What counted as historical progress for women? This was the question which Hannah Lawrance sought to answer in two historical works published in the late 1830s and early 1840s; and in her journalism which spanned forty years until her death in 1870.Footnote 1 The conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, which grew out of the historicizing moral philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith, had bequeathed a problematic answer. In the eighteenth century, the status of women was, as Karen O'Brien and others have demonstrated, ‘ubiquitously cited as an insight into a society's economic system, its degree of social leisure, its moral values, and, above all, its cultural practices (or “manners”).’Footnote 2 Although this interest gave women a prominent place in the story of England's development from barbarism to civilization, the strong emphasis on female deference and polished manners in histories or sociologies by scholars such as Adam Ferguson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), John Millar, or William Robertson rendered them passive enablers of polite society, rather than active historical agents.Footnote 3 Women's history mattered as evidence of wider progress rather than in and of itself, making William Alexander's History of women (1779) an exception to the general rule.Footnote 4
Alexander's history was unusual in its exclusive focus, but typical of a growing eighteenth-century interest in women's condition in the medieval period and in particular, the benefits of chivalry on society.Footnote 5 As Alexander claimed, it was ‘the institution of chivalry’ which reformed the earlier ‘rudeness of manners’.Footnote 6 The widespread assumption in eighteenth-century conjectural histories was that as women were exempted from manual labour in the process of a society's moral and economic development, they became worthy of adoration and male refinement. The practice of chivalry supplied historical proof. Interest in historical women as individual subjects remained, however, minimal, and female agency went no further than sociability. In A view of society in Europe (1778), Gilbert Stuart exemplified the limited role women played in chivalry's civilizing influence, declaring that ‘They partook in the greatness they communicated.’Footnote 7 Such idealizations of the historical woman and the cult of chivalry were widely echoed, and found their expression par excellence in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Recalling a ‘delightful vision’ of Marie Antoinette, Burke exclaimed that ‘antient chivalry’ has ‘subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great.’Footnote 8
The history of women and chivalry, as Burke's Reflections illustrated, was an important way of critiquing social arrangements and finding hope for the nation's future.Footnote 9 This was a problematic legacy for early nineteenth-century female historians, for despite restoring women to the nation's past, it limited their role to an undefined influence on history's real actors: men. The late century bluestocking critique of this historiography was set out by Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay's Observations on the reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1790) ridiculed Burke's idealization of medieval times and his glorification of chivalry, describing it as ‘a mark of disgrace to the times in which they were formed’, nothing more than ‘methodized sentimental barbarism’ in a period of ‘ferocity, slavery, barbarism, and ignorance’.Footnote 10 Macaulay's claim followed the chronology of her History of England (1763–83) which explained the loss of English liberties following the Norman Conquest and their uneven recovery from the seventeenth century to the present.Footnote 11 In A vindication of the rights of men (1790), Wollstonecraft also criticized Burke's glorification of chivalry, insisting that ‘the spirit of romance and chivalry is in the wane; and reason will gain by its extinction’.Footnote 12 Wollstonecraft shared with Macaulay a belief in the paramount importance of reason to civic virtue, and stressed its superiority over artificial sensibility.Footnote 13
This bluestocking inheritance had its own attractions and limitations for future female historians interested in using history to promote women's rights. In her History of England, Macaulay had restored some women to the historical record that she believed had been neglected by Hume, as well as arguing ‘it is education and circumstances which alone form the man’, reiterating the point in her Letters on education (1790).Footnote 14 This emphasis on situation as the mould of character was a powerful argument against beliefs in women's innate inferiority, which Wollstonecraft pursued in A vindication of the rights of woman (1792) to show that an enlightened education would allow women ‘to attain such habits of virtue’ as to make them independent.Footnote 15 Although it was also a justification for exploring women's history in greater detail, neither Macaulay nor Wollstonecraft pursued this possibility. They were instead committed to realizing republican political principles in the present, and arguing for them in a rational and unsentimental register.Footnote 16 Women's history appeared to offer little to this project. Wollstonecraft declared that the historical woman ‘has always been either a slave or a despot’.Footnote 17 Both mainstream Enlightenment historians and their bluestocking critics saw no active or distinctive role for women in the historical unfolding of progress.
This pessimistic appraisal of women's history was evident in the female-authored picturesque histories which had become established by the 1830s. The unsentimental language deployed by Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, as well as their unconventional private lives, also contributed to a fierce backlash against bluestocking feminism regularly cited in modern-day scholarship.Footnote 18 Hence the picturesque histories of the early nineteenth century are commonly portrayed as a retreat to the private sphere as Victorian domestic ideology imposed serious limits on women's engagement with public life.Footnote 19 For Rosemary Mitchell, the high church Tory Romantic histories of Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland represent ‘the struggle of the submissive and the subversive’ in this genre, which was a ‘retreat’ from the eighteenth-century historiography.Footnote 20
Mitchell's claim underestimates the dynamism of ‘Woman's Mission’ in the nineteenth century. The career of Hannah Lawrance shows, in contrast to the Stricklands and other eminent female historians like Mary Anne Everett Green, Mrs Matthew Hall, or Anna Jameson, just how far ‘Woman's Mission’ could be reconceptualized and deployed in favour of women's rights. Unlike the Stricklands, Lawrance did not draw firm boundaries between male and female experiences and potential. Instead, she argued from history that women were equally as capable as men of public occupations assumed by some to be unwomanly. Like Macaulay and Wollstonecraft before her, Lawrance believed that education was most important to character formation, which makes her use of a feminine register and conventions appear more rhetorical than a sincere avowal of separate spheres ideology. Furthermore, whilst her bluestocking ancestors had dismissed medieval England, and Strickland and her sister were most interested by the Tudor and Stuart queens, Lawrance wrote about the English past from post-Conquest times to the late medieval period, deeming this era the ‘olden time’ of England, and arguing that women had played a central role in its progress.Footnote 21
The anonymity of her journalism has left Lawrance virtually unknown today; Mitchell, for example, has deemed Lawrance ‘perhaps the most elusive of mid-nineteenth-century women historians’.Footnote 22 She was, however, well known in her lifetime and the influence of her ideas, which gave the broadest interpretation of ‘Woman's Mission’, was exceptional. She wrote over 200 unsigned review essays for the Athenaeum between 1830 and 1858, and over sixty unsigned review essays for the British Quarterly Review between 1847 and 1870. Agnes Strickland may have been the most popular female historian of the period but by 1848, Elizabeth Barrett Browning judged that Lawrance was the ‘deeper-minded woman … and qualified to take, in literature, the higher place’.Footnote 23 Such high praise might have been based on Lawrance's first major publication, a two-volume work of historical fiction entitled London in the olden time (1825–7). It is, however, more likely that, by 1848, Browning was thinking of Lawrance's position as a staff-writer for the Athenaeum and her two histories: Historical memoirs of the queens of England, from the commencement of the twelfth century (1838–40) and The history of woman in England, and her influence on society and literature (1843).
