Introduction: "The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800)

Abstract

Introduction"The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) Nicole Pohl (bio) There is a much higher character than that of a wit or a poet, or a savant, which is that of a rational and sociable being, willing to carry on the commerce of life with all the sweetness and condescension decency and virtue will permit.1 john doran's characterization of Elizabeth Montagu aptly reflects her multifaceted and versatile role in eighteenth-century society. Montagu was and still is known as a prominent author, critic, patron, businesswoman, and salonnière. Through birth, friendship, and marriage she was part of and, at times, the center of important political, literary, and social crosscutting networks that connected the public sphere and the court. She corresponded extensively with leaders of British Enlightenment coteries, such as Edmund Burke, Gilbert West, David Garrick, and Horace Walpole, as well as the Bluestocking inner circle—Elizabeth Carter, Sarah Scott, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Frances Burney, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen. Her vast correspondence (ca. 8,000 extant letters) is now collected in various archives and private collections across the U.K. and the United States; only a few of these have been printed, often in heavily edited versions.2 With such wealth of epistolary material, it is not surprising that her letters [End Page 443] have been described by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg as "among the most important surviving collections from the eighteenth century"3 and that Elizabeth Eger's forthcoming biography is entitled Elizabeth Montagu: A Life in Letters. Doran accentuated Montagu's participation in "the commerce of life" of eighteenth-century polite society with, indeed, "decency and virtue." The meaning of commerce is undeniably multilayered, ranging in the eighteenth century from conversation to "exchange of one thing for another; interchange of any thing" and, of course, to economic trade, according to Johnson's Dictionary (1755).4 In this sense, and as the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued, sociability and conversation, virtue and sympathy were not necessarily seen in contradiction to, but rather helped to embed (and in some ways, justify), commercial activities and pursuit of self-interest for the purpose of the public good. Thus, Montagu elegantly spanned all rubrics of eighteenth-century commerce that Johnson identified; to trade, to correspond and to exchange ideas as a literary critic and essayist, to be a businesswoman, a patron of the arts, and a literary hostess. These economic but, more importantly, social activities produced, according to eighteenth-century political philosophy, civility and refinement of manners, morals, and the arts: "doux commerce."5 It was predominantly the douceur of women that appointed them to exert civilizing influence through mixed-gender sociability in polite society. Montagu exceeded this gender-limited role. While her patriotic and public sociability, particularly in her Bluestocking assemblies, was admired by contemporaries and exemplary, she also sought to influence and correct through her active participation in business, politics, [End Page 444] and the arts.6 In a letter to her husband, Montagu enthusiastically praises the benefits to humankind of his coal business, which, after his death, she took over and expanded successfully: Riches drawn from the bowels of the earth, or gained by commerce, where exchange is still a mutual benefit, present agreeable views of the arts and policy of mankind. Though the coldness of our climate may set coals in a favourable light, I shall be glad to see as many of them turned to the precious metal as possible. I have not enough of the miser, to love treasures hidden and buried. Money is convertible to credit and pleasure; useful in the hands of the prudent; noble in the hands of the generous; pernicious with the bad; ridiculous with the prodigal, and contemptible with the miser.7 Montagu was aware that commerce in the business sense, the transaction of money and the management of industry, shaped civic virtue and moral responsibility as much as her conversations and assemblies civilized the nation. This special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly addresses Elizabeth Montagu's complex and innovative position in eighteenth-century polite society and complements "Reconsidering the Bluestockings" (2002), edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, also...