INTRODUCTION

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet, Eliza Haywood insisted that she never wrote any thing in a political way. This was a flat out lie, of course, but to some it will come as news that an author known for her scandalous novels of sexual passion wrote anything in a political way, never mind that her politics might be the subject of an entire book. Others may be surprised that facts enough exist to fill out a full-scale biography, political or otherwise. Haywood is without question an uncooperative biographical subject. Just four letters survive, each an attempt to secure patronage, and as her bibliographer Patrick Spedding has noted, the manuscript sources total fewer than one thousand words.1 If contemporaries recorded their impressions of Haywood their comments have gone missing, with a few notorious exceptions. She was a voluminous writer and readers will find that her imaginative works abound in fascinating self-inscriptions and authorial self-representations, but apart from some prefaces and dedications, mostly from the 1720s, she seldom speaks in propria persona or comments directly on herself. Autobiography was almost the only form of writing not attempted by Eliza Haywood in the course of her long career as an adventuress in letters, an early biographer noted.2 It seems unlikely at this date that even the most strenuous archival digging will yield up the diary, journal or cache of personal letters that would throw light on the personal or private life. A century ago George F. Whicher wrote that Mrs. Haywoods one resemblance to Shakespeare is the obscurity that covers the events of her life.3 We reject today the condescension of an earlier generation, but the stubborn fact remains that little in the way of biographical data survives. In short, Haywood presents the biographer with something of a conundrum: she is a scandalous figure without a personal life. But for over four decades she performed in the public eye as an actress, novelist, translator, playwright, publisher, essayist and political journalist, and that life is amply documented. From the mid-1730s she wrote in a political way, developing a flexible feministinflected Patriot politics very much her own which enabled her to comment on contemporary affairs while continuing to subject female existence to the searching examination she began in the amatory fictions of the 1720s. The present
1

Copyright

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

biography is scant on startling revelations about the inner life her thoughts and feelings, even to some extent her true political views but it does provide a great deal of new information about a remarkable public life, including her theatrical ambitions, friendships, political alliances, business associations, households and living arrangements, and it casts new light on her character and sensibility, especially her desire for fame. The political biography format, it turns out, is ideally suited to tell the story of a shape-shifting author who used a variety of means, including political commentary, to make herself heard in the public sphere all the while concealing the personal life behind a succession of masks. The paucity of information on the life has been a theme in Haywood studies from the start. The earliest biographical notice, David E. Bakers indispensible entry in his 1764 Companion to the Play-House, known sometimes as the Biographia Dramatica, remarks upon the obscurity surrounding the Circumstances of Mrs. Heywoods Life. Baker then recounts an anecdote, one of few preserved, which speaks to Haywoods deep apprehension of the power of print to distort, and which may help explain why so little of Haywoods private life ever entered the public record. According to an unnamed source, Haywood asked that all particulars of her life be suppressed from a Supposition of some improper Liberties being taken with her Character after Death by the Intermixture of Truth and Falshood with her History. Baker reports that she laid a solemn Injunction on a particular person who was well acquainted with all the Particulars of it not to communicate to any one the least Circumstance relating to her.4 Despite speculation, the identity of this particular person remains unknown, but the fact that so little real information about the life leaked out either before or after her death may attest to her ability to inspire loyalty in her friends. Baker is the source of nearly all early biographical accounts, including Clara Reeves better known The Progress of Romance (1785), but starting with Sidney Lee in the late nineteenth century a small but dogged group of scholars has done its best to enlarge upon the information in The Companion to the Play-House. Lees entry to the original Dictionary of National Biography (1891) presented new information that made its way into a number of early twentieth-century studies.5 The most important of these is Whichers The Life and Romances of Mrs Eliza Haywood, published in 1915, which gathered together just about everything that could reasonably be surmised about the life and more, for as will be seen it introduced some piquant errors into the mix. As late as 1998, Paula Backscheider, one of Haywoods most attentive modern critics, could write that almost nothing useful is known of Haywoods life, and she was right.6 But much has changed since then. The modern era in Haywood biographical studies began in 1991 when Christine Blouch, then a graduate student, published in Studies in English Literature a biographical essay entitled Eliza Haywood and the