The medieval focus of these histories made Lawrance unusual as a female historian compared to her bluestocking predecessors and contemporaries. Strickland's favoured era, by contrast, rendered her part of what Peter Mandler has called ‘the popular cult of the Olden Time’ which grew rapidly in the 1830s and ‘centred on the “Merrie England of Good Queen Bess”’.Footnote 24 This ‘olden time’ began with the advent of the Tudors in the late fifteenth century, which is where Lawrance's alternative olden time drew to a close, and it ended with the Civil War.Footnote 25 As Mandler explains, a number of popular writers and artists used Merrie England as a standard to measure the present, celebrating this Olden Time's culture, social harmony, equality, and cheerful virtuous domesticity.
It was due to Lawrance's commitment to women's education and women's public employment that her olden time was medieval. She argued that the progress of England's institutions and tradition of liberty dated from the early twelfth century, thereby distinguishing herself from the ‘Teutomaniacs’ like John Mitchell Kemble who were primarily interested in connecting English history to its German origins and mourning the loss of Saxon liberties on the arrival of the tyrannous Conqueror. That branch of national history had little space for women. Lawrance's olden time shared some of its features, such as the celebration of English liberty, but it placed women and the state of their education at the centre of the nation's story, welcomed the consequences of the Norman invasion and appeared before the Teutonism of the 1850s and 1860s. Whilst Thomas Babington Macaulay would later celebrate English liberty as peculiarly English, Lawrance likewise celebrated Englishwomen's education as equally unique to their national story.Footnote 26
Lawrance avoided a problem faced by Strickland and other female writers – coarse Elizabethan women and their questionable descendants – by locating the shoots of English progress in the medieval period and describing them as dependent, not solely on women's nurture, but also on women's agency, which was a rarer claim. The reason Lawrance's olden time ended with the Wars of the Roses was due to the decline in female education, indicating a wider loss of English liberties and peaceful progress. By making women's education the driving force of her narrative, however, Lawrance could celebrate Elizabeth I in terms which her female contemporaries, trapped by essentialist notions of femininity, could not bring themselves to invoke. By 1850, both Lawrance's name and her ideas were widely known and her extensive scholarship earned her arguments for moderate liberal reform a place in mainstream public debate across political divides. It also earned the approval of like-minded reformist figures in the liberal press, such as Thomas Hood, who introduced Lawrance to the editor of the Athenaeum, Charles Wentworth Dilke, who employed Lawrance to review histories for almost twenty years. Her calm mode of argumentation also distinguished her from radical Unitarians who held comparable ideas of women's rights whilst Dilke also recognized a large middle-class audience likely to be receptive to her work, as did her two publishers, Edward Moxon and Henry Colburn. Lawrance's moderation, characteristic of the ethos of the Congregational Church to which she belonged, also secured her employment at the British Quarterly Review, edited by Robert Vaughan, which was where she worked for the last twenty years of her career, continuing to show that ‘amidst the enlightenment of the nineteenth century, ladies are becoming far different from what they were’.Footnote 27
I
When Hannah Lawrance published the first volume of her Historical memoirs in 1838, she was conscious of presenting her readers with something new. The popular histories of royal lives written by the Stricklands, Green, and Hall were yet to arrive in the literary marketplace and earlier nineteenth-century histories written by women such as Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger, Mary Hays, Anna Jameson, and Katherine Thomson had been primarily concerned with the Tudors and Stuarts, paying little attention to the medieval period. Lawrance ambitiously sought to reclaim this period by presenting her Historical memoirs as a history not just of women's lives but also of ‘the advancing progress of national improvement’.Footnote 28 At the same time, her histories were also constructed differently to the prevalent model of female-authored picturesque histories. Biographical chapters discussing the state of society were interspersed with chapters devoted exclusively to the arts and poetry of England, from the time of ‘Good Queen Maude’, as she called Henry I's wife, to Elizabeth Woodville, wife of England's last Plantagenet, Edward IV.Footnote 29
To open her study in the Norman period with Queen Maude (c. 1080–1118; christened Edith, later known also as Queen Matilda) was a clear engagement with earlier histories. In her Letters on education, Catharine Macaulay had argued that England's progress had failed to benefit women substantially, and the chronology of Macaulay's History of England followed a decline of liberties following the Norman Conquest. This was part of a previous eighteenth-century historiographical tradition which claimed that female progress began in the Saxon period, whilst a separate debate asked whether the ‘Norman Conquest of 1066 ended a sort of Golden Age for women.’Footnote 30 This debate, closely related to discussions of women's role in society, continued into the nineteenth century. Sharon Turner, whom Lawrance cited in her Historical memoirs,Footnote 31 published the first part of his History of the Anglo-Saxons in 1799 and wrote of women that ‘[a]mong the Anglo-Saxons they occupied the same important and independent rank in society which they now enjoy’, though he did not explore their claim to education as Lawrance was to do.Footnote 32 Decades later, the misogynistic Kemble used the history of Anglo-Saxon women to maintain that women belonged at home.Footnote 33
In locating social progress after the Conquest, Lawrance aimed to supply a rich counter-argument to ideas of women's decline, and to ideas of their domestic confinement. Disagreeing with Kemble, her History of woman in England explored positive attributes of Saxon times despite the era being characterized by political instability and a disunited England. Indeed, it made sense to begin her Historical memoirs with Queen Maude, the ‘Saxon princess’ from Scotland whose marriage to Henry I helped to establish Norman legitimacy and to pacify a querulous realm. In Lawrance's history, this marriage embodied the principles of Henry's Charter of Liberties, ‘which engaged to restore the laws of Edward the Confessor to the Saxon’.Footnote 34 This was the moment when the history of English civilization really began.
