Sarah Scott and America: Sir George Ellison, The Man of Real Sensibility, and the Squire of Horton

Abstract

Sarah Scott's English novel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), had its broadest contemporary impact in a Philadelphia-issued epitome, The Man of Real Sensibility (1774). Considering the novel and the epitome together illustrates the instability of stories in transatlantic print culture, and important differences in transatlantic cultures and ideas. Reading both Ellisons against an important pro-American pamphlet (1774) by Scott's brother, Baron Rokeby, which shared many of the same concerns, distinguishes Scott's politics from classical republicanism and Lockean contractualism, and shows that Scott's conservatism was both less Utopian and more radical than it has seemed to previous critics.