by Adams, Max;
No artist painted a portrait of Mary Astell – at least, none survives; she published anonymously, sometimes as ‘A lover of her sex’, and was wilfully neglected by historians of English thought until the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, finally, fresh editions of her works have been published. One of two great women scholars of her generation to emerge from the relative obscurity of Newcastle upon Tyne – the other was her friend, the linguist Elizabeth Elstob, who was the first to produce an English–Anglo-Saxon grammar11 – she lived her adult life in London among a glittering array of thinkers, many of them formidable women, the forerunners of the bluestockings,≈ who pass muster as an early Enlightenment all their own and for whom Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14) was an inspirational patroness.
In public, Mary Astell professed herself uninterested in earthly love, reserving it for the Divine being. Logic and rationality were her passions, above all in the fields of women’s education, religion, constitutional reform and the social contract, on which she held startling, penetrating views. She never married, but she was always known as Mrs Astell. She formed intellectual relationships with the few men whom she admired. Her friendships of passion, her unconsummated desires, which she called ‘weaknesses’, were reserved for women: ‘…it is a very difficult thing for me to love at all without something of desire’, she wrote to John Norris. On the whole, while admitting that some marriages might be happy, she saw much evidence that the institution was designed to enslave, or oppress:
To be yok’d for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied one’s most innocent desires, for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose Follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them; is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it…12
And…
If none were to Marry, but Men of strict Vertue and Honour, I doubt the World would be but thinly peopled.
And again…
If a Woman can neither Love nor Honour, she does ill in promising to Obey.
Mary was born in 1666, a year before the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost, far from the vibrant chaos and burning streets of London. Her father, and her mother’s family, belonged in Newcastle’s lucrative coal trade. The Northumbrian town, perhaps the second largest in England at this period, had been resolutely royalist during the Civil War and paid the price afterwards. Mary, in sympathy with her fellow townsmen, thought the Republic of 1649–59 a mean, undemocratic project…
The short [truth] is, the true and the principal Cause of that Great Rebellion, and that Horrid fact which compleated it, and which we can never enough deplore, was this: Some Cunning and Self-ended Men, whose Wickedness was equal to their Craft, and their Craft sufficient to carry them thro’ their Wickedness; these had Thoughts and Meanings to destroy the Government in Church and State, and to set up a Model of their own Invention, agreeable to their own private Interests and Designs, under the specious Pretences of the Peoples Rights and Liberties. They did not indeed speak out, and declare this at first, for that wou’d have spoil’d the Intrigue, every body wou’d have abhorr’d them; but a little Discernment might have found what they drove at. For to lessen and incroach upon the Royal Authority, is the only way to null it by degrees…13
In later life, Mary flirted very seriously with Jacobitism and seems to have acted as a conduit for correspondence between more active plotters in support of the Stuart cause. Robert Walpole, Britain’s first ‘prime minister’ from about 1721 to 1742, went so far as to have her followed. The religious and political fervour of the period between the Civil War, the Protestant coup of 1688 and the first Jacobite uprising in 1715, during which period the British monarchy was in almost permanent crisis, provides a tense backdrop to a life in which thinking about a woman’s place in society was a worthy calling. Even so, for Mary Astell, gender was – or should be – less important than rank, and the accession of a woman to the throne of England was proof of her logic:
If every Man is by Nature superior of every Woman it would be a Sin in any Woman to have Dominion over any Man, and the greatest Queen ought not to command but to obey her Footman.14
When Mary’s father died in 1678, he left the family in straitened circumstances. Mary was a child of talents, more inclined to read and to hone her skills in abstract thought than to indulge in what she saw as girlish fancies. Fortunately, she was indulged in a moral and literary education by an uncle, Ralph Astell, through whose tuition she honed her mind:
Hitherto I have courted Truth with a kind of Romantick Passion, in spite of all Difficulties and Discouragements: for knowledge is thought so unnecessary an Accomplishment for a Woman, that few will give themselves the Trouble to assist us in the Attainment of it.15
But Ralph lost his position as curate in St Nicholas’s Cathedral for being drunk in the pulpit; he died a year later and she was left without a tutor to direct her studies. Her family’s social stock was low; her prospects were poor. At the age of twenty-one, Mary travelled 300 miles south to London, perhaps to find work as a governess. When, after a few unsuccessful months, she was obliged to pawn her clothes, she wrote a begging letter – characteristically poised and humorous – to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft. He responded kindly with money and introductions, through which she found her long-time publisher Richard Wilkin. She began a correspondence with the philosopher John Norris, which he published and which drew attention to her writing and thinking. In 1694 she won immediate and lasting fame with A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, in which she argued the case for girls to be educated away from men, in what amounted to Protestant convents without vows – she might have called them beguinages, or Cities of Ladies – so that, when they emerged into society, they might hold their own and not be cowed. How could men complain that women did not think rationally, when they withheld from them the means of education in rational thought? Why did parents not invest in their daughters’ minds instead of their dowries?