Copyright

Introduction

Romance of Obscurity that vigorously swept away the myth of the runaway wife of a clergyman introduced by Whicher in The Life and Romances and brought to light new details relating to her background. Blouchs essay in effect kick-started modern Haywood biographical studies and inaugurated analysis of the role of the politics of literary reputation in shaping the image of Haywood still in circulation. Some of the same information reappears in the more fully elaborated biographical essay that opens the six-volume Pickering & Chatto The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood that began publication in 2000.7 These are keenly intelligent essays and have been welcomed for their new information, but it must be admitted that Blouch was so eager to get anything potentially relevant into print that they can seem somewhat jumbled and stretches of them are unabashedly conjectural. Some of her surmises have opened up whole new pockets of inaccuracy, or at least dubious inference, especially regarding Haywoods motherhood and sexual relationships. The next milestone came with Patrick Speddings A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), also from Pickering & Chatto, which unusually for a bibliographic study presents biographical findings as well as detailed information regarding the publication history of the texts. The bio-bibliography, to use the term Spedding applied to Whichers Life and Romances, often makes good on its authors hope that detailed bibliographical analysis would reveal details of Haywoods life.8 The massive Bibliography, often described by reviewers as magisterial 848 closely printed pages, a seemingly exhaustive record of the publication history of the vast Haywood oeuvre is indeed a monumental achievement that makes a study such as the present political biography imaginable. However, and this seems inevitable in any developing field, the Bibliography has serious flaws and these are now beginning to receive attention. Spedding is tendentious, careless or both in his reading of biographical evidence. He uncritically accepts some of Blouchs questionable conclusions and introduces distortions and misrepresentations of his own, biographical but also bibliographical. Some of his conclusions are now being challenged, notably by Leah Orr in a forceful critique of his methods of attribution, and later in this book I will have occasion to correct his account of Haywoods activities as a bookseller and publisher.9 Nonetheless, the research and knowledge distilled in the Bibliography provides a platform for the present study and informs virtually every page. His biographical findings and, if Orr is right, even some of the attributions must be used with caution, but the Bibliography remains all the same a magnificent achievement that must be regarded as the starting point for any investigation of Haywoods professional career. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood is the first full-length biographical treatment of its subject in nearly a century and the first ever comprehensive

Copyright

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Copyright

assessment of her politics. It corrects many misunderstandings, brings to light new information about the life and career and offers fresh readings of a number of texts, both familiar and unfamiliar. That this biography is able to add significantly to the foundational research of Baker, Lee, Whicher, Blouch, Spedding and many others who will be encountered in this study, including Thomas Lockwood and Catherine Ingrassia, is owing in no small part to the existence of digitized databases that enable access to an astonishing range of materials available via Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), the British Periodicals database, and most importantly for this study, the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, said to total nearly one million searchable pages, although those who have struggled with the failures of character recognition endemic to this database may wonder how searchable it actually is. Contemporary newspapers have proven especially illuminating. The press historian Jeremy Black thought it probable in 1987 that a stress on specificity is going to be one of the key developments in eighteenth-century historiography, and it has certainly been a key to advancing my understanding of the nature and implications of Haywoods political engagements, which are often tied to specific activities in the press.10 A few big finds will be reported in what follows, but more important finally is the accumulation of new or reinterpreted circumstantial evidence as it permits inferences that can be used to build upon and to some degree reimagine the scanty what-is-knowns of the life. This combination of inference and informed re-envisioning has made it possible to reassess Haywood in relation to historical contexts that have been only barely considered: pamphlet debates, the oppositional press at mid-century, Patriot politics from the 1730s onward, the Broad-Bottom opposition of 17424, the cult of the Patriot King and Bolingbrokean thought more generally and the Leicester House opposition of the later 1740s, to name only a few. Thus recontextualized, Haywood turns out to be a more adroit and better informed author than many have thought, as well as a productive figure for study of relations among the press, public opinion, political journalism, feminism and the emergence of the public sphere at mid-century. Haywood was the foremost female author by profession of the first half of the eighteenth century and her achievements, especially in the 1740s and 1750s, utterly belie her reputation in some quarters for breathless prose and venal marketplace copycatting. Viewed through the lens of the political engagements reconstructed in this study, many of her works from this period stand as complex and sometimes brilliant works of the creative imagination. It seems unlikely that another full-scale biography will be attempted any time soon, although I would be happy to be proved wrong on this point, so I have included in A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood a good deal of information