What rendered this revision of Whiggish history distinctive was Lawrance's narrative. Women's biographical histories written in the first few decades of the nineteenth century generally proceeded from queen to queen noting their beneficial, but passive, influence exerted on their husbands.Footnote 35 Authors like Sarah Stickney Ellis and Coventry Patmore sanctified women in the domestic sphere in the same way as they wrote of their ideal woman's life: eventless, calm, and, as far as possible, characterless.Footnote 36 A female writer sensitive to the heterogeneous reading market could not afford to ignore the domestic terms by which their subjects lived. Motherliness was the most obvious of these terms which ‘emphasized female power’;Footnote 37 successful needlework was another, and Lawrance ignored neither. What she chose to celebrate, however, was women's education.Footnote 38
This assumed two forms: the role of the mother as educator, and the role of convents providing female education and spreading knowledge more widely. This is the order in which the Historical memoirs introduces Queen Maude. What made Queen Maude the good queen was the education she received from her mother, Queen Margaret of Scotland (c. 1045–93; canonized in 1250), who set a fine example to her daughter.Footnote 39 Margaret was a woman who before her son-in-law's reign in England, ‘afforded a secure asylum to those of her countrymen who fled the rigour of the Norman yoke’, attracted learned men from all over Europe, educated her people, and encouraged Scottish commercial prosperity.Footnote 40
Lawrance's account of Queen Margaret is characteristic of others in the Historical memoirs: it is a checklist of progress. In Lawrance's memoir, Margaret guided not only intellectual development, but also commercial advancement, underpinning the country's civilizational role as spreader of wealth and liberty. There is no hint of female passivity or emptiness of character. Instead it is Maude's father, Malcolm III, who is passive: ‘the unlettered monarch … unquestioningly listened to her counsels, and devoutly imitated her religious duties’.Footnote 41 Lawrance's description of Margaret portrays her as a woman on whom social progress depends and whose religious conviction confirms her womanliness at the same time as it justifies her role as ‘fair and royal reformer’.Footnote 42
The convents celebrated in the Historical memoirs also helped mould Maude into the same kind of woman as her mother. The abbeys of Wilton and Romsey, both Saxon foundations, offered ‘a general course of instruction’ which included needlework and music alongside medicine and surgery, Latin (‘and not mere monkish Latin’), and literature.Footnote 43 This was education with a social purpose: such institutions, run solely by women, both interacted with, and enjoyed the respect of, professional men.Footnote 44 As Lawrance subsequently wrote in a separate article, women ‘received precisely the same education as men … [They] were never sternly warned off from sharing the feast of knowledge, but were willingly proffered an equal participation’.Footnote 45
In the History of woman in England, Lawrance endowed English convents and abbeys with a longer history, deeming them to originate in England's Saxon past, being founded and run by women who were ‘pre-eminently, lights in a dark age’.Footnote 46 In Maude's time, however, ‘the importance of female education was first publicly recognised’ as something that would by no means ‘render women mere creatures of accomplishments’.Footnote 47 Lawrance also implied that convent education was not restricted solely to queens. Elsewhere, she concluded that despite the difficulty of determining ‘[t]o what extent the female population, both before and after the conquest, profited by these convent schools … we cannot think that any very large proportion of females of the higher and middle classes were unsupplied with educational advantages’.Footnote 48
The Catholicism of the convents was seemingly unproblematic for Lawrance, despite the characteristically negative image of convents popularized by gothic novels and periodical literature.Footnote 49 Assuming the air of a dispassionate professional, Lawrance judged this as Protestant bias that was ‘forgetful of the many benefits which, without any reference to their peculiar creed, they were calculated to confer’.Footnote 50 Agnes Strickland's history of the period, however, exemplified this Protestant bias in following up Lawrance's celebration of Henry I's marriage to Maude, and acclaiming it as the moment from which ‘we may trace all the constitutional blessings which this free country enjoys’. Nevertheless, Strickland's Maude was accorded comparatively little agency and her conventual education was portrayed negatively. More widely, convents were invariably ‘dreary asylum[s]’ and ‘gloomy conventual prison[s]’.Footnote 51 Mary Anne Everett Green also followed Lawrance's celebration of the Plantagenets,Footnote 52 but remained ambivalent about the role of convents, generally describing them as secluded retreats, rather than institutions of social and cultural progress.Footnote 53
For Lawrance, however, the education given and received by women was unrelated to the papacy. Unlike her contemporaries' histories, the personal and wider benefits of a broadly conceived education made anti-Catholic sentiment redundant. The convents were proto-Protestant in that ‘the reading of the Scriptures by the laity’, for instance, was not opposed ‘until a very late period’ and took place in English before Wycliffe's late fourteenth-century translation of the bible into English.Footnote 54 As Christian Isobel Johnstone, editor of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, pointed out in a review of the second Historical memoirs, Lawrance referred politely to the ‘Latin Church’,Footnote 55 whilst attributing the negative reputation of medieval abbeys as ‘the abodes of sloth and gluttony’ solely to male establishments.Footnote 56