Seeing it is ignorance, either habitual or actual, which is the cause of all Sin, how are they like to escape this, who are bred up in that? That therefore women are unprofitable to most, and a plague and dishonour to some Men is not much to be regretted on account of the Men, because ’tis the product of their own folly, in denying them the benefits of an ingenuous and liberal Education.16
Women were given brains and the aptitude to reason, just as men were; they should use them. In this view, as in many others, she had much in common with Christine de Pizan; she was, in fact, proposing a secularised version of what had existed for hundreds of years in monastic guise before the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41). Like Christine, she had many male admirers and quite a number of enemies; few of the latter could hold their own against her. A Serious Proposal, with a second volume published in 1697,∂ went to six editions in her lifetime. Daniel Defoe, author and sometime government spy, immediately took up the idea of female colleges and in 1719 published his own version of the proposal. Later in the century, Dr Johnson borrowed the idea.
Mary was the talk of the town, even among those who thought the idea ridiculous or, worse, impracticable. She was in good company. Chelsea, in the time of Queen Anne, was a hotspot of female wealth, talent and literary taste, enjoying a relatively unpolluted and very scenic stretch of the River Thames and lying far enough from the hubbub of the City to offer seclusion for those who sought it.
Mary’s biographer Ruth Perry offers a telling cameo of Chelsea life in that era, in an advertisement for a concert…
In Honour of the Queen’s coronation; The Ladies Consort of Musick, by Subscription of several Ladies of Quality… at the Royal College of Chelsea… The Hall to be well illuminated; the
said Consort to begin at exactly five a clock, and to hold 3 full hours. Each ticket 5s. Notice that the Moon will shine, the Tide serve, and a guard placed from the College to St James’s Park, for the safe return of the Ladies.17
Perhaps, if Queen Anne had survived another decade, if she had not been put off by whispers in her ear warning of popery, she might have provided the funds and patronage to put Astell’s great idea into effect and revolutionised women’s education in England, just as Elizabeth Cellier’s plans for a college of midwifery might have advanced obstetric medicine under James VII/II. As it was, English women’s education at the turn of the eighteenth century was in a woeful state. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge founded women’s colleges until well into the nineteenth century. Even so, Mary’s writing and her sparkling speaking skills inspired the work of a large number of women in positions both to resent the lack of educational opportunity for women and to act: among them Elizabeth Elstob, the Anglo-Saxonist; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, famous for her brilliant Ottoman letters – which Mary encouraged her to publish – and her smallpox inoculation campaign; and Judith Drake, author of ‘An essay in defence of the female sex’ of 1696.
Sometimes it was not enough to think: one must act. In 1709 Mary, under the sponsorship of her wealthy women friends, set up a charitable school for thirty girls, the dependants of Chelsea’s military pensioners, and was employed as its schoolmistress. She found herself for once in tune with the spirit of the age: by the end of the 1720s the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698, had set up more than one hundred new charity schools for boys and girls in London alone. The literate young women who graduated from these schools were apprenticed as seamstresses, housemaids and cooks; most of the boys became fishermen or Thames watermen.
Some of Mary Astell’s views may now seem rather retrograde; others are expressed with the sort of rhetorical power that cannot be ignored. But as a shining light in London’s early eighteenth-century intelligentsia, she deserves a more prominent place than she has often been allowed in the line of great British thinkers – and writers about thinking – which runs from More, Hobbes and Locke through to Paine and Smith, Bentham, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Owen and the Mills; and beyond. She died in 1731 after enduring a mastectomy.
Mary Astell’s first biographer was George Ballard, whose Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain of 1752 was a landmark in drawing together the lives of female writers, theologians, artists, scientists and linguists. Many of them, like the Tudor scholar Margaret Roper (1505–44), daughter of Thomas More, and calligrapher Elizabeth Lucar (1510–37) are much more obscure than Mary Astell. Some are conspicuous for their large output of devotional writing. Ballard acknowledged his inability to find sufficient material on other women whom he admired. The Dutch painter-poet and linguist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) and the English linguist Bathsua Makin (c.1600–c.1675) were both, like Mary, polymaths and campaigners for women’s education and liberty. Ballard might also have included Hannah Woolley (1622–c.1675), who earned her living writing books on household management long before Isabella Beeton; and the playwright, novelist and spy Aphra Behn (c.1640–1689).
Celia Fiennes
Each of those women would justify a biographical sketch in their own right. But I want to end this series of stories with a nod to the first, that of the pilgrim nun Egeria. Nothing inspires the unquiet spirit like travel and few have travelled better, or written about their journeys with more purpose, than Celia Fiennes (1662–1741).