Introduction

that is not strictly political, including details relating to her friendships with William Chetwood, Richard Savage, Aaron Hill, Henry Fielding and that relative latecomer on the biographical scene, William Hatchett. I have also tried to correct errors and misunderstandings that have taken root in the Haywood story. Blouch wrote in 1991: Little is known about Haywoods biography, and brief as it is, a good part of the received account has proved inaccurate.11 Her pithy assessment remains about as true today as it was two decades ago, and in the interest of giving Haywood a less conjectural life I have attempted in the biographical prolegomenon to distinguish those parts of the received account that are undocumented, patently false or highly suspect from claims that can be shown to have some foundation in the historical record, although it should probably be added that any account, my own included, will require a great deal of inference and inevitably some degree of guesswork. Every biography is to some extent an argument and because this one is more contentious than many it seems a good idea to lay out some of its principal contestations. For starters, it seeks to dislodge the image of the romance-writer loose of life and pen that has taken hold in many accounts and, in a closely related objective, to push critical imaginings beyond the preoccupation with the cultural scandal of Haywoods life and writings.12 If it remains largely the case that we know little, really, about the life, it is also true, and probably more damaging, that we think we know a great deal more than we do. The stories told about Haywood in even reputable sources often turn out to be driven not by evidence and analysis but by the desire to furnish her with a life commensurate with her significance as a cultural figure and her reputation for scandalous disregard for the proprieties. The sexual affair with the dangerous poet Richard Savage, the two bastard children from the 1720s, the long-term sexual liaison with William Hatchett these biographical facts turn out to be no more than speculation, some of it fashioned out of the flimsiest of evidence, and they give a misleading picture of a life that seems, from some angles, not only short on sexual adventure but curiously indifferent to the claims of heterosexual attachment. It may be going too far to argue that Haywoods life as a single mother who declines to remarry represents a challenge to heteronormativity, although a queered view of Haywood is something I would like to see developed, but it can hardly be denied that her reputation as a loose if not downright whorish woman rests to an uncomfortable extent on readings of her life filtered through the detractions of her enemies as they are abetted by present-day desires to give her an appealingly unconventional history. It is largely owing to that single image in The Dunciad of a fore-buttocked Eliza with sagging breasts and babes of love at her waist that she comes to us today fitted out with a sexually scandalous past and two illegitimate children, and is it sobering to say the least to consider that this image is the product of the inventive malice of Pope, fuelled by the enmity of his Grub

Copyright

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Copyright

Street tell-tale Savage and assembled out of details drawn from the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric conventions. In 1891, before Haywoods present reputation for sexual licentiousness had taken solid shape, the DNB was careful to trace the origins of her bad reputation to the reports of hostile observers and then hastened to supply the other side of the story. Literary enemies Pope and Savage, so far as I can tell represented that her character was bad, and that she had two illegitimate children, but her friends asserted she had been abandoned by her husband and was obliged to raise their children herself and this, by the by, is the story as Haywood tells it in one of her letters.13 But it suits the kind of cultural histories that get fashioned today to regard Haywood as signifier for the scandal of the emergence of the woman writer and of the early novel, and so it is often the disreputable elements that expand to fill the frame. A further example of the preference for ill-repute is found in a pair of biographical canards revolving around Haywoods supposedly scandalous maternity. The first is the notion, introduced by Blouch as conjecture and taken up as fact by many since, that Haywood and Richard Savage were lovers and that in 1722 or 1723 he fathered the first of two illegitimate children.14 The second is that she had a second illegitimate child by William Hatchett, the actor, playwright, and pamphleteer often described in recent accounts as Haywoods long-time companion. The first is possible if unlikely; the second wildly improbable, as will be seen in a later chapter. Baker in 1764, by comparison, is a model of judiciousness. He acknowledges her reputation for Gallantry but adds the important qualification that he had heard no particular Intrigues or Connections directly laid to her Charge.15 More than can be said of any other literary figure from the period, the Haywood we know, or think we know, is constructed out of the malignity of her enemies and they turn out to be fewer in number than we had imagined. It is one goal of this biography to shift the emphasis away from repetition of overly familiar hostile representations to the study of her friendships, alliances and associations, and this change of focus can be so startling as to give the impression that one is encountering Haywood for the first time. At some conjunctures the image of Haywood the grimy Grub Street hack working solo disappears altogether and one glimpses instead a competent and respected professional pursuing her craft within a network of allies and associates. This biography also questions the entrenched view of Haywood as a Tory or Tory feminist who expressed her partisan sensibility, ideas and worldview as early as her first novel, Love in Excess (171920). The notion of the Tory Haywood seems to have originated with Ros Ballaster in Seductive Forms: Womens Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (1992) who commented, almost in passing, that although Haywood failed to pursue the overt party political program of her Tory predecessors Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, she retained in her work the over-arching structure of a Tory ideology.16 Since then a small but rapidly