Lawrance's queens are connected not only to the progress of English liberty and commerce, but also to cultural advancement in that Lawrance assumed that music, literature, poetry, or drama served a socially cohesive function.Footnote 57 The progress of English culture and society was credited to Maude without compromising her femininity. But if Maude emulated her mother by serving as an example of female potential, Henry I (Henry Beauclerc) was not an ideal husband, for ‘unlike her mother, Maude was neither the cherished wife, nor the beloved and respected adviser’.Footnote 58 Henry supplied the perfect counterpoint: his refusal to admit Maude into royal council accounted for ‘the licentious habits, and the fierce and unscrupulous conduct of Beauclerc’. ‘[S]he was snatched away’, Lawrance quoted from William of Malmesbury's Gesta regum Anglorum (c. 1125–6), ‘to the great loss of the people, but her own great advantage’.Footnote 59
Questionable queens were also accommodated within Lawrance's historical narrative to prove that circumstance, rather than nature, shaped character. Maude's second daughter, Maude the Empress (c. 1102–67; also known as Matilda of England or Empress Matilda) was a queen who had fought with Stephen of Blois for the English crown, which had been promised to her by her father, Henry I, in the event of his failing to produce an heir. Lawrance explained Maude's character in terms of a deficient education whilst her marriage, aged twelve, to Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, meant that ‘we shall be inclined rather to admire the good qualities which remained undestroyed, than to severely censure the evil ones’.Footnote 60 Blaming her father's male courtiers who failed to abide by their oath to serve her as queen regnant,Footnote 61 Maude's greatest fault was held to be her ‘haughty contempt of the people’: ill-educated and ‘with a strange perversity she seems to have been unwilling to acknowledge her own subjects’ and fulfil her duty as English queen.Footnote 62 Depicted as fundamentally a good woman with an uneducated mind, Maude saw ‘the fearful loss of life and devastation this unhappy conflict had occasioned’ and ended the ongoing Civil War. Thereafter, she demonstrated a ‘mild and judicious regency’ of Normandy by supporting charitable and religious foundations as well as building a stone bridge across the Seine at Rouen. She held ‘the reins of government for nearly fourteen years’ whilst her son, Henry II of England, consulted her on important matters until her death in 1167.Footnote 63
These examples of the Good Queen Maude and her daughter illustrate the approach Lawrance adopted when writing queens' histories. She supplied as detailed as possible an account of a queen's education at home and at any abbey or convent, and explained the broader benefit to England at large. The connections Lawrance drew among education, women, and the march of civilization was the defining feature of these volumes and explains why Lawrance chose to locate her olden time in the medieval period. For despite its bloodshed and turmoil, ‘the real attraction of that period consists in the conflict of light with darkness, the successful, though long, struggles of freedom and civilization with the opposing influences around’.Footnote 64 The civil war between Stephen of Blois and Empress Maude, for example, ‘was the interval in which the Anglo-Norman mind was extensively educating itself’.Footnote 65
II
For Lawrance, the trouble with the Tudors was twofold: their general disregard for popular rights, and Henry VIII's dissolution of convent schools between 1536 and 1541.Footnote 66 Although she celebrated Elizabeth I, Lawrance's olden time was obliged to end by the Wars of the Roses, for reasons revealed in her journalism. Her histories had celebrated advances in women's education which she associated with England's wider social progress in trade, literature, poetry, and politics, but society had begun ‘retrograding during the greater portion of the fifteenth century, and the earlier half of the sixteenth’. Warfare under the Lancastrians and the Yorkists had rendered the people destitute, and Lawrance wrote that her contemporaries had ‘altogether lost sight of the ruinous effects’ of this dynastic struggle. There was little reason to think that the people ‘stood on high vantage ground compared with the middle ages’.Footnote 67 When Henry VII acceded the throne, there was no equivalent to Henry I's Charter of Liberties which Lawrance had used to downplay medieval episodes like Empress Maude and King Stephen's war: regardless of their differences, each Tudor monarch ‘held fast that doctrine, altogether new to Englishmen, the irresponsible power of the monarch’.Footnote 68 Henry VIII's ‘spoliation of the monasteries’ catalysed England's decline. For Lawrance, this act had three consequences which were emblematic of the dynasty's disregard for the people: it ended the period of an uncorrupted medieval early church; it marked tyrannous rule and widening class divisions; and it stopped the work of female convents, leaving ‘little hope … that the people at large would advance in civilization or morals’. Thereafter, England suffered Mary Tudor, who was additionally problematic because of her Catholicism and marriage to Phillip II of Spain.
