The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Chapter 1: ‘‘An Assured Asylum against Every Evil’’

Name /V2007/V2007_CH01 12/19/01 06:00AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 33 # 1 1 ‘‘An Assured Asylum against Every Evil’’ Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Mid-EighteenthCentury Philanthropic Institutions for Women In 1766 Newton Ogle, deputy clerk of the closet to His Majesty George III, summarized the achievements of mid-eighteenth-century English philanthropists in a charity sermon delivered before the assembled governors of the Magdalen Charity: ‘‘Houses of Charity have been opened for every Malady incident to Man. The Aged, the Maimed, the Sick, the Foundling, the Woman Labouring of Child, even those polluted by the foul Effects of their own Vices, have justly been admitted to a Share of our Bounty.’’1 The ‘‘Houses of Charity’’ that Ogle lauds were charitable subscription societies modeled after joint stock corporations.2 Although in previous centuries rich benefactors had often founded hospitals and almshouses to receive the sick and aged poor, these new societies were formed to meet a variety of specific social needs, many of them the result of increasing urbanization. Thus the institutions subscription societies founded would, it was hoped, have important economic and political, as well as humanitarian, effects.3 Based as they were on commercial and political principles, the modern philanthropic ventures Ogle praises were usually organized, supervised , and managed by men; in the numerous prospectuses for and reports of midcentury philanthropic societies, names of women occasionally appear as subscribers but never as directors or governors.4 Although women Name /V2007/V2007_CH01 12/19/01 06:00AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 34 # 2 of the landed classes continued to play their traditional role in rural charitable activities by distributing largesse and advice to their poorer neighbors and tenants, tending to the sick, founding and teaching in charity schools, and, in some cases, leaving large benefactions in their wills, the developing ideology of domesticity threatened to make their active participation in newer businesslike charities seem inappropriate and improper .5 Excluded from the leadership of these new charitable projects, women faced the potential loss of the opportunities that philanthropy had offered them—occasions not only for useful public activity but also for an alternative vocation to marriage, as the celebrated Mary Astell had proposed in her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in 1694 (1:36). Thus when Sarah Scott came to write her novel about women and charitable activity, some sixty years after Astell’s Serious Proposal, she faced the problem of reclaiming women’s traditional prerogatives from a new kind of philanthropic practice that threatened to exclude them. Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762 and her most successful novel, imaginatively resolves the problem of integrating the upper-class Englishwoman’s traditional charitable role as Lady Bountiful with the principles of public, businesslike philanthropic institutions by utilizing both the discourses of philanthropy and of sensibility. While Millenium Hall has been read as a typical example of the novel of sensibility, its contribution to midcentury discussions of philanthropy has received less attention.6 Like novels of sensibility, many of the houses of charity promoted in philanthropic prospectuses and charity sermons aimed to rescue victimized single women, teach them to be proper domestic women, and restore them to their appropriate place in the home—ideally, by finding them husbands. Millenium Hall, with its utopian female community dedicated to charitable works, offers a feminized version of these male-run philanthropic institutions as a solution to the ‘‘problem’’ of unmarried and sexualized women as well as to the larger social problems such women symbolized. In so doing, Scott’s novel helped to establish philanthropy as a defining characteristic of the domestic woman and to generate women’s ambitious desires to contribute to the resolution of social, political, and economic questions. To authorize these ambitious desires, however, Millenium Hall must renounce its heroines’ sexuality. Sarah Scott was well aware of the predicament of the victimized woman in mid-eighteenth-century England. Although she had beenmar34 ‘‘An Assured Asylum’’ Name /V2007/V2007_CH01 12/19/01 06:00AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 35 # 3 ried briefly, her father and brothers had ‘‘removed her’’ from the marriage after less than a year. Her family feared for her reputation, as letters between her sister, the famous bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, and various correspondents indicate.7 Scott’s reputation was apparently salvaged when her husband returned half of her marriage portion; although her means were now modest, she had enough to...