"Fill up His Blanks": Making Matthew Montagu

Abstract

This essay provides the first detailed examination of Elizabeth Montagu's adoption of her nephew Matthew Robinson, and of her subsequent attempts to cultivate him as the ideal heir. It considers, in turn, Matthew's adoption, his education, his training in estate paternalism, and his political career in the House of Commons. It provides a case study of the ways in which eighteenth-century women could exert a familial, moral, discursive, and material authority that had significant repercussions for the formation and construction of masculinity. It also examines the discomfort that the exertion of such authority might generate within the social and professional circles of such women and their male subordinates—especially when their relationship was an instance of 'fictive kinship.'