Accordingly, Elizabeth I was the only Tudor successor to the virtues of Hannah Lawrance's olden time. As she wrote in ‘Society in the Age of Elizabeth’ (1847) for the British Quarterly Review, ‘[H]er intercourse with her subjects was always marked by a courtesy, which, save in the long past days of the Plantagenets, had never been displayed.’Footnote 69 Following the pattern of her Historical memoirs, Lawrance established the queen's education, which reflected general education across the realm, and explained how ‘The learned queen … read every day a “portion of the orations of Isocrates, or the tragedies of Sophocles”’ without scorning homelier stories like the tales of King Arthur or Robin Hood.Footnote 70 What Lawrance regarded as the finest drama and literature proved ‘the unexampled development of the national mind at that wonderful period’, whether one envisaged Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, or William Shakespeare.Footnote 71
The fortunes of English society was next cited in favour of the educated Elizabeth, which Lawrance pursued along several different lines. Most obviously, the queen defended Protestant England from threats posed by Catholic Europe and from Mary, Queen of Scots.Footnote 72 Secondly, she upheld the law of the realm, unlike her predecessors. Despite assassination attempts, she allowed ‘judicial investigation’ a full remit at a time when the public wanted summary justice,Footnote 73 whilst also presiding over England's burgeoning trade.Footnote 74 Elizabeth I was a light in an otherwise dark period of English history; a queen who reigned over ‘golden days’.Footnote 75
By contrast, those of Lawrance's contemporaries who framed their interpretations with essentialist ideas of womanhood found Good Queen Bess much harder to celebrate.Footnote 76 As Rohan Maitzen has shown, Agnes Strickland and J. A. Froude ‘comment again and again on the potential split thus created, constantly presenting “woman” and “queen” as alternative, if not necessarily opposing, identities’.Footnote 77 The difficulty lay in Elizabeth I's status as sovereign queen: rather than occupying a woman's familiar historical role with some limited influence to improve society, she embodied unambiguous power. The Stricklands attempted to reconcile these conflicting personae in Elizabeth by turning her ‘private virtues into a political statement’,Footnote 78 and regularly emphasized their queen's needlework.Footnote 79 Elizabethan rule was thus tempered by her ‘feminine accomplishment of needle-work’ which Agnes Strickland claims she practised from a young age.Footnote 80 Elsewhere, Mrs Matthew Hall also marked her subjects' femininity during this period by needlework skills.Footnote 81
Lawrance's approach was remarkably different. Her memoir of the fourteenth-century Philippa of Hainault informed readers that ‘the labours of the needle were not at this early day appropriated to women’, whilst her History of woman was similarly keen to unsex the arts of needlework and weaving.Footnote 82 Lawrance's primary interest in a queen's education, as well as educational provision more generally, allowed her to eschew the potential conflict of a feminine creature in a manly role. Approaching the past, Lawrance believed that neither virtues nor civic duties were necessarily masculine or feminine. ‘Society in the Age of Elizabeth’ concluded: ‘Our space is too fully occupied, to contemplate Elizabeth in private life’ before briefly dismissing derogatory claims about her as ‘foreign and papal’.Footnote 83
Peremptory dismissal of historical arguments based on potentially untrustworthy sources was typical of Lawrance's persona of a confident professional historian. Authorial anonymity in the press accorded a woman such confidence, although, in Lawrance's case, her signed publications maintained a similarly assured tone, and such professionalism was vital to Lawrance's cultural authority. As Una Pope-Hennessy has shown, the Strickland sisters adopted the motto ‘Facts not Opinions’ when penning their picturesque accounts, but they also used sentimental or emotive language, thereby incurring Macaulay's opprobrium.Footnote 84 Lawrance compared Agnes Strickland to the novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth, deeming both to be more popular than historically valuable.Footnote 85 When it came to proving the past, Lawrance set an exacting standard which distinguished between ‘authentic materials’ and ‘apocrypha’, promoting her work on the medieval ‘olden time’ and denigrating the Tudor period. Reviewing letters written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII's court, for example, Lawrance asserted their value, given ‘the singular dearth of authentic materials from the days of the strife of the Roses, down to the times of the Reformation’. By contrast, the ‘olden time’ was comparatively rich with no need to resort to the ‘utterly apocryphal chronicles of Grafton, Hall, and Holinshed’, whom she dismissed as indentured royal servants.Footnote 86
‘It is important to draw the line, and to know where to draw it.’Footnote 87 Lawrance objected to relying solely on one type of source alone to produce a picture of the past. Her method favoured consulting as many different sources as possible, including artefacts such as monkish chronicles, legal records, and popular tales, which shed different, but indispensable, light on the past.Footnote 88 This wider selection of sources offered evidence that apparently fixed criteria of femininity, like needlework, were variables across time.Footnote 89 This methodology makes Lawrance appealing to modern sensibilities in that her approach provides a precedent to today's cultural history. The assumptions guiding her historical practice remained nonetheless different in that she saw history as a ‘series of moral developments, each connected with and influencing the other’, explaining why ‘the science of politics’ was less important than ‘the whole business of life’.Footnote 90 The lesson of history was that ‘all true change must commence within’, which is why Lawrance's ‘olden time’ celebrated the education available to her historical subjects.
III
Hannah Lawrance's perspective on the past also enabled her to criticize assumptions made about women and the standard of female education available in the nineteenth century. In its positive review of The history of woman in England, the Tory weekly John Bull remarked that ‘The “Rights of Woman,” though not exactly in the sense used by Mary Wolstoncraft [sic] and her lecturing followers of the present day; are no longer likely to be contested.’Footnote 91 The subject of female education had not disappeared since Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the rights of woman and as this reviewer noted, Lawrance pushed Wollstonecraft's unsexing of virtue and potential into the mainstream of public debate on women's education.
Voices in favour of a more rational education for women, as well as those of opponents, grew noticeably louder after Queen's College, London, opened its doors on 1 May 1848. In March 1850, the bishop of London, Charles James Blomfield, scorned the college's educational practice in an article for the Tory Quarterly Review. In short, Blomfield argued that it overeducated middle-class girls who needed no more than ‘practical common sense’ to be governesses, wives, and mothers.Footnote 92 F. D. Maurice, in turn, rebuffed such accusations in a lengthy and, at times, sardonic reply.Footnote 93 Lawrance entered this argument a few months later in an article for the British Quarterly Review entitled ‘Novelties in female education’, whilst she later developed her arguments in ‘The education and employment of women’.
