From Times Online

May 14, 1999

A valuable property

Margaret Anne Doody

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU. Comet of the Enlightenment. By Isobel Grundy. 704pp.

Oxford University Press. Pounds 30. - 0 19 811289 0.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, christened Mary Pierrepont on May 26, 1689, was born into a world made new by the success of the

"Glorious Revolution". Her sister Frances was to marry a man who adhered to the "wrong" cause, but most of Mary's family seem

like Whigs of God's own making. Mary belonged to a New World Order, a world of trade and industry and new wealth, as well as

one of publications and Enlightened views. Mary enjoyed all these things, believed in these things, and hoped for progress through

these things, but her belief in herself and in what she might achieve was always based largely on a sense of privilege, of

entitlement by blood. Her rank was inalienably her identity - "Lady Mary" is no mere Mary, like a Wollstonecraft.

Holding fast to her advantage of rank, Lady Mary could console herself for the attacks of Pope and Swift by reminding herself

how low-born they were. If, to our disappointment, high-born writers customarily refrained from publication, her rank meant that

she always had what we call publicity. She lived in public, always on display to journalists and scandal-mongers and on-dits.

Despite intelligence and long practice, Lady Mary never quite learned how to handle this position. To Isobel Grundy she appears

a comet, a blazing individual and eccentric mass of energy, yet she sometimes seems more like another cliched figure, the

chameleon. Sometimes a tease, sometimes strong-minded, she could lose her rebelliousness in a desire to fit in or to show off,

as she did in Brescia where the middle-aged Englishwoman allowed herself to be fleeced like any little lamb by a well-born and

charming bandit. (She might almost have served as the model for the heroine's foolish aunt, seduced by Montoni in The Mysteries

of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe.)

Her ingenuousness in that long episode stemmed from her desire to be esteemed by Italian aristocrats not only as a lady but as

a lady perfectly at home in Italy. Lady Mary the worldly and cynical was utterly diddled in a land deal, vainly believing (as she

was meant to do) that she had purchased an Italian estate.

At times shrewd, at times foolish, Lady Mary also had a variable temper. She could be charming to people who were doing

her in or did not think well of her, and ruthlessly sharp to those closest to her. The Lady Mary we see in this biography had a

talent for wit and for pleasure, but no great talent for happiness. She was usually surrounded by crowds of acquaintance, courtiers

and hangers-on, yet she was solitary. She fell out with many of those closest to her, and could both charm and alienate.

Lady Mary never became "an author" in the simple sense in which we can say, for instance, that Mary Astell and even Anne Finch,

Lady Winchilsea, were authors.

Most of her writing was circulated in a private group, or kept for personal consumption. We are indebted to Robert Halsband, who

edited her Letters in the 1960s, and to Isobel Grundy for presenting us with Lady Mary's writings. Over many years, Grundy has

edited Mary Wortley Montagu's essays, poems, plays and fiction - most of which existed only in manuscript until very recently.

The published work for which she is best known, the Turkish Embassy Letters, was (fortunately) pirated from manuscripts after

Lady Mary's death and smuggled into print, to the horror of her relations. Mary Wortley Montagu's novella "Docile" has not been

known to the world until Grundy produced it a few years ago. Lady Mary's imagination and her emotions were alike released by

writing in French; "Docile", which displays her talents in prose fiction, cannot be called a work of English literature. It is Grundy's

contention that Lady Mary is an author, and interests us on that account. It is Lady Mary the writer whom Grundy declares

worthy of this long life story.

The work that has gone into this biography is impressive. Lady Mary's life touches the lives of many others, and there are acres of

manuscripts to consult, by numerous writers of different sorts, from teenage girls giggling at sex jokes to the confidences of

government agents. The archive extends to the account books of great estates, wills, marriage contracts, even the report of a

commission of lunacy. Grundy's mass of well-arranged information inspires confidence, even if at times we may wish for more

than the abundant facts. The psychology is of the elementary "common-sense" kind. Feminist theory is alluded to occasionally

in a perfunctory manner, chiefly only as a means of defence of the subject, about whom Grundy is openly defensive. The depth

and darkness of Lady Mary's life go almost unnoted, although the facts we are given point to them. The Lady Mary that we get to

know here is not a comfortable companion, though she is a brilliant one.

