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This study reevaluates Bluestockings’ gathering, collecting, and epistolary correspondences as crucial cultural practices that built a feminine vernacular republic of letters in the eighteenth century. It focuses on a miniature portrait, shells, florilegia, and letters as circulating objects of friendship. The discourse of the Scottish Enlightenment on civil society anticipated that the emergent clubs and societies would be favourable to the public values of civic virtue and sociability. This paper starts with a scrutiny of David Hume’s three essays, “Of Essay-Writing,” “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” and “Of Refinement in the Arts,” which describes the relationship between the learned and the conversible, civility and manners, and curiosity and pleasure. Then it reads Catherine Talbot’s “Essay XX: On Our Capacity for Pleasure” which shares Hume’s opinion on the pleasure that it facilitates the refinement and polish of the mind. In the latter part of her essay, Talbot defines the collector of rarities and the botanist as the appreciators of “a wise and reasonable Pleasure.” Montagu’s letter to the Duchess of Portland, portraying her head as the Duchess’s closet, interestingly captures the characteristics of a wunderkammer. In her letter, shells are metonymy objects encompassing naturalia and artificialia. Mary Delany’s Flora Delanica, or “paper mosaic” of various herbs and flowers, a product of the Bluestocking botanist community including Queen Charlotte and the Duchess, dramatically represent a mixture of curiosity and pleasure. This study proposes that Delany’s florilegia should be reassessed alongside Rousseau’s herbaria, considering Rousseau’s long-term correspondence with the Duchess on botanical subjects. In sum, this paper examines how material culture constituted female subjects as individuals and how it mediated their communion.
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Bluestockings, Enlightenment, friendship, sociability, material culture