Introduction

growing contingent of critics has begun to insist that Haywood did write politically in her early amatory fiction and they are united in agreeing that she wrote as a Tory or, in a more extreme version, a Tory-Jacobite, and assume as a corollary that she campaigned against Sir Robert Walpole from the start. It is true that the first half of her career coincided with the rise and fall of Walpole as Englands first prime minister, to use the derisive phrase applied to the oftabused Great Man, and that from the mid-1730s she added her voice to that long tirade against Walpole that stands as the first example in British political history of an effective long-term propaganda campaign.17 That said, I must say that Haywoods Toryness in the 1720s is less clear to me than it is to others and the anti-Walpole element in her early writing is unquestionably overstated. It is almost startling to discover that her public opposition to the Great Man is largely confined to a period of about a year, beginning with the (anonymous) publication of the anti-Walpole satire-romance Eovaai in the summer of 1736 and ending the following spring when her brief career as a player in Fieldings politically edgy Great Moguls company at the Haymarket was brought to a close by Walpoles Licensing Act. Haywoods political positions were complex and shifting, to some degree situational; the desire to pin a political label on one or another text is understandable but reductive and tends towards the production of decontextualized readings that in my view create a distorted picture of the political life considered as a whole. The aim of this study is to develop the long view urged by Juliette Merrit, who compellingly argues that Haywood studies have arrived at a point at which we can begin to take the long view of her career and recognize that she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the course of nearly forty years as a professional writer.18 To bring these preoccupations and strategies into focus I have found it necessary, with one major exception, to set aside the usual party political labels the exception being the label Jacobite which, as will be seen, presents a special set of difficulties that require particular examination. But those convenient but not very illuminating terms of opposition, Tory and Whig, will receive short shrift in what follows. It is the political argument of this book that from the mid-1730s until her death in 1756 Haywood engaged energetically and at times vehemently in antiministerial satire and journalism. In contrast to her one-time theatrical colleague Fielding, a self-described strenuous advocate for the Pelham ministry in the 1740s who at different times wrote from different sides of the ministerial divide, Haywood consistently aligned herself with those excluded from or out of power. Her positioning in the 1720s is more problematic, however, for she plainly solicited support from government Whigs and, arguably, even wrote in support of Walpole in her scandal chronicle Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724). As far as I can tell, her anti-Walpole stance begins