The narrative style of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment is somewhat bread-and-butter, a jog-trot

sometimes infelicitous in metaphor: "Lady Mar was the football, or the tug-of-war rope, between these two". The text is sometimes

littered with anachronistic contemporary slang - with words like "macho". We are told that Lord Kingston "saw him (Grange) as a

dinosaur". No, he could not have thought that thought. It does not matter, however, that the style of the biography itself is

somewhat humdrum, and occasionally awkward, because Lady Mary herself is anything but. Quotation from her own writings

is consistently vivid (if often biting) and memorable. The Queen, dressed in pink surrounded by her ladies, is "superior to her

waiting Nymphs / As Lobster to attendant Shrimps". A lady is "a little thread satin Beauty", a phrase of which Meredith might

have been proud.

That "little thread satin Beauty" was Lady Mary's close friend Molly Skerret, who seems to have served for a while as Mary's

"humble companion" (and, some might speculate, as her mistress) before Molly became openly the mistress of Sir Robert Walpole;

Sir Robert later married Molly after the death of his wife, who had eloped with another partner. Lady Mary's friendship for Molly

Skerret explains Horace Walpole's un-dying animosity to her as the friend and protectress of one whom Horace regarded, however

unreasonably, as his mother's supplanter.

Mary Pierrepont, more aristocratic than Horace Walpole, was the offspring of a younger son of the Earl of Kingston and his wife,

the orphaned Lady Mary Feilding - through whom Mary was connected to Henry Fielding the novelist, a young relative whom she

came to know in the 1720s. In 1690, her father had a stroke of luck; the second of his brothers to hold the title died without issue,

and Mary's parents became Earl and Countess of Kingston. The child was "Lady Mary" before she was two years old. Her mother

died when she was three years old; she was put in the care of her grandmother at a manor house in West Dean; the grandmother

died when Mary was ten and she went to live in the grandeur of Thoresby, estate of the Earls of Kingston. Here her father

entertained cronies of the Kit-Kat Club (including Congreve and Addison). She had masters to teach her Italian and drawing

until the last was thought to be "harmful to her eyes". Her real education was self-administered; she boasted that she taught herself

Latin and Greek, studying in the library "whilst everybody else thought I was reading nothing but novels and romances".

One suspects that a brother or brother's tutor may have given a little assistance; nevertheless, it is a feat. Mary was proud of the

achievement, although it had to be kept secret, for learned ladies were ridiculous and a woman who was too "bookish" might be

thought unmarriageable.

In her teens, she naturally thought a good deal about marriage - the inevitable destiny of a woman. She and her sister Frances

seem to have had a good deal of freedom for uncensored correspondence with girlfriends. She and Anne Wortley (the sister of the

man who was to be Mary's husband) exchanged "giggling and outrageous" letters commenting on the news that Lord Herbert had

stolen the chamber-pot of Lady Bridgewater as a love memento. Mary and Philippa Mundy made up their own slang to deal with

their marriageable state:

Philippa Mundy shared with Mary and Frances a playful secret code for use in their letters, in which Paradise meant marriage for

love, Hell meant marriage with reluctance and detestation, and Limbo meant marriage with indifference.

Each of the three confided in the others about a Paradise whom she truly loved.

But none of them expected to be able to marry her Paradise, and none of them did . . . . Mary's unidentified Paradise is first heard

of after her father had chosen her a Hell, and last heard of not long before she eloped with her Limbo, Edward Wortley Montagu.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this book is the insight it offers into former generations of teenagers, overhearing the slang

and chat of girls. In the next generation, Lady Mary's daughter Mary and her niece Frances Erskine refer to desirable boys as

"teddy Lads(s)" - ancestors of the 1950s Teds? Whether they looked on "Paradise" or a "teddy lad", well-born girls in the eighteenth

century knew that they were unlikely to be given choice in matrimony, which was an affair of alliances and money. Yet, some

of Lady Mary's girlfriends tried to intervene in their own fate. Mary Banks became a scandalous jilt when she turned down a suitor

who was a heavy drinker; Lady Henrietta refused to accept her mother's choice of a first suitor, saying he stank, but consented to

marry the second suitor, the Earl of Oxford, once her mother had turned against him. Mary was to make the most notable effort

to break free, eloping with Edward Wortley rather than marry her father's choice.

No wonder that she later found Samuel Richardson's Clarissa an interesting novel. Richardson's novel in turn may have been

affected by what its author knew of news and gossip regarding Lady Mary (his exact contemporary) and her family. As Grundy

notes, the novelist may have taken in the Pierreponts' methods of building up wealth by having it coagulate around one member of

the family (in order to rise to a dukedom).

Clarissa's uncle John also enriches himself through coal mines, like Edward Wortley, the man Lady Mary married.