To the Reader
…Now thus much without vanity may be asserted of the subject, that if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to Inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve ffrom these Epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness? – it would also fform such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil Itch of overvalueing fforeign parts…18
So runs the opening of Celia Fiennes’ s collection of her travel journeys, completed in 1702 and which, she says disingenuously, she never meant to be read. Celia is not an important historical personage; so far as we know she had little effect on her contemporaries, was not widely read until 150 years after her death and was not a ‘great’ writer. She owned some land with a salt mine on it; she left some baubles in her will; she has only recently found her way into the Dictionary of National Biography (2004). For social historians and historical geographers, however, her journals are a gold mine.
Celia stands out for the brilliance of her observation, for her unaffected conversational style, her opinionated views and her sheer chutzpah in riding side-saddle, often accompanied by two servants, through every county in England over a period of more than two decades – at a time when few men would have embarked on such a feat. Maybe there is something in the Fiennes genes.
She was born in Newton Tony in Wiltshire in 1741, the daughter of one of Cromwell’s colonels. She was Whiggish by temperament, solidly Anglican, unsentimental, all for the new and down with the old; a staunch supporter of William III and Mary. She breezed through towns, villages, great houses and manufactories; poured scorn on idlers and nature, loved neat, tidy streets, gardens, fine spa springs – her favourites were those at Bath and at Tunbridge Wells – and good beer. No highwayman, rutted track, ill-mannered wifey or injury put her much out of countenance. Where her contemporary, Daniel Defoe, rode on a mission to watch for signs of sedition, Celia travelled for pleasure and for her constitution. She and the pilgrim Egeria would have got along splendidly. After her move to reside in London in 1691 she may have known Mary Astell, although their views on philosophy and monarchy are unlikely to have endeared them to one another.
In this first excerpt from her diary she approaches the fen-island town of Ely in East Anglia, on a 1698 tour that would take her as far north as Newcastle. Her boyish curiosity and love of numbers, weights and measures, her dry wit, eye for detail and sleeves-rolled-up pragmatism are on unashamed display:
All this while Ely minster is in one’s view at a mile distant you would think, but go, it is a Long 4 miles. A mile distant from the town is a Little Hamlet from which I descended from a steep hill and so Cross a bridge over water which Enters into the Island of Ely, and so you pass a flatt on a Gravel Causey which way the Bishop is at the Charge to repaire Else there would be no passing in the summer. This is secured by some dikes which surround more grounds as the former, full of Rows of trees and willows round them which makes Ely looke finely through those trees, and that stands very high. In the winter this Caussey is over flowed and they have no way but boates to pass in. They Cut peate out of some of these grounds. The raines now had fallen so as in some places near ye Citty ye Caussey was Covered, and a Remarkable deliverance I had, for my horse Earnest to drinke ran to get more depth of water than the Caussey had, was on the brinke of one of these dikes, but by a speciall providence which I desire never to forget and allways to be thankfull for, Escaped. That bridge was over the River Linn which Comes from Norfolke and does almost Encompass the island of Ely…
At this bridge is a gate, but by reason of ye great raines the roades were full of water, even quite to the town which you ascend a very steep hill into, but the dirtyest place I ever saw, not a bitt of pitching in the streetes, so its a perfect quagmire the whole Citty, only just about the palace and Churches the streetes are well enough for breadth, but for want of pitching it seemes only a harbour to breed and nest vermine in of which there is plenty Enough, so that tho’ my Chamber was near 20 Stepps up I had froggs and slow worms and snailes in my Roome, but suppose it was brought up wth the faggotts. But it Cannot but be infested with all such things being altogether moorish ffenny ground which Lyes Low: it is true were the Least Care taken to pitch th
eir streetes it would make it Looke more properly an habitation for human beings and not a Cage or nest of unclean Creatures. It must needs be very unhealthy tho’ the natives say much to the Contrary which proceeds from Custom and use, otherwise to persons born in up and dry Countryes it must destroy them Like Rotten sheep in Consumptions and Rhums.19
She is more admiring of Ely’s cathedral (founded by St Æthelthrythπ in 673), with its unique fourteenth-century lantern…
The Lanthorn in the quire is vastly high and delicately painted and fine Carv’d worke all of wood, in it the bells used to be hung, five, the dimention of the biggest was so much when they rung them it shooke the quire so and the Carv’d worke that it was thought unsafe, therefore they were taken down. Its 80 odd steps to the top of the Lanthorn and 160 steps round in Compass.
Celia was equally interested in the engineering marvels of her day, as a visit to Lyme Regis shows. She described it as
…A seaport place open to the main ocean, and so high and bleake Sea, that to secure the Harbour for shipps they have been at a great Charge to build a Mold from the town with stone like a halfe Moon, which they call the Cobb; its raised with a high wall and this runns into the Sea a good Compass [so] that the Shipps rides safely within it, when the tide is out we may see the foundations of some part of it – that is the tyme they looke over it to see any breach and repaire it immediately, else the tide come with so much violence would soone beate it down – there is some part of it low and only is to joyne the rest to the land, and at high water is all Cover’d of such a depth of water that shipps may pass over it to enter the Cobb or halfe moone, which is difficult for fforeigners to attempt, being ignorant…20