Copyright

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Copyright

only with Eovaai in 1736, and the politics of this strange text, a satiric Oriental seduction tale infused with fairy-tale romance, something of a sport in the oeuvre, are not well understood. Eovaai is certainly an attack on Walpole but, more interestingly in terms of the political engagements in the second half of her writing career, it is our first indication that Haywood, whether for pay or out of conviction, wrote on behalf of the Patriot propaganda campaign to foster support for the peoples Prince, Frederick Lewis, the Prince of Wales. My sense that Haywood cannot be easily consigned to any particular party has the support of that school of political history that stresses the subordination of party identities at mid-century to that variant of Country ideology known as Patriotism, to adopt the terminology of newspaper historian Robert Harris. In A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (1993) and several related articles on the press and politics, Harris stresses the mongrel nature of political alliances. Political manoeuvrings at mid-century were based on complex alliances between Jacobites, Whigs, Patriots and Tories that inevitably blurred the ideological boundaries between these groups. In such an environment people of apparently very different political persuasion came together, forming temporary alliances under the umbrella of the slippery language of patriotism and liberty.19 My research suggests that Haywood is best understood in relation to this discursive Patriot mix. She can be shown to have had relations at different times with dissident Whigs, disaffected Tories, crypto-Jacobites and all-but-declared Jacobites and she was well known, it appears, to the organized opposition that had formed at Leicester House in the late 1740s and early 1750s. She herself wrote from a variety of political positions. In the months preceding the fall of Walpole and for several years after, she operated a pamphlet shop at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden that advertised a line of anti-ministerial wares. During the Fame years she ran a small-scale publishing business and saw into print works exhibiting a strongly oppositional bent. She seems to have been a supporter of the Broad-Bottom opposition of 17424. In early 1745 when many former members of the opposition found their way into the new coalition government, her Female Spectator received a telling endorsement from Jeffrey Broadbottom, spokesman of the outspokenly anti-ministerial paper Old England, or, The Constitutional Journal. She attacked the Duke of Cumberland at least once and may have been a paid propagandist for the party of his brother, the Prince of Wales. There is reason to suspect that Epistles for the Ladies (174850), a work with many seeming Jacobite elements, was part of a coordinated effort organized on behalf of Leicester House by the oppositional journalist James Ralph under the direction of George Bubb Dodington. Sometimes she exhibits a kind of populist Tory-Jacobite radicalism associated with the City.20 Some passages of The Female Spectator sound very like the arguments of a Whig radical. To the extent that she is Tory, as many have argued, she seems

Introduction

to possess that eighteenth-century Tory mind that J. G. A. Pocock characterizes as displaying a strange blend of Jacobite and republican ideas.21 Her work from perhaps the mid-1740s onwards expresses considerable sympathy for Jacobites and possibly for the Stuart cause, as others have argued, but her sympathies crossed partisan lines in ways that align her less with Jacobitism per se than with the Bolingbrokean ideal of a Patriot King capable of dissolving all distinctions of party and uniting the people around a monarch-father who would rule the country as if it were a patriarchal family. It is no great exaggeration to say that much of her work from Eovaai onwards, and perhaps earlier, meditates upon the implications for women of Bolingbrokes ideas about public service. My assertion earlier that Haywood did not write in a party political way in the 1720s is not meant to imply indifference to the themes of power, domination, and control that are at their core political. Her amatory fictions from this decade share to the full the fascination shown by Bolingbroke in The Craftsman with the intoxicating nature of power. He wrote in The Craftsman, 13 June 1730, that the Love of Power is natural; it is insatiable; almost constantly whetted, and never cloyed by Possession. From this premise he argued for the necessity of a mixed and balanced government to hold in check mans innate desire to exercise power. Haywood shared his views on balanced government, for many of the same reasons, but she was also deeply interested in the power dynamics of men and women in private life where, as the plots of the early amatory fictions repeatedly demonstrate, the sexual power of men over women is cloyed by possession. More than any other writer of her time she explores the effects of power-seeking on the powerless (and it should be noted that women in her analysis could be numbered among the power-hungry as well, as witness the aptly named Tigernipple in Eovaai.) In seduction-driven plots featuring the heterosexual pair, she lays bare abuses of power on one side (the chronically inconstant male) and thoughtless credulity and susceptibility to fantasy on the other (the too-credulous female). In romances, satires and political journalism from the mid-1730s onwards she uses the codes and conventions developed for the analysis of gendered power relations to take on an expanded range of social and political questions. From various angles she explores threats to what emerge in the long view as her core values chief among them constancy, social justice and reason or the sceptical intelligence. It is as if what had begun as concentrated attention on gendered power dynamics is refocused to encompass the entire social order. Within this enlarged field of interest it is no longer the overly susceptible heroine who is under threat but rather the entire social order, a heroine writ large one might say, and it is an order which has come unmoored from its traditional values and is at chronic risk of seduction by the increasingly systemic corruptions of greed, passion and self-interest. Her amatory fictions had asked, what must credulous young women do to resist the allure of heteroromantic fantasy? How can they develop the intellectual and

