague was encouraged to contribute anonymously three dialogues to this book. And the Dialogues of the Dead are basically political tracks for the... kind of reformation of English society. So we go back to this idea of the civic virtue. This is exactly what the Blue Stockings brought into in many ways.

So he was very important. We have Lord Bath, who came in himself quite a turbulent and political career. He was a confidant and friend of Elizabeth Montague, Samuel Johnson, we mentioned. And then we have Gilbert West, who was himself a poet and translator, but also cousin of Elizabeth Montague. I think from the 70 and 70s onwards, and someone like Hester Thrail is partially guilty of that,

people focused much more on the female aspect of the society of the blue stockings. So in Threliana, for instance, she reflects all on the women together, being the blue stockings. But one shouldn't forget that there was that mixed-sex debate, which was part of expanding the range that I mentioned at the beginning of the sociability of English society. Can I turn to Elizabeth, Elizabeth,

when you were talking about Shakespeare, Nicole, you pointed across to Elizabeth. We haven't quite nailed it, I think. Voltaire's essay basically said, Shakespeare did not follow the classical rules of drama and therefore he was not first-rate. I'm using an awful phrase.

and he was he could be faulted here and Elizabeth Montague went back and attacked him on that basis and she also said only women can understand women can understand Shakespeare because they're women so there's two things though what did she say and why she think only women could do it well the first thing is that she was very daring

to take on Voltaire head on and she criticises him on purely intellectual grounds she retranslates his mistranslations back into bad English to point out that he doesn't understand the language, which is a very... It's quite a provocative thing to do. And I think she could do it in a way that Samuel Johnson probably wouldn't dare to.

But the other argument that women understand Shakespeare is very important, I think, because it's quite strategic on one level. Women don't have, usually have an education in the classics. They express them. themselves in the vernacular language. At the beginning of the 18th century, this is still a very live debate, the tension between ancient and modern literature.

These women are at the forefront, the cutting edge of not only contributing to the idea of a national literature, which is, I mean, you ask some what other contributions women's made. There's a wonderful editor of poetry anthology, Elizabeth Cooper. But can we stick to this essay and, Sorry.

Oh, no, absolutely. It's good to stick to it. So she says, right, can you just go on? Yes, well, I think one fascinating thing is when she, she publishes it anonymously, but it soon becomes very popular and then she owns it and puts her name to it, which was a quite common practice in the 18th century. But when she goes to France, she's invited to the Academy Frances to defend herself or to defend Shakespeare in public.

And she says she refuses to speak because she says it's beneath her dignity. because she knows that in the same institution they were debating the value of Homer 20 years ago. Homer, the great poet of the oral tradition. And I think given that the institution didn't formally incorporate a woman into their... A woman member of the French Academy doesn't exist until 1980.

And I think it's important to say that because in England, these women, they do inhabit the central cultural institutions of their time, and yet they nevertheless, they feel excluded. and I think it's fascinating to think historically about people who both want to belong but don't belong. I think it's a fascinating essay. We have to move on now, but one thing she says

is that, look, we weren't formally educated in Latin and Greek. Neither were Shakespeare. So that gives us a more understanding, more understanding of the way he had to tackle this. And also we don't believe in your rules. We believe in things going waywardly and by indirections, as it were. We have to move on. I know we could spend all morning,

but we haven't got all morning. Can we turn now, Karen, to their views on religion? Yes, this was quite strongly an Anglican movement. A number of the blue stockings were very closely tied to archbishops of Canterbury and leading Anglican theologians of their day. So it's important to see the idea of rational conversation of virtue, partly in a civic context, but also in a religious context. And they think very deeply a number of them about the ways in which

having religious faith and being involved in a church is a kind of social activism. So how does it inspire philanthropy? How do you balance the claims of your conscience and what you owe to yourself as a rational creature and what you owe to society? So I think it's important to see this as a kind of social Anglicanism. In the second generation, Hannah Moore, who wrote that conversation poem that Elizabeth quoted, moved into the evangelical wing of the church, opened a number of Sunday schools in Somerset,

was very instrumental in a school movement. for poorer children. So it has quite a significant evangelical 19th century legacy in terms of religiously motivated educational projects and philanthropy. But there were stern supporters of the Anglican ascendancy, really.

They were, and they were deeply implicated in terms of family, in terms of social and personal ties in that ascendancy. And they didn't want it to exaggerate it at the one end. Of course, they didn't want it to pose at the other end. Most of them wouldn't have liked it too radical or too evangelical at one end and they certainly didn't want it too dissenting at the other.

They began to, you talk about the second generation. So are we, yeah, well, can we just turn to you again, Elizabeth. Fanny Bernie, the novelist, was part of what's called the second generation. So the first generation, I say 15, so 1750 to 65 or 17, until about 75 or 80, another group, big group come in, painters. What does Fanny Bernie tell us about the group? Because she wrote a lot, and she had strong, What does she say that's interesting about the blue stockings?