In both articles, Lawrance constructed a social critique from her historical knowledge, whilst also praising Wollstonecraft fulsomely. ‘With her after history we have nothing to do’; Lawrance wrote, ‘but for her celebrated work we must emphatically declare that there is no immoral teaching in it whatever’, whilst ‘Education’ of 1870 opened with a similar commendation.Footnote 94 In both articles, Lawrance positioned herself at the head of a long line of female predecessors who had either enjoyed, or argued for, the right to education.
Like Wollstonecraft, Lawrance avoided excessive sensibility which might have compromised her claim to historical accuracy.Footnote 95 This professionalism, however, also marked her difference to the historicism of Wollstonecraft and later Romantic female historians. Whilst Wollstonecraft was keen to leave history's woman in the past, Greg Kucich has demonstrated that this idea of women's history as a record of oppression and victimization influenced later generations of Romantic female historians. Central to the historical methodology of women like Lucy Aikin, Alice Ogilvy Benger, Mary Hays, Anna Jameson, and others was the use of sympathy to narrate the stories of individual women hitherto ignored, allowing them ‘to critique sex/gender systems past and present’. But as Kucich also observes, this was not unproblematic: focusing on women's oppression could risk marginalizing women's experience and claims to a more just role in society, and it could limit women ‘to the role of passive historical agents’.Footnote 96
Lawrance's contemporaries were reluctant to abandon this historical methodology, which helps explain her frustration with the Stricklands' sentimental accounts. It was not just a case of market envy, but a fundamental disagreement about how to write women into history. Hence in ‘Novelties’, Lawrance reiterated her historical narrative to show ‘that these new-fangled ways are indeed but a return to the system adopted more than a thousand years ago’.Footnote 97 The Tudor decline was restated and England's subsequent history surveyed through the lens of female education, wherein the Stuarts were accorded short shrift: ‘On the accession of James, the respect which had been paid to “learned ladies” [in Elizabeth's time] rapidly subsided.’Footnote 98
For Lawrance, the decadence of the early Stuart court was emblematic of wider social decay. Disregarding lessons from history of educational institutions run by women, England started to regress. The one hope lay with those Puritan women who maintained this ideal during the republican Commonwealth (1649–60).Footnote 99 For although ‘the women of the Restoration were frivolous beyond precedent’, Lawrance identified this era as the nadir to which England had sunk, before starting to reclaim its nobler history.Footnote 100 She found support for her argument that women drove this restoration of English civilization in an anonymously authored Essay to revive the antient education of gentlewomen (1673), attributed to Bathsua Makin, which provided perfect evidence for Lawrance's claim that nineteenth-century women's education was no more than a return to ancient principles.Footnote 101
The opposition of Tory intransigence (the bishop of London) and liberal Christian progress (F. D. Maurice) are the poles between which Lawrance's article ‘Novelties’ moved. In terms of the conclusions Lawrance injected into the debate about nineteenth-century women's education was the familiar argument that women's ignorance was not natural, but acquired. In ‘Education’, she cited a lengthy excerpt from Sydney Smith's famous article, ‘Female education’ (1810), in which Smith had confidently dismissed essentialist ideas of femininity and masculinity.Footnote 102 Lawrance also claimed that her history of female-run institutions for female education proved this argument:
let us hope that we shall henceforth have no more ‘twaddle’ – we really cannot find a word that can better explain our meaning – about ‘becomingness’, and the ‘graceful’, and the ‘touching’, from silly writers on female education—alas! that they should be women—as though woman's duty consisted in mere attitudinizing virtues.Footnote 103
On such grounds, Lawrance dismissed Blomfield's critique and observed approvingly ‘the crowds that have flocked’ to Queen's College and Bedford College, London (founded in 1849), proving ‘that the public mind is fully awake to the necessity of providing a sound and enlarged education for women’.Footnote 104 The only worthwhile discussion concerned the form such education should assume wherein Lawrance argued for broad instruction, incorporating mathematics, languages, literature, and history. She was also keen that women's education be not removed from female hands, and asked: ‘Is it altogether right that in colleges intended for the improvement of women the whole of the instruction should be in the hands of men?’ Lawrance's ‘olden time’ explained female authority on the basis of their education, and there were likewise plenty of eminent women qualified to teach in the mid-nineteenth century. In their respective fields, who could, for example, excel the art historian and literary critic Anna Jameson, or Jane Marcet, the writer on science and political economy, or the historian Lucy Aikin? ‘[N]eed any scholar seek a better teacher in their respective departments than these’, Lawrance asked? To be taught by such women would inspire the next generation and was vital to the nation's health.Footnote 105
This argument was based on Lawrance's belief in women's God-given potential to be more than housewives, and their responsibility to fulfil such potential. Her ‘olden time’ had shown the heights to which England could climb under such conditions. But although Lawrance stressed women's calling to the world of education, it also implied that female employment did not have to be limited to teaching. The type of broad education Lawrance advocated for her contemporaries theoretically envisaged any number of occupations outside the home. As Joyce Pedersen writes, the women's colleges gave women more opportunity to acquire ‘an additional repertoire of skills and values’ which helped a growing number to find employment outside of the home.Footnote 106 The most acceptable of these employments, at least in 1850, was the life of a governess or teacher. By 1870, however, when ‘Education’ was published, Lawrance expanded her argument by insisting that it was time to advocate a wider range of female occupations.Footnote 107