Copyright

10

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

emotional resources to resist male predation? What is the role of constancy in male-female relations? Of fantasy? Of reason? Her work from Eovaai onwards poses these same questions but transposes them, as it were, into a national and public register. What is the role of constancy in a modern economic order based increasingly on individualism and self-interest? What can be done to educate a too easily infatuated populace to resist the lies, enchantments, and misrepresentations of government power? How can human parrots be convinced to think with their brains rather than their mouths? Her preoccupations are of a piece, from beginning to end of her career, and party political labels like Whig, Tory and Jacobite recede in importance when Haywood is contemplated within the feminist-inflected Enlightenment contexts that are reconstructed in some detail in this book. Haywood is rightly admired for her penetrating if somewhat cynical analyses of the skills needed by women to survive in a world that favours men in virtually every way. It is satisfying to discover that in addition she worked out for herself a vision of womens productive role in national public life more richly imagined than I could have predicted before beginning this study. One of the shadowy professional relationships of which we catch intermittent glimpses in this biography is with James Ralph, the historian, political journalist and oppositional propagandist who was considered by his contemporaries to be a leading political writer. He co-edited The Champion with Fielding, wrote behind the pseudonym Jeffrey Broadbottom for Old England Journal and was later editor of The Remembrancer, the chief propaganda organ for the Leicester House opposition. These are all papers with which Haywood was in some fashion associated. Ralph was also one of the earliest professional writers to give serious thought to the phenomenon of the author by profession, a category that was beginning to take visible shape over the course of Haywoods career. Two years after her death he published The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), a treatise that has been described as the earliest comprehensive defense of the class.22 Ralph divides professional authorship into three Provinces or categories: an author may write for the booksellers, for the stage, or the most interesting for our purposes here for a political party, in his words, a Faction in the Name of the Community.23 That Haywood wrote for the booksellers and the stage is well known, but the likelihood that she also wrote for a political faction (or factions) represents a whole new way of thinking about her. Ralph described political writing as a demanding application of ones writing talents, for it requires the author do that without Doors that is, outside Parliament which his Confederates in a superior Station, find impractible to do within 24 There is no smoking gun to establish that Haywood, like Ralph, wrote without Doors on behalf of her parliamentary superiors, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence points in

Copyright

Introduction

11

that direction, and her periodicals from the 1740s The Female Spectator, The Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies take on important new layers of meaning in the context of this possibility. With a few exceptions from a scattering of Haywood scholars, these periodicals have not been approached in a sustained way as political works, that is, there has been little attempt to connect them to press activity or the specificities of high politics at the parliamentary or ministerial level. They have been overlooked by historians of the political press generally and the Leicester House opposition more specifically. This neglect is not entirely surprising given Haywoods reputation as an amatory novelist and the tendency of the for-the-ladies titles to conceal political intent, but it will be seen that these works have significant points of contact with the wider press debate and their contents give reason to suspect that Haywood had ties with persons within or close to the parliamentary opposition. This preliminary investigation of her contributions to polemical activity and press debate at mid-century will I hope act as a stimulus to further historical study. The political life that follows begins with her earliest appearance on stage at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1714 and takes her through to her final major political work, the four-volume Invisible Spy published late in 1754. Five of the chapters provide close readings of key political texts within a variety of political, polemical and discursive contexts. These texts are Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (17245), Adventures of Eovaai (1736), The Female Spectator (17446), The Parrot (1746), Epistles to the Ladies (174850) and, in an epilogue, Invisible Spy (1754). Another chapter examines the 1749 pamphlet that got Haywood arrested, a Letter to H Gg, Esq. (1749), as well as several other Jacobite-leaning works, including The Fortunate Foundlings (1744). Extensive close readings of imaginative texts may seem an odd modus operandi for a political biography but, in the case of an author whose political views are ill-understood and political engagements often misrecognized if not overlooked entirely, it seems a necessary method of proceeding. One benefit is the revelation, at least it came as such to me, that Haywood is an accomplished satirist who used established political symbol and metaphor to idiosyncratic but powerful effect. Many themes will emerge as the narrative develops, but two require some explanation here. The emphasis upon friendships and alliances mentioned earlier is part of a larger effort to offset the distortions induced by reliance on satire as a biographical source, but there are other historiographical issues to be considered. The fact that this eighteenth-century political biography is the biography of a woman poses a number of gender-related considerations or, to put it another way, the narrative shaped for this volume is inevitably an argument about how best to tell the story of a womans life. The models governing feminist literary