Well, her diary is the fascinating accounts of the meetings and she's very much being presented to them as a young protege, an emerging talent. She's very double-edged because she owes a lot to these women and in a way she's associated with them because her ability is celebrating the context of, of the blue stocking salon. And yet she's quite satirical as well.

And she wrote a play that was never performed in her lifetime called The Whitlings, in which she satirizes Elizabeth Montague as Lady Smatter. And her father... Lady Smatter? Yes. Good work, too. And I think she was... Many creative women experienced great ambivalence in terms of the way in which they're singled out as women.

And she apparently... all her writings at the age of 15 because she wasn't sure that she could cope with the implications of her intellectual energies. And I think it's worth remembering that several women of this period, Sarah Scott, the sister of Elizabeth Montague,

Jane Austen indeed, left strict instructions for many of their writings to be burnt at the point of death. So I think what's fascinating about Bernie is that she acknowledges in some of her writings, in some of her accounts of the blue stockings, the uncomfortable

competitive and, well, particularly the acid and savage nature of competition between women and between the sexes. Nicole, can we take that as a cue to discussing the decline in the 1790s, which the Bluestock has certainly had? Can you take on from that what you thought were the main causes or the causes? Sure, of course. And again, actually, I would come back to the play The Wittles. Whittlings because Hester Thraeel suggested not to perform the play. Hester Threll was a friend of Tamil Johnson. Yes, exactly, and kind of looked after him.

And she recommended not to have the Whitlings performed because it would offend the blue stockings. And you can see that actually earlier, even not necessarily in the 1790s, but from the 1780s when the blue stocking circles was sort of feminized, as in people only focused now on the female members, the blue stockings, you find increasingly a kind of satirical stance and a pejorative stance towards

the blue stockings, which has to do in that time, I think, with the increasing literacy, but also the increasing literary market for women, so as writers, as authors. So why do you increase the literature market turn people against them? Because there were competition to the men, of course. And later in the romantic period, you have that

much more outspoken, and I've got some nice phrases there, sort of by Coleraghanes and Hazlett, who were very kind of vicious against the blue stockings much later. So we have that, that men found that there was a kind of competition in the literary marketplace. From 1789 onwards, the idea of female learnedness was related to the French Revolution, to radical politics, to people like Alain de Guzge, of course, who wrote their pamphlets and her own kind of declaration for the human rights.

and you have suddenly terms like Gallic Frenzy and thrown against the... And also non-support of the radical women in France. Yes, of course. In fact, non-support, in one case of fish wives, right? The fish wives, yes, exactly. So suddenly words like the fishwives and Gallic Frenzy were used to describe the blue stockings.

It's quite interesting because the blue stockings themselves were not politically terribly radical. I mean, Sarah Scott, the sister of Elizabeth Montague, who writes in a letter to her sister about those fish wives and how outrageous there were. So the 1790s, the kind of anti-French

and anti-radical, political radical movement, churned people against the blue stockings. And towards the turn of the century and the romantic period, you will find that this becomes more and more prevalent in public culture.

It's not disappointing. Oh, they were vicious. They were absolutely vicious. I know. I've got lots of questions. We've put them up on whatever things you put things up on. We've just... But if I could just add that,

it was not only against the blue stockings, it was against learned women themselves. So Haslett made it very clear, is that he doesn't want to know, he doesn't give a fig, he says, but women who know what an author is. He made that very clear. So it was a learned woman. I like Haslet.

Well, now it seemed to unlike him, but it's about. Learn it to women. And authors and authority. Yes. Because I think which we haven't really said is that the one thing women could own in this age is their literary property. And it was one means of achieving independence, financial independence, which is very important. And I think there is a link between the history of women's writing and the history of rights, which...

Can I take a kind of shortcut with you, Karen, here? We've got Mary Walsoncraft heaving up in the 1790s who is a woman who has educated herself in much society. Anyway, it gets an education through the dissenting churches. The churches are moving into education. Now, the salons are followed by the riches are followed by church, by religious people, giving women education. She was a radical. One of the blue stockings called her a hyena in petticoats.

They were against her and what she stood for. I would think it's partly of that sort of attitude that the blue stockings began to wither away and really withered through the 19th century. Is there anything in that? I think you're right. In some ways, Mary Wilson-Croft, was very indebted to the blue stockings,

to their ideals about education as something that gives you a mental reservoir, but at the same time allows you to take on certain kinds of social responsibility. But clearly, she pushed that in the direction of a very vigorous argument for women's civil and religious rights and political rights. So I wouldn't want to overly polarise them. At the same time, people like Mary Wollstonecroft made the wider public, nervous and suspicious of radical female intellectuals. At the same time, as Elizabeth and Nicole have indicated,

the intellectual female novel continues to flourish in the early 19th century right the way through to George Eliot. So we have Sarah Scott, the sister of Elizabeth Montague, writing a really interesting set of novels in the mid-18th century. And we have all the way through the 19th century novelists like George Eliot who create blue-stocking characters like Dorothea Brooks, who continue to embody that idea of rational conversation and the educated woman. And that is a paradox that goes through. But why does the name become pejorative? The name Blue Stoff. I think it actually has already become pejorative in the 17th century.