Lawrance's earlier histories of women's historical progress had insisted that female education was for the public good. In ‘Education’, she used this history to argue for the further expansion of women's employment. ‘There are many sources of employment which were free enough to women during the Middle Ages’, she wrote, ‘but which now, notwithstanding the pressure of destitution, few women would think of seeking.’Footnote 108 It was time for change. If women had practised medicine in the middle ages, they should do so again, whilst there was no reason they should not engage in commerce.Footnote 109 More strikingly, Lawrance attributes to women a ‘singular aptitude for government’. Here John Stuart Mill's Subjection of women (1869) coincided with Lawrance's reading of history which confirmed that no public office was inherently masculine or feminine. At the very least, women might work in parishes or perform the duties of guardians of the poor. These and other public institutions would be greatly improved by women's administration, Lawrance continued, comparing them to large households, ‘requiring just the same kind of supervision and rule as the family.’Footnote 110
When thus invoked by nineteenth-century writers, the analogy between society and the family is often taken to imply no more than a limited expansion of ‘Woman's Mission’. Lawrance's intervention in debates about women's education and employment reveal, however, that this was not always the case. It was, instead, a familiar comparison which she redeployed in her own terms. If men and women were different, she argued, and suited to different occupations, that difference varied considerably across time according to the available levels of education. Essentialized ideas of femininity and masculinity had no place beneath the surface of her writing, which in its signed and unsigned forms attempted to galvanize the ‘progress of public opinion’ and change the mental outlook and material prospects of her readers.Footnote 111
IV
The reaction of the Tory press and other traditionalist periodicals to Hannah Lawrance shows that she established a place for herself in mainstream public debate. John Bull was not the only representative of non-radical values to approve her histories, for the Gentleman's Magazine also praised Lawrance's research in 1838, and drew particular attention to her new account of the progress of English culture.Footnote 112 Five years later, the Idler, and Breakfast-Table Companion declared that her History of woman in England ‘must become popular’ and provided a lengthy excerpt ‘of the system of education given to young ladies in convents, about the time of Henry I., [that] will be perused with much interest’.Footnote 113 At the same time, the New Monthly Magazine and Humorist opened its review with a sober statement that it would be ‘unfeminine’ and ‘impolitic’ for a man, let alone a woman, to argue for woman's rights. But this was not a charge laid against Lawrance who instead had, ‘so far as her work proceeds, demonstrated the Right of Woman to a social equality with Man, by recording her History: thus showing that, in every step which men have advanced from barbarism towards civilization, the influence of woman has been at least as operative in the good work as that of man’.Footnote 114 Nor were liberal periodicals like the Athenaeum alone in comparing Lawrance to Agnes Strickland.Footnote 115 The New Monthly concluded that Lawrance's History of woman in England had secured her a popularity equal to Strickland's.Footnote 116
After the publication of the Historical memoirs, Lawrance's research was cited by another historian, Elizabeth Stone, in The art of needle-work (1840), dedicated to Queen Victoria. This history was quite unlike Lawrance's in its feminine register and decorous feminine subject, but comparable inasmuch as it connected women to the progress of civilization. Instead of focusing on the convents' role in safeguarding women's education, the light of progress convents preserved for Stone was ‘the ancient art of embroidery’. Although Stone quoted Lawrance at length on medieval convents and on the life of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century housewife,Footnote 117 she criticized Lawrance for not treating needlework as a peculiarly feminine preserve.Footnote 118 Unimpressed, the Athenaeum criticized Stone's book for being a rather ‘“conservative” production’.Footnote 119
Although the Athenaeum's loyalty to its longstanding writer is unsurprising, Lawrance's entry into the male-dominated world of letters remains unexplored. Her identity as the author of London in the olden time was known as early as 1829 when she contributed a signed piece to the Gem annual, edited by Thomas Hood.Footnote 120 Like other contemporary women who were paid less than men to publish histories and to write for the press, Lawrance's career began in the mid-1820s with historical fiction, whilst she later wrote another historical novel entitled The treasure-seeker's daughter: a tale of the days of James the First in 1852.Footnote 121 An article by Lawrance about Thomas Hood, however, sheds more light on how she cultivated her intellectual ambitions, revealing that she had formerly been a member of a ‘Social Literary Society’ in Islington in the late 1810s and early 1820s.Footnote 122 Hood remembered that ‘the gallantry of the founders had ruled that half the members might be of the female sex, and accordingly amongst our “intellectual legs”, we numbered a fair proportion of the hose that are metaphorically blue’.Footnote 123 It was here that Lawrance became friends with Hood who shared both her powerful social conscience and an idiosyncratic pleasure in writing.Footnote 124
The interaction between Lawrance and Hood at this literary society formed the basis of a close relationship. In his biography of Hood, John Clubbe described Lawrance as Hood's ‘contemporary and lifelong friend’ who appreciated his satirical verse.Footnote 125 What has hitherto remained unrecognized, however, is the extent to which Hood assisted his friend's career. According to J. C. Reid, the social literary society ‘seems to have continued during 1822 and 1823, before fading quietly away, as such groups have a habit of doing’.Footnote 126 Hood's career in poetry and prose was, however, in full flight as he joined the London Magazine as an editor, befriending Charles Wentworth Dilke and others at the time that Lawrance was working on London in the olden time. When the London Magazine went to press for the last time in 1829, Hood became involved with a new publication, the Athenaeum.
