 Welcome, you're joining me here in the heart of the British Library, the home of words and people who love them. In 1770, Elizabeth Montague wrote, I never invite idiots to my house. Well, neither does the British Library. This next session invites you inside a digital Blue Stockings Salon as part of the upcoming exhibition, Unfinished Business. I'm going to hand you over now to my chair, Joanna Barker. Thank you, babe. I would like to start by introducing our panel for this evening. First of all, we have Dr. Yutika Sharma from Edinburgh University, who works on the art and intellectual history of South Asia in the early modern and colonial period. In fact, she used to work in the Asian Department of the British Museum and has been involved in the East India Company at Home Project. Our second participant is Professor Emma Cleary, who is Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University. And she has written extensively on the Blue Stockings and also is the author of a very interesting book called Jane Austen, The Banker's Sister. And our final panel member is Dr. Elizabeth Eger, who is a writer and cultural historian and reader emeritus at King's College London. She is currently completing a biography of Elizabeth Montague. And some years ago, she co-curated the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition called Brilliant Women, wonderful title, which was about the 18th century Blue Stockings. Now, Elizabeth and I are here today. One reason we're here today is that we are both co-founders of an organization called MCO. And MCO stands for Elizabeth Montague Correspondence Online. And this organization is about to launch the digital edition of the Letters of Elizabeth Montague. And the launch will actually be in three weeks time on the 15th of October. Now, this correspondence is one of the most important collections of the 18th century. There are an amazing 9,000 letters known to have survived, including 4,000 that are written in Montague's own hands. And the aim of MCO is to produce a free, online, digital edition of all her letters together with transcriptions and notes. And including in this will be 46 letters that are held by the British Library. So, who was Elizabeth Montague? Well, I'd like to show you a picture which was painted by Richard Samuel in 1779 and is called The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. Now, in this group of nine ladies, we see a singer, a painter, a poet, a playwright, several writers, and Elizabeth Montague, who's the one seated in the middle holding a scroll. Now, unfortunately, it doesn't look like her at all. These were idealized muses, not real people. So, who was the real Elizabeth Montague? She was an author, a businesswoman, a philanthropist, and a patient of the arts. She was a leading woman of letters of her day. And for 50 years, she hosted one of the most celebrated salons in London. So, today, we are going to use the spirit of the sound to illustrate the role that Montague and women like her in London in the second half of the 18th century played at a time when London was already regarded as a global city. But I'd like to talk, first of all, about what this meant in practice. Emma, can you help us? Yes. Well, I can try. One of the blue stocking writers, Anna Letitia-Babel, described London as a global city in her poem, 1811. She presented as, to quote her, a mighty city, which by every road in floods of people poured itself abroad. The main feature is this sense of openness, of what she calls spontaneous plenty. The sense of commerce as a powerful force which pushes people outwards around the globe, but also draws them into the British metropolis from all corners of the world. She talks about and celebrates ethnic diversity in London's public spaces, streets where the turbaned Muslim bearded Jew and woolly afric met the brown Hindu, to quote the poem. I'm going to show you the first of our images or rather the second, but the first that I'd like to bring forward, which is a painting called Commerce or the Triumph of the Thames by the Irish artist James Barry. It was one of the series he created to show the progress of human knowledge and culture for a society that was founded in London in the mid 18th century to encourage artistic and commercial enterprise. The headquarters were located right on the river at Adelphi, not far from the present day Trafalgar Square, and this image strongly conveys the imperialist mindset. It's a kind of fever dream of a vampire. On the left, you've got giant figures representing the different continents presenting their goods to father Thames, who's being propelled by a collection of great explorers, Drake, Raleigh, Cabot and Captain Cook, and surrounded by a ring of sea nymphs, some of them holding up goods manufactured in Manchester and Birmingham ready to be shipped out to the colonies. On the one hand, there's pride in London as the world's exchange. It's openness. And on the other, there's a rather overheated and exclusive patriotism. In the same series of paintings, there's another image. This was the annual prize giving for young creatives. It's really striking, I think, how prominent women and girls are at this event and in this image. James Barry, the artist, himself thought that talented women and girls were an important national resource. And the Society of Arts who awarded the prizes shared this view. Now, right at the centre of this image, it's rather, I don't know if people can locate it, but if you see a girl holding a basket just beyond her is Elizabeth Montague, the Queen of the Blue Stockings herself, right in the centre of the picture, you can see her in profile presenting this girl who has won a prize for needlework and she's presenting the girl to some aristocratic patrons. Montague was one of the main supporters of this society. This is very much a London image. You have the tip of a sail on the far right and the dome of St. Paul's in the distance. It's about the concentration of capital in the capital, wealthy aristocrats mingling with talented and ingenious professionals in the applied arts. The picture is saying this is the dynamic mixture which makes London the ideal launch pad for a rising international superpower, Britain. That's very interesting, Emma, but I wonder if Elizabeth can tell us a bit more about how women were able to participate in this because you showed the explorers there, but women were not able to be explorers or ambassadors and they didn't join the army or the navy and go abroad. So really, how could they be involved? That's a very good question. As Emma has emphasised, Montague lived in an era of empire building and while she couldn't travel abroad, she was very concerned with building Britain as a nation. As you saw in the paintings of the 9 Muses, she represents Britain's cultural talents as being superior, particularly to that of France. At the end, and it's important to remember this was an era of global warfare at the end of the Seven Years War after the British had signed a pact of peace with the Cherokee Indians having been fighting over land in the colonies. Elizabeth Montague decided to visit the Cherokee Indians who are an embassy to London and I'd like our next image up, please. This portrait is fascinating. It documents the visitation of the Cherokee chief and his fellows to London where they became something of celebrities appearing at Vauxhall pleasure gardens, randly and even visiting the court. What is interesting is that Montague is determined to see them for herself and she describes them