Lady Mary was a valuable property to be exchanged - a girl of good birth who was known as a beauty, slender and dark-haired

with long eyelashes and a witty way of speaking. Edward Wortley was not the catch her family looked for. He made his own

advances, and had some claim by birth, as a grandson of Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich; his father had married an heiress

named Wortley and had taken her name. Young Edward Wortley, despite his expectations of estates in Yorkshire, was not yet

wealthy - he was going to get wealth by determined operations as the owner of coal mines. Edward Wortley Montagu is one of

the first profiteers of the Industrial Revolution. The courtship did not proceed well; her relatives wanted strong settlements pushing

all Edward's and Mary's property towards the eldest son, and Edward did not care for this service to primogeniture. (In the event,

as no premarital settlements were made, Edward was able to leave his wealth to his daughter rather than to his son.) Meanwhile,

Mary's father wanted her to marry a man with the ineligible name of Clotworthy Skeffington, heir to Viscount Massereene.

She loathed him, writing to her father: "My Aversion to the Man propos'd was too great to be overcome".

But he answered only that "pleaseing him was only to be done by Obedience".

Like Clarissa, Mary offered her father a promise never to marry as long as she did not have to marry the object of her aversion,

but the parent was adamant.

Telling Philippa "Limbo is better than Hell; my Adventures are very odd", Lady Mary eloped - not from her father's house but from

the house at West Dean to which she had been taken - and she and Edward were married in Salisbury in August 1712.

Despite some promising elements of compatibility, the marriage was not particularly happy. Both were given to fault-finding.

Initially, the young wife had to live a quiet life in Yorkshire, often alone, looking after her baby. She tried to spur Edward on in

active political engagement, to make his sails catch the wind that blew in the new Hanoverian dynasty just after the death of Anne.

As the men she knew were politicians (by birth if nothing else), Lady Mary was not used to a man who did not care for public life;

Edward's slow, not to say dithering, public manner was an irritant. Mary's ambitions were largely political, whereas Wortley's

talents were much more suited to business; a certain dogged persistance was to make him rich if not beloved. The marriage was

probably a better deal than a union with Clotworthy Skeffington - it bought her the trip to Turkey, for one thing. Lady Mary's

father showed his poor judgment in marriage choices again when he bestowed the hand of Mary's beloved sister Frances upon

John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar. The Jacobitism of Mar meant nothing but trouble; and the strain of living exiled abroad, in poverty

and anxiety, probably contributed to the mental breakdown of the unfortunate Frances.

In 1714, Edward Wortley had accepted a (rather unglamorous) post as junior commissioner of the Treasury, and his wife could

enjoy the delights of London and the stirring world. She did her best to get on good terms with the new court, especially with

the King's bastard sister, Madame von Kielmansegg, and with Caroline, Princess of Wales. Lady Mary's determinedly close

association with the Hanoverian court was one reason that her relationship with Pope was likely to founder. In this heady period

of life as a young married lady in London, however, she met many distinguished people who had something to gain from

complimenting her, and Pope was among them. Paying verbal court to high-born young beauties was probably psychologically

important to the young, crippled Alexander, and Mary had much to gain by being associated with the wits who wrote in the new

style. She wrote a number of poems in this period, best known of which is probably "Saturday. The Small Pox", the last of her

eclogues.

The year 1715, disastrous for the family, ended with Mary's life-threatening bout with the smallpox. She was fighting for life

at the same time as her sister and new brother-in-law experienced the dreadful aftermath of the Old Pretender's failed attempt on

the Crown. Mar and his wife went into exile in February 1716, a few days before the Earl was attainted and his estates forfeited.

A little money was allowed out of the estate to support his wife and child. Anxious attempts to recover some of the Mars' money,

and to deliver them from exile, were to preoccupy Mary and others for years to come. Meanwhile, Mary had lost the beauty which

had been part of her power. Although convention dictated that she be addressed and even painted as if she were still beautiful, the

loss of her looks and of part of her identity evidently went deep.

When she went to Turkey with her husband, in his brief and failed embassy, she was, as Grundy points out, probably already

aware that the Turkish method of dealing with smallpox had been reported to physicians in England. Her time in Turkey gave

her the opportunity of observing the medical practice at close hand. She also wrote a travel book. Her Embassy Letters, written

with a conscious journalistic intention, belongs in the tradition of Enlightenment discourse about men, manners, relativity and

tolerance. In manuscript the Letters were not without readers at the time (perhaps including Voltaire), but Wortley's relatives

would not permit Mary to endanger her husband's reputation by printing them, even though (judging by Mary Astell's preface)

she apparently intended to do so in 1724.