Copyright

12

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Copyright

history often stress the individual woman writer in her quirky, often rebellious singularity or emphasize her identity within female communities or in relation to feminine literary counter-traditions. The feminocentric focus tends to restrict the range of questions we are prepared to ask about eighteenth-century women writers with the result, in this instance, that we know much less than we should about circles through which Haywood moved and the professional and political networks of which she was a part. Current interpretive models are often ill-equipped to deal with issues of social embeddedness and can be the equivalent of ham-fisted when it comes to thinking about womens relationships with men within male-dominated cultural formations, such as the press at mid-century. But to understand Haywood as a political writer we simply must find ways to see her in relation to her male colleagues in the political press, even if the attempt to do so may feel at times like so much untheorized peering into the dark. The role of Jacobitism in Haywoods writings is presently much debated and since my position is likely to dissatisfy some readers I want to say from the outset that, despite what looks to be considerable fellow-feeling for the Jacobites and their families, I believe Haywoods support for the Stuart cause has been overstated. David Oakleaf cautions that oppositional political sympathies are ambiguous and reminds students of Haywood that we must ask of her as we do of Pope or Johnson, What was the nature and extent of her Jacobite sympathy? and, most importantly, we should expect complex answers.25 One part of that complex answer is that Haywood used idealized Jacobite counterworlds to imaginatively enshrine values (loyalty, hospitality, constancy, steadfastness, sacrifice) threatened under conditions of modernity as persuasively described by J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment. Closely related to this imaginative Jacobitism is an ongoing preoccupation with issues of social justice linked in Haywoods texts with a succession of Astrea figures. Astrea is important in Jacobite mythology as the goddess of justice who returns to earth to review its wickedness and in Haywoods usage, especially in Epistles for the Ladies, she embodies the idea of a Machiavellian ritorno to justice, patriotism, and public virtue under the influence of the ladies. For Haywood Jacobitism is not so much a political cause as a vehicle of critique and an imaginative resource for her Patriot feminism. The first chapter, Her Approach to Fame, focuses on the unfolding of her public life and political commitments as Haywood becomes by degrees an author by profession who pursues fame in a variety of forms. This chapter offers an appraisal of her politics in the 1720s that challenges the usual understanding of Haywood as a Tory and anti-Walpole writer, traces her transition from aspiring actress to London coterie poet to innovative novelist to multifaceted market-

Introduction

13

place professional, and revisits her fraught relationships with the Hillarians, including Savage, Martha Sansom and of course Aaron Hill. Chapter 2 looks closely at her major political work from the 1720s, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, arguing that this fascinating and understudied roman clef is a satire on England in the age of the financial revolution that (among other things) responds to two national financial crises, the well-known bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which forms the allegorical framework of Part 1, and the Macclesfield scandal that rocked the country in 1725 even as she was composing Part 2, which is one of many stories used to illustrate national corruptions in the aftermath of the Bubble. The moral indignation, sensationalism, and ripped from the headlines contemporaneity of this scandal chronicle is read as part of Haywoods tabloidizing imagination. Chapters 3 and 4 take up the Haywood story in the 1730s which means reassessing her life in the theatre. The Theatrical Thirties reconsiders her return to the stage in 1729 in light of the boom in London theatre following the unprecedented success of The Beggars Opera in 1728 and reconstructs her relationships with two of her theatrical colleagues at the Haymarket in the 1730s, William Hatchett and Henry Fielding. Her relationship with Fielding, to take the better known of the two, was far from being the antagonistic war that some have imagined, while her relations with Hatchett, who is often described these days as her lover and domestic partner, turns out to be more puzzling than existing accounts would suggest. The idea that Haywood was his mistress, as is often said, strikes me as unlikely, indeed preposterous, but I hasten to add that the evidence is ambiguous and I will do my best to lay it out fairly. This chapter also looks at the roles Haywood is known to have performed on stage, something that oddly enough is seldom attempted, and finds that she was a deliciously outrageous figure on stage, romping and raunchy. This chapter is followed by a close and multiply contextualized reading of The Adventures of Eovaai, which argues that this Oriental satire-romance represents Haywoods first outing as a Patriot feminist writer. Chapter 5, At the Sign of Fame, 1741-1744, presents new information about Haywoods publishing venture at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden, an upmarket glass-fronted pamphlet shop where she sold oppositional wares, some published over her own imprint, and offers a thick description of the neighbourhood where Haywood lived for over three years. It uses visual evidence to speculate about the sign suspended above the door which (I believe) featured the iconic figure of Fama or Fame blowing a trumpet announcing the triumph of Patriot virtue over ministerial corruption. This sign, which I argue is reproduced in miniature in the frontispiece to the present volume, is one of the many authorial self-representations that Haywood held out before her public and offers another example of her immersion in Patriot oppositional culture.

