"Spare from Your Luxuries": Women, Charity, and Spending in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

"Spare from Your Luxuries": Women, Charity, and Spending in the Eighteenth Century CATHERINE KEOHANE The eighteenth century was proud of its charitableness: across a range of texts, including novels, sermons, conduct books, and periodical essays, writers identify their time as an age of charity or benevolence. Common is Henry Fielding's mid-century assertion that "Charity is in fact the very Characteristic of this Nation at this Time.------1 believe we may challenge the whole World to parallel the Examples which we have of late given of this sensible, this noble, this Christian virtue."1 Yet, giving was also worrisome, and such congratulatory characterizations of the period coexist with equally common depictions of the age as misdirected in its charity. The reported consequences of misdirected charity were quite serious and included the impoverishment of the country and the perpetuation of poverty.2 Given such worries, it is not surprising that many contemporary didactic tracts and sermons attempt to regulate giving. In one 1773 example, the sermonist Beilby Porteus alleges the presence of a "spirit of universal philanthropy," but also observes that the benevolent need direction: "The chief thing necessary is not so much to urge them to do good, as to show them, how they may do the most good; in what way they can bestow their alms to the greatest advantage."3 That this "greatest advantage" could benefit more than the poor is suggested by two methods that proposed how polite women were to fund 41 42 / KEOHANE their charity: the economy argument and its apparent inverse, consumer charity, attempt to regulate polite women's outlays of money not just in charity, but also in their consumption of so-called luxuries. As a result, these methods have larger significance for understanding eighteenth-century concerns about women's spending more generally. On the one hand, the economy argument (the model to which we will devote the most attention here) posits consumption and charity as mutually exclusive forms of spending, urging women to "sacrifice" luxuries in the interest of having money for charity; on the other hand, the model of consumer charity combines charity and consumption by identifying forms of consumption that can serve charitable ends. Focusing on the construction of charity allows us to see that, as Ken Jackson reminds us, charity "does not just involve charitable practices or good works, but a whole cultural belief system which helps determine and explain those practices."4 Looking at these two models of women's charity will allow us to see the concerns about women's money handling that "determine and explain" them and, in doing so, will open up our understanding of the opportunities available for eighteenthcentury polite women's participation in the public arena. Charity is a significant component of this participation, being a site of the intersection of both developing notions of feminine propriety and women's agency. Speaking to notions of propriety, conduct books and didactic literature assign women an innate charitableness and allege that its cultivation will develop polite women's character and fill up their time with appropriate activities. On the one hand, assigning women charitable duties allows them a degree of agency, by giving them some work to do. Yet, on the other hand, the models proposed by the economy argument and consumer charity seek to harness women's so-called natural charitableness in order to restrict their activity in the area of consumer spending. While conduct literature recommends charity as an activity that develops women's character, a byproduct of the inculcation of habitual charity, as we will see, is making them less self-interested in a more basic, economic sense. Although apparently contradictory models, the economy argument and the model of consumer charity both mask, as they also respond to, a more general fear of women's distribution of money that is fueled by the growing array of consumer products and increasing opportunities to spend money. While my emphasis here will be on conduct books' and charitable treatises' construction of these two models of charity, brief considerations of the fictional representations of women givers in Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) will confirm that conduct-book prescriptions...