“Far Other Times Are These”: The Bluestockings in the Time of Ossian
As early as 1761 Elizabeth Montagu, Queen of the Blues, began hold ing eccentric dinner parties, during which guests "had the feast of shells and drank out of a nautilus shell to the immortal memory of Ossian."1 In honor of Ossian, the recently rediscovered Highland bard, Montagu recreated-down to the unconventional stemware-the ceremonial meals of the Highland warriors described by Ossian's self-proclaimed translator, the controversial James Macpherson.2 Montagu even counted "the Bard Macpherson" among the "tuneful train" who attended her Highland feasts held throughout the 1760s and 1770s (Montagu to Lyttleton, 17 November 1761). A letter dated 13 February 1772 from Montagu to Elizabeth Vesey, a close friend and fellow Bluestocking, describes another "feast of shells" more than ten years later attended by Macpherson (who seems to have been a regular), Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Lyttleton, and the playwrights Richard Cumberland and Alexander Dow.3 Montagu's feasts are just one example of the Bluestockings' passion for Ossian, a passion that crops up repeatedly in their voluminous correspondence and, most strikingly, in Catherine Talbot's imitations of the Ossian poems. These sources also establish the Bluestockings' indifference to the raging debates over the poems' authenticity, a subject to which much recent criticism has been devoted.4 In fact, in a letter to Lord Lyttleton, 31 October 1760, Montagu made light of the forgery accusations leveled at Macpherson soon after the initial publication of the Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760: "The Bishop of Ossory tells me Mr. Macpherson receives 100 per annum subscription while he stays in the Highlands to translate the poems; if he is writing them, he should have a thousand at least" (II, 211). The significance of the Ossian poems for Montagu and her fellow Bluestockings did not lie in their historical accuracy or ancient author ship, but rather in their egalitarian vision of gender. In many ways, the Ossian poems provided a template for Bluestocking salons, where both sexes debated issues of literary, social, and political interest. Although the term Bluestocking typically conjures the image of a socially awkward learned lady, whose devotion to study and the betterment of the female condition make her poorly suited for her domestic duties, this understand ing of the term did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. Among
Re-Orienting the Bluestockings: Chivalric Romance, Manliness, and Empire in Joseph Emin’s Letters
abstract:In this essay, Humberto Garcia examines the chivalric romance tropes informing the correspondence between the Armenian freedom fighter Emin Joseph Emin (1726–1809) and his patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot. To master English politeness, Emin played a humble knight-errant or “Persian Slave” before his exotic Queen Montagu. The working-class foreigner thereby presented himself as a patriotic gentleman, while his female friends expanded their gender roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities. This reciprocal self-fashioning responded to a crisis in British masculinity caused by military setbacks during the Seven Years’ War. The essay points to transnational affiliations that were wider than the ethnocentric patriotism that scholars have assigned to Bluestocking correspondents’ nationalist self-conception.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.