Copyright

14

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Copyright

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 take up her major journalistic texts from the second half of the 1740s, The Female Spectator, The Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies, works often linked in advertisements and on title pages. These chapters use a combination of close reading and contextual analysis to place Haywood in relation to parliamentary politics. It will be seen that each work has links with arguments and commentary in the oppositional press and that The Female Spectator, despite its address to the ladies and its multiple professions of gentility, shows signs of radical populism. It was followed by The Parrot, a weekly paper of Jacobite tendency which was shut down after only nine numbers and suggests the risky path Haywood trod at this time. One of its numbers contains a bitterly satiric portrait of the Duke of Cumberland as a mangler of flies. Close readings of the political subtexts of Epistles for the Ladies deepen the picture of Haywoods political connections. There are links with the propaganda efforts connected with such oppositional figures as Dodington and Ralph at Leicester House and ultimately, perhaps, the Prince of Wales himself, and there are suggestions as well of connections with the world of City radical Whig opposition via one of her collaborators on Epistles for the Ladies, Richard Glover, and with the Tory-Jacobite opposition through the Welsh MP Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. Her political journalism raises questions not easily answered about Haywoods motivations and the issue of political backing. Was Haywood working for her bookseller or for sponsors? Was she a hired gun or did she write out of personal conviction or both? Did she undertake to write these papers on her own or did she function basically as an editor seeking contributions? Chapter 9, Was Haywood a Jacobite? contextualizes the Jacobitism so evident in many of the writings of the late 1740s in relation to the demoralization of the opposition and the dual-dynastied cult of a Patriot King that flourished at the end of the decade. The volume concludes with an Epilogue that focuses on Haywoods self-inscriptions in her last and most selfreflexive political text, the seldom discussed Invisible Spy, written after the death of Frederick. She appears in this instance to write as an outraged Tory in the furore over the Jew Bill in 1753-4 and continues her needling campaign against Henry Fielding. Like many ambitious projects this one began in high-spirited confidence. Although it seems laughable now, once long ago I envisioned this volume as a definitive reappraisal of Haywoods political writings and career. Questions would remain certainly, but the searching assessment of the politics many have called for would be accomplished and the groundwork for the much-needed comprehensive and reliable life-and-works would be in place. If I am being fully honest, I saw myself as the scourge of ill-founded speculation who would set many misunderstandings aright and, in the words of the Female Spectator, I looked forward to razing the massive Buildings erected by Enchantment.

Introduction

15

The experience of writing A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood has been chastening, not least because I have been obliged to engage in a fair amount of speculation and guesswork myself, especially in areas where others more trained than I in both the broad sweep and the particulars of political history will detect arguments erected by Enchantment requiring correction. And, of course, much remains to be done. Some will notice the omission of discussion of The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1726) and others will regret that much attention has been given to a few key texts when a broader survey of her political thought might have been in order. Her work in relation to the Freemasons, the Jew Bill, the Elizabeth Canning episode; the political implications of her many translations; the specificities of her political engagements in the 1720s outside Memoirs of a Certain Island these are only a few topics all but passed over in this study. If there is one thing of which I am certain as a result of preparing this biography it is that, despite a number of very smart studies of individual texts, the study of Haywoods career as a whole is still in its early days and many more studies like this one will be required before we can confidently take the long view of her life, texts, career and politics.

Copyright