Lady Mary intended to bring to England something bigger and more important than another travellers' tale. She was determined

to introduce inoculation into England. She inoculated her own daughter - although she claimed she had to watch the child closely,

as those who didn't want the method to work were not above trying to make away with the baby. The propaganda and

demonstrations were successful, but her introduction of inoculation was, to say the least, contentious. Perhaps her reputation

never fully recovered from the storm of controversy, probably more damaging to her reputation than any rumoured youthful love

affairs (regarding which, Grundy points out, there is no proof).

One of the most interesting sections of Grundy's biography is the discussion of inoculation. One actually wants more - to read

the letters to the newspapers, magazine articles, and fulminating sermons to which the author alludes. A book on "Lady Mary

and Inoculation" would be well worth having. Princess Caroline supported an experiment, begging the lives of six condemned

criminals to be inoculated as test cases. One would like to know more about these Newgate "volunteers". Who were they? What

happened to them afterwards? (We are told in a footnote that one of the condemned convicts thus pardoned was Anne Tompion,

wife of Tompion the watchmaker, but we are not told why she was under sentence of death.) Princess Caroline bravely had her royal

children inoculated, raising the ante and of course introducing a political element to the controversy.

Not unlike evolution or abortion in our own time, inoculation became an issue that aroused terrific passions. World-picture clashed

with world-picture. As Grundy indicates here, the interference with "Nature" was figured as the intrusion of both Oriental and female

elements, going against the biblical and the Graeco-Roman traditional views of the body and of human identity. Critics were right

to think the introduction of this medical practice a momentous cultural step - in its engagement with changing the world it not only

heralds the introduction of all inoculation and vaccination in the centuries to come, but also adumbrates future practices entailing

the willed insertion of "foreign" matter into the body - practices which include the insertion of pacemakers, organ transplants, and

the design of artificial organs.

Lady Mary is a pioneer in science and medicine, although her most decided achievement has been paradoxically almost completely

erased in public memory.

Pious schoolbook tributes to Jenner and vaccination generally suppress the initial steps - thus getting rid not only of Lady Mary's

role but the even more important role of the Turks. The Jenner story becomes an idyll about English cows and English dairymaids,

a story of the village green - no hint of perfume and minarets. Lady Mary herself wrote in defence of inoculation, counselling

moderate and careful use following the Turkish method. One of the things that revolted her was that the English doctors who

accepted the practice put their own stamp on it, introducing heroic measures - deep slashes, quantities of infective matter

introduced into the system. In addition, they gave the patients the good old English benefits of bleeding and fasting, remedies not

applied by the ignorant Turks during inoculation. It was no wonder that some patients died under this treatment, thus proving to

some triumphant sceptics that the Turkish practice was wicked and dangerous.

The journey to Turkey was of great importance in Lady Mary's life and the life of her country, but it did not lead to the literary

renown that the Embassy Letters might have brought her. Her husband had proved a political failure.

Living fairly quietly at Twickenham, she could correspond with her sister Frances, Lady Mar, but spies monitored Lady Mar's

correspondence. People of importance in those days learned discretion through painful experience. By 1728, Lady Mar had sunk

into severe despondence, perhaps complete loss of wits.

She was allowed to return to England, where a commission of lunacy decided that she was lunatic, and not competent to manage

her affairs. The fate of Lady Mar was interesting to people in different political camps. Her sister was criticized for keeping her in

poverty and on short commons, although, Grundy argues, Lady Mary may have been following medical advice which advocated

low diet and complete lack of excitement for lunatics. There was, however, undeniably a harsh streak to Lady Mary. Failure,

self-pity and incompetence of any kind always made her angry. She was scarcely an ideal companion for anyone in a weak state.

It is about this time that Pope turns against Lady Mary, for reasons still not clarified. Some personal slight or feeling of having

been betrayed created an estrangement and dislike exacerbated by political difference. His attacks on Lady Mary for being "dirty"

and physically disgusting are, as Isobel Grundy says, part of the weaponry always used against the female body (dirty in itself ipso

facto) and against the "bookish" female.

Pope's attacks on Lady Mary are certainly ungentlemanly, wanton and cruel. Yet it is hard to say that none is justified.

Isobel Grundy does not seem aware of the extent to which her own narrative offers a justification to Lady Mary's attackers.

Mary was often cruel and heartless - or appeared so. Her treatment of her mad sister and of her elder child are not above reproach.

