Stoicism and the Servants: Philosophy and the Periodical Press

In this article, I focus on two periodicals, Godey's Lady's Book and the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, both of which counseled Stoic resignation to duty as a means for bearing the multifaceted demands of housework, motherly duties, and wifely cares. I will discuss how these domestic periodicals drew on a shared transatlantic ethos of Stoic philosophy in their attempt to intervene in the "servant problem"—a common shorthand for the racial, class, and gendered tensions that troubled household relations. Few scholars have considered domestic literature philosophical; none has considered it Stoic. I will argue that domestic literature in the periodical press, far from occupying a marginal position in the general culture, was widely read and highly influential in broader intellectual culture. I draw on Leslie Butler's recent work on transatlantic exchange to position domestic periodicals within this broader discourse community.¹

The Stoic ethos of domestic ideology in the periodical press dates to Richard Steele's portrait of Sir Richard de Coverley published in the Spectator, which is echoed in nineteenth-century periodicals. I will also explore how the Stoic emphasis on living in conformity with nature translates to nineteenth-century aesthetics. Periodical writers, when discussing domesticity, sought to discipline readers' senses as well as their morality, training their taste so that they valued the real over the reproduction, the natural design over the artificial creation. Finally, I will show how the Stoic mandate to bear and forebear was enforced unequally across boundaries of class and race and could paradoxically reinforce social hierarchies even as its precepts emphasized the equality of master and servant.

Scholars of the eighteenth-century periodical press have acknowledged Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's classical allusions, including their references to the Stoic writers Cato and Cicero, specifically.² However, critics have tended to flatten the complexity and significance of this philosophical tradition. Adam Rounce, for example, dismisses the didactic philosophical content of the Spectator as "humdrum virtue" and "monkish austerity."³ A deeper engagement with Stoic paradoxes helps to contextualize what Rounce identifies as textual contradictions between "worldliness" and "self-sacrifice."⁴ Brian Johnson notes that the "diminished status" of Stoic thinkers has been reconsidered by more recent scholars, as "there has been a new recognition that Epictetus and the Stoics had produced philosophical work of greater sophistication and subtlety than previously thought."⁵ Recently, Lois Peters Agnew has insightfully demonstrated how the aesthetic principles of eighteenth-century rhetoricians were underwritten by the moral and didactic principles of Stoicism.⁶ Her work has implications for understanding similar connections between the virtue ethics and aesthetic principles articulated in the eighteenth-century periodical press and in the nineteenth-century periodicals which forwarded their ideological agenda.

Stoic philosophy resonated with nineteenth-century domestic writers, who were forced to cope with racial anxieties, gender limitations, and the rapid changes triggered by industrialization. Drawing on Stoic precepts allowed domestic writers to explore moral issues in secular terms. As the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine noted, "We prefer not to meddle with religious subjects."⁷ The tendency of domestic writers to draw on the lives and works of Epictetus, Cato, and Marcus Aurelius, among others, reflects the wide regard in which Stoicism was held in the nineteenth century. Brian Johnson explains that until "Epictetus and the Stoics were temporarily edged off the table" in "the late 19th century," "Stoicism enjoyed wide recognition for its ethics, a stance that was seen as both an alternative and a complement to Christian ethics."⁸

The philosophical content of women's domestic periodicals, including their engagement with Stoic philosophy, has been neglected, most likely due to ongoing critical assumptions about the genre. Kay Boardman's assessment that the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine "aimed to privilege the domestic sphere and pursued a traditional and rather conservative exploration of what it meant to be a woman at home" may be taken as representative.⁹ The philosophical content of domestic periodicals challenged assumptions about women's traditional roles and emphasized the intertwined nature of public and private spheres, even as they ultimately enforced social hierarchies. Patricia Okker writes that "whatever their...