At this point, Hood and Lawrance started to see each other more regularly,Footnote 127 rendering it probable that it was through Hood that Lawrance met Dilke, who was then one of the small group who had taken over the Athenaeum. Lawrance's tenure as one of the periodical's regular contributors began with her first article in late 1830, at the same time as Dilke assumed full editorial control. Whether or not Hood introduced her to Dilke, Lawrance and her editor certainly shared a similar liberal outlook on social reform and specifically, on the situation of women. ‘Dilke and his staff early took a definite stand for “National Education”,’ writes Leslie Marchand, ‘which was first seriously discussed in the thirties.’Footnote 128 In ‘Education’, Lawrance fulsomely praised Dilke for supporting women's wider employment, helping to establish the Female Schools of Design in 1842, and labouring ‘unceasingly, by speech and pen, in the cause of women's advancement’.Footnote 129
Writing for the Athenaeum secured Lawrance a place in a current of prominent middle-class liberal reformers; by the mid-1840s, the Athenaeum had a reputation ‘surpassing that of even the great quarterlies’.Footnote 130 Like Lawrance, Dilke believed that character was formed by environmental factors and that women deserved a new type of rational and moral education, as well as wider employment opportunities. This idea was not new, for Lucy Aikin had made this argument in her Epistles on women (1810),Footnote 131 whilst radical Unitarianism advanced comparable claims for women's rights in the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote 132 This was the milieu from which Harriet Martineau emerged, though unlike the short-lived radical Howitt's Journal (1847–8) which achieved only a small circulation, Martineau secured a wide audience from the early 1830s onwards. Nevertheless, Martineau wrote only a few articles on education, and her support for women's access to a rational kind of education and wider employment opportunities came towards the end of Lawrance's industrious career.Footnote 133 As Dorothy Mermin remarks, Martineau was ‘ambivalent at best about feminism’ and had summarily dismissed the subject in her autobiography.Footnote 134
Accordingly, the Unitarians did not have a monopoly on ‘a particular set of liberal cultural views’ because they were attractive to a range of reformist-minded figures who occupied influential positions in British society.Footnote 135 The view which appealed to Lawrance was Wollstonecraft's argument for women's education and employment, which was also based on the belief that Christian virtue is available equally to women and men.Footnote 136 This view was, however, explicit only in ‘Novelties’ and ‘Education’, where Wollstonecraft was historicized, more than invoked. This moderation is characteristic of Lawrance's reformism, which rested on historical scholarship and balanced argument, rather than on radical forms of political satire or invective, and explained her appeal to magazines and journals of different political persuasions. It also corresponds to the ethos of moderation characteristic of Congregationalism, which was the church to which Lawrance belonged and the third largest Christian denomination in the country according to the census of 1851.Footnote 137 Mitchell notes that Lawrance was baptized at the New Broad Street Independent Chapel in London in 1795, and left £50 in her will to the Congregational Fund Board for the Relief of Poor Ministers;Footnote 138 Lawrance also evidently donated ten shillings to the largely Congregational Missionary Magazine and Chronicle in 1866.Footnote 139 Described late in the century as ‘the Church of the wealthy, well-to-do, respectable middle-classes of the country’,Footnote 140 Congregationalism had its origins in seventeenth-century Puritanism. These origins were obviously appealing to Lawrance who claimed it was her Puritan ancestors who had kept the ideal of women's education alive during the republican Commonwealth. More importantly, Congregationalism promoted a liberal culture in which Lawrance thrived and met fellow reformers like Hood and Dilke.
Whilst Hood and Dilke shortly thereafter parted company as business partners, they remained friends and Hood still wrote the occasional review for the Athenaeum. One such review praised Charles Dickens's Old curiosity shop (1840) and led to ‘something like friendship’ between Hood and the famous author.Footnote 141 It was perhaps due to this new friendship of Hood's that Lawrance contributed five articles to Dickens's Household Words in 1854 and 1855;Footnote 142 though she could equally have contacted with Dickens herself. Two letters from Dickens to Lawrance written in April 1854 suggest this may have been the case: these indicate that she had contacted him and suggested contributing some historical vignettes, to which he replied enthusiastically.Footnote 143 For Lawrance was now well known. Her signed histories had been published to critical acclaim; she was established at the Athenaeum; and she had written three articles for Hood's Magazine in 1844.Footnote 144 Besides another two other articles for Fraser's Magazine, she also wrote a review for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in 1841, and another three in 1847, when she began writing for Robert Vaughan's British Quarterly Review.Footnote 145
In this new periodical Lawrance found her perfect home. The British Quarterly Review was a serious nonconformist journal which Vaughan, a fellow Congregationalist, had founded in 1845 out of opposition to the ‘radical political dissent’ he found in the Eclectic Review.Footnote 146 Appointed professor of ancient and modern history at London University in 1833, Vaughan's ideas about the practice of history, which he outlined in his introductory lecture, were very similar to Lawrance's.Footnote 147 In terms of education Lawrance was also at one with Vaughan, who fiercely disagreed with the extreme nonconformist argument for educational voluntarism, formulated by critics like Edward Baines who believed that any state provision of education would jeopardize popular liberty. By contrast, Vaughan saw that ‘voluntary effort alone could never provide universal education’ and firmly espoused the benefits of state-sponsored secular instruction.Footnote 148
Lawrance wrote for the British Quarterly Review until 1870, five years before her death, and it is fitting that the last article she ever submitted to the journal was ‘The education and employment of women’ in July 1870. Presumably her contemporaries were not as immediately persuaded by her historically grounded reformism or her enthusiasm for the medieval olden time. Johnstone quipped in one review: ‘Have all of us, unfortunate wights that we are, lived too soon or too late?’Footnote 149 But Lawrance's contribution to public debate should not be underestimated, or characterized as a limited, single issue campaign.Footnote 150 Lawrance focused on women's education in her histories and her journalism because it was, to her, the most important way of bringing the ideal of liberal Christian England closer to reality.