True, the entire family on both the Mar and Pierrepont sides got into unseemly and even violent disputes as to who would have

control of Lady Mar (and thus of her fortune) and, later, who would get control of her orphaned daughter, Frances. Lady Mary

was not singular. But it seems glaringly evident that neither Edward Wortley nor Lady Mary were of any comfort to anybody else.

The suffering of other people meant little or nothing to either - even within their own family, let alone among the poor outside

their own circle. Believing (or persuading herself to believe) that mental illness is a mere physical kink, unrelated to affliction,

Lady Mary removed herself from sympathy with Lady Mar when that sister went mad - though that may have been a defensive

measure against any mad tendencies she feared in herself.

Piling up money, but giving little or nothing to sister Mar, and refusing to see their son, Wortley and his spouse could seem

egregiously and interestingly mean, avaricious well beyond the norm. In the Epistle to Bathurst, Pope accuses Wortley of being

one of the "misers of great wealth, proprietors of the coal-mines" who combined "to keep up coals to an extravagant price,

whereby the poor were reduced almost to starve". "And Worldly crying coals from street to street" might truly seem emblematic

of a bad Whiggish age in the eyes of the Tory satirist.

The figure of greatest pathos to emerge in this narrative is Lady Mary's and Edward Wortley Montagu's unfortunate son, a

disappointment to both parents. Mary's view of this "rogue", that he was silly and incorrigible, is all too readily accepted by

her biographer. At the age of fourteen (significantly just after the death of his aunt, Lady Gower, Mary's sister Evelyn), young

Edward ran away from Westminster School to sea. At seventeen, he contracted a union with a lower-class woman, a Sally who

"may have been a washerwoman". He left Sally very soon, but it is not clear whether he did so entirely of his own accord. His

father took steps to disinherit him. Both parents seemed to believe that he was irreclaimable and that they were entitled to shrug

him off. The Montagus were certainly practitioners of Tough Love. Looking at the cold world in which the boy lived, it is easy to

imagine that a tavern coupling might offer the warmest experience he had known of love, and that the forecastle mess might hold

greater sociability and harmony than he had encountered elsewhere. (After the cold water and beatings of a public school, the

severities of a sailor's life might not seem too hard.)

Edward's life seems a restless "search after happiness", a search that eighteenth-century writers, including Mary Wortley Montagu

the author, understood. But Lady Mary's understanding was for her own search, not for her son's.

Her son came honestly by a capacity for un-expected action, and for fugue. In middle age, the Lady Mary who had eloped with

her husband in former years, now eloped from him. She ran away from her husband to the Continent, in the belief that she was

about to enjoy a liaison with the young charmer Francesco Algarotti. She was certainly courting loud ridicule in undertaking an

affair with a younger man. (As the liaison did not develop, the family were able to keep this affair secret for many, many years.)

Lady Mary allowed herself to be even more ludicrous, and more blind. She had apparently not noticed that Algarotti was really

interested in sexual relations with men and not with women, and that he wished to ally himself with powerful people who could

do him good. An accomplished courtier, he made himself indispensable to powerful males as a connoisseur of art. He avoided Lady

Mary with great assiduity, always leaving town before she arrived. If she had left her marriage for this, she had deluded herself most

thoroughly. Perhaps, however, the Algarotti pursuit was itself a sort of cover-up, a passion suggested by Lady Mary's own

imagination as a sufficient reason for abandoning husband and home. What she really wanted was separation from Edward,

and a European existence at her own command. That suited her daughter Mary very well. Lady Bute, married to a man who

became Prime Minister, very patently felt happier if her mama was several countries away, not able to meddle in her daughter's

affairs or attract English attention to her flamboyant self.

As faithful to absence as Algarotti himself, Lady Mary remained distant from her husband (though never totally estranged),

returning to England only after Edward Wortley Montagu was dead. There she could die (of breast cancer). Even her enemies

(such as Horace Walpole) admired her dignity at the end. But even this dignity did not, as Grundy shows, prevent others from

going into a frantic scramble, even before her demise, to get her possessions, to hush up malfeasance, and, in the case of her

daughter, Lady Bute, to get her hands on Lady Mary's journals lest they became public. In contrast to the respectable Lady Bute,

her brother Edward died in the company of an illegitimate or possibly adopted son Fortunatus, originally Massoud. Edward by

now was a staunch Muslim, and died "repeating to his son, Fortunatus, in Arabic: 'Elhamdulillah - May God be praised'". His life

in Turkey had evidently "taken" like his inoculation, and in his exotic wanderings of mind and heart he was actually Lady Mary's

faithful child.

Margaret Anne Doody is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Professor of

English at Vanderbilt University.

URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article772056.ece

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