It was used as barbleau in France against the Precious. And Molière makes fun of the baroque as well. We're going to stick to us now. I know. 18th century. We're talking about the 18th century. In the 19th century, it became a pejorative word. It became a pejorative word because it was about the learned women, the manly woman, so to

say, the unsexed females who were intellectual women who were a threat to men. I think it resurfaces when you get the first generation of women going to university in the late 19th century. You see it again. I mean, blue stocking becomes a term to describe someone dowdy, not someone fashionable. And I think it's what's fascinating is that it's an insult because it's women have been pushed out of these opportunities. And it's a means of excluding them. It's misogynistic. And we shouldn't forget that because, you know, the first.

fact is the Royal Academy of Arts, Angelica Kaufman's a founding member. The next time historically that they accept a female member is 1922. If you think of that in relation to suffrage, the vote, you know, I think what the history of Blue Stockings tells us is that the history of feminism is not a simple tale of progress. It's quite on the surface and I'm going to be biffed if I don't finish now. Thank you very much, Elizabeth Hager, Karen O'Brien, Nicole Pole. And next week we were talking about Robert Boyle. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. An awful lot of good stuff was said. I mean, what do you think? You're going to tell me what you didn't say, okay, but what you did say I think was cover the field quite well. I think so. The one thing I thought the story we didn't talk about was friendship.

Yes. Because I think that it's very moving when you read blues talking letters. They're often very intimate. And I think that's something that, you know, Wilsoncraft plays great. value on friendship as well as something that was almost utopian in because it was different from love or sexual love

that you know sexual love is unreliable and fickle and dangerous whereas friendship was something that you could commit to and it was morally That's a recurring theme over 2,000 or 3,000 years as you know really. They had the friendship being in a way superior to love

But is that classical, that Ciceroonian idea of friendship and how might you apply it to female friendships and take them more seriously? Because in the 18th century, people underestimate a female friendship going back to gossip and titletattle. Actually, this idea that you had friendship in a rational way as well. That's what the blue stookings took on. And we didn't get the chance to talk about the letters either

because the letters are really interesting because of their kind of documents about, as Lizzie said, about friendship, about politics, how Elizabeth Montague was not really involved in the court circles but was very political, very expressively political. Was she excluded from the court circle? Not excluded, but was she not up to snuff? She opted out, I think her dad had been happy

if she went, like as Fanny Bernie did, spent all her time standing around, listening to concerts at the court of Georgia Third. It was notoriously deadening and ghastly. Actually, the madness of George of Third, that film captures really well, the sheer boredom of being a sort of lady in waiting to the Queen and standing. So she didn't want to do that, but I think her father would have been

delighted if she would have been delighted if she She'd have that as a career. She stays yourself as a like queen because one of the French visitors said, oh, this is like a levy at her. You know, she was the lady of the castle, as Fannie Boni said. And she was a bit of a queen

of the blue stockings in that way. So as if she had her alternative court. Yeah. It's quite interesting, which Elizabeth Visi, of course, didn't have. I was uneasy. I'd like to have explored the relationship between the miners and the northeast. and the diamonds in London.

I agree. I mean, because she definitely thought that she, I mean, she was, I guess, by the standards of her day, a kind enough employer. She had some, she established some schools, didn't she for the miners' children? She had some concern for their welfare. But mining in the 18th century

was a seriously brutal and dangerous activity and children would be said down to mind. It's fascinating, isn't it? It's not just sort of blame her anything. It's just the way that mindsets change. They probably didn't. to go to her that maybe with a lot of this enormous money she should improve the safety in mines and pay people more

because that wasn't what was happening in the life she saw. I think it did to an extent it's just that the benchmark was so low that it was quite easy to congratulate yourself on doing a little better than everybody else. Well what she did is she gave those charity dinners, didn't she, to the miners? And then she, the charity dinners

to her farm labourers as well. And I read yesterday a letter to James where she said, oh, I gave them more loads of food and gave them sort of a little treat in a way. But the principle was frugality. So I'm not giving them too much

to make them lazy. I'm just giving them enough just to kind of encourage them to work a bit harder for me. So there's a double-edged sword with charity, isn't there? Well, there is in that case, yeah. I also think, sorry, I also think

another interesting thing is that awareness of the Industrial Revolution, It's slow to dawn on people in London in the later 18th century, what's really happening. And I would love to know, to what extent that was part of the conversation. Did people really understand industrial transformation in the North and in the Midlands in London? And was she an agent of that understanding? We honestly don't know. Enter Tom, Morris, stage left, with offers of riches such as we're never known at Portman House.

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