- Studying: PhD in English and Related Literature (full-time)
- Supervisor: Dr Mary Fairclough
- Thesis Title: Women, Empiricism, and Epistolarity, 1740-1810
- Research Interests: Eighteenth-century literature and culture; history of science; gender studies; letters; sociability
Thesis Overview
My thesis examines the relationship between epistolarity and empirical culture in the mid-late eighteenth century. I focus on female-authored epistolary writing, in the form of letters and poems by Elizabeth Montagu, Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, and Anna Barbauld. Drawing on disciplinary perspectives from literature, cultural history and the history of science, I aim to contribute to the project of recovering women’s involvement in science in the eighteenth century. Rather than looking at scientific practices, however, I’ve found that the epistolary writing of these women exposes their methodological contributions to science: their writing interacts with, draws on, and produces, an empirical epistemology and culture. I hope to show the significance of letters, such as these, in a broad eighteenth-century empirical culture that manifested across a range of forms of written, visual and performance media, and to show how the qualities of the letter form – targeted communication, experiential description and a claim to actuality – informed scientific method and communication.
What are you currently working on?
I have recently been working on landscape descriptions in Elizabeth Montagu’s correspondence, having been lucky enough to spend several months working on her letters where they are housed at The Huntington Library, CA, through the AHRC International Placement Scheme. I’ve been looking at how Montagu uses an empirical mode when describing the scenery of the north of England and Scotland, which she visits when she inherits coalmines in Northumberland. Her attention to sensorial detail compounds her otherwise conventional aesthetic landscape representations,and consistently emphasises her lived experience of her location. She is frequently aware of the epistolarity of her empirical accounts, commenting on her geographical distance from her recipient and, particularly in these moments, she uses her empirical representations of the places she visits to manage her relationship with her correspondent, demarcate the bounds of her social circle, and curate her identity as a friend and colliery-owner.
Here are my current thoughts on one of these passages:
On her journey to Northumberland from London in 1763, Montagu writes to her friend Elizabeth Carter, following a visit to Wetherby, Yorkshire, which she describes in terms conventional of landscape aesthetics:
I wish I could describe it [Wetherby] in such a manner as to give you a true idea of it. You must follow me by the side of a broad rapid river whose opposite bank is rocky & steep, but well adorned with trees which seem to lean over the stream to catch ye cool exhalation of the water; above the bank rises a fine solemn wood of Patrician Trees; as you look under the arches of the Bridge you see a fall of water which the sun this morning made a cascade of diamonds, on one side of the bridge is the Town of Weatherby built of stone […] on the other side the bridge there is a wood chiefly of aquatick trees betwixt which ye thatch’d roofs of Cottages appear […] as the River falls down the vally it grows more placid & seems to wander with indolent pleasure through the rich medows adorn’d with fine beautifull cattle & shelterd with noble woods. you who have an exquisite sensibility will I am sure agree with me, but these circumstances are lost on ordinary beholders. I was almost in a passion that you should be 300 miles off & very shortsighted & I could not make you see the happiest assortment of objects that I almost ever beheld. Had the River pretended to polite & solemn dignity whilst it ran betwixt a post village & a rude Town, it had been guilty of a great impropriety, so there it roar’d, & foamed, & behaved suitably to its vally it glided & dimpled along. [1]
Montagu’s representation of the river seemingly conforms to landscape aesthetics typical of landscape artists such as Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) – a painter to whom Montagu refers with relative frequency. But her representation of the landscape is not only visual, but empirical. She vivifies the scene through particular sensorial details: in the visual texture of the ‘rocky & steep’ bank and ‘dimpled’ surface of the water, the coolness of the water, and the implied warmth of the sun, and the sound of the river as it ‘roar’d, & foamed’. Montagu’s description further emphasises her presence in the scene, and her experience of the specific location, through the mobility of her perspective. Rather than stopping to take in the whole scene and its prospect view, this speaker is moving through the landscape, walking along the river bank, and commenting directly on the changing view of the ‘Patrician trees’ and ‘under the arches of the Bridge’ as they occur. At this point, following the representation of the arches of the bridge the second-person active verbs stop. The speaker becomes static. The perspective now elevates to a high viewpoint, and the scene stretches into the distance before her, beyond the bridge, and through cottages and meadows, seemingly towards the horizon.
But, as the scene recedes into the distance, it does not become increasingly blurred or obscured as in a painting of a landscape; it still contains moments of finely-painted, textured detail, such as the ‘aquatick’ trees and ‘thatch’d roofs’, and the river that ‘glided and dimpled along’. She describes distant items with a detail which we might understand as a telescopic perspective, or at least one which makes a claim to having encountered the features of these distant objects intimately. In Montagu’s landscape description, the aesthetic and the empirical and, at moments, telescopic, eye are one and the same. Montagu’s empirical representation, through precise visual, circumstantial and sensorial detail, attests to her lived experience of the river bank at Wetherby, and brings the scene to life for her correspondent.
Montagu’s vivid empirical portrayal of the scene positions Carter, her recipient, as its virtual witness. Her blurring of the written with the visual through her use of aesthetic landscape conventions is comparable to what Shapin and Schaffer observe in Levianthan and the Air-Pump:in experimental reports produced by the Royal Society, ‘the text itself’, ‘constitutes a visual source’, and that such a report ‘imitate[s] reality and [gives] the viewer a vivid impression of the scene’. [2]The empirical description, and precise circumstantial detail, recreate the scene for Carter allowing her to witness the scene virtually; the geographical distance between them seems to collapse, creating the illusion of their sharing the scene together. However, Montagu only sustains this illusion so far. At the close of the description, she states: ‘I was almost in a passion that you should be 300 miles off & very shortsighted & I could not make you see the happiest assortment of objects that I almost ever beheld’. Her structural positioning of her wish to show Carter the objects of the Wetherby landscape – directly following a vivid empirical account which successfully conjured the landscape scene – instills the phrase with irony. The phrase is delivered, I think, with a wink, in the knowledge that she has achieved a successful empirical representation. She almost convinces the reader of their presence in the scene. This phrase teeters between upholding the illusion, and revealing the textual devices she has used to create it. The illusion of a shared presence is wholly put to bed, however, by Montagu’s exclamation of her frustration at their distance – complete with a play on Carter’s shortsightedness. In the same moment that she wills the collapse of the 300-mile distance between them, she upholds it, in a way that may have forged emotional closeness between the women, but which makes their geographical distance certain. This moment exposes the paradox at the heart of using empirical description to create the illusion of geographical proximity between correspondents. On one hand, an empirical description brings the account to life, and it enables Montagu to communicate the details of her experienced moment. On the other, the empirical description makes a claim to the authenticity of Montagu’s lived (and, in this case, relatively immediate) experience of the place. The empiricism of the description verifies Montagu’s presence at Wetherby, and concretises her geographical distance from Carter. These sentences expose the working of the illusion created by an empirical description, through drawing attention to that description’s epistolary context. It is highlighting Carter’s physical distance from Montagu, and the epistolary nature of their communication, that confirms Carter’s participation in the scene as virtual, rather than actual.
[1]Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, Boroughbridge, 12 October, 1763, MO 3103, Huntington Library, CA.
[2]Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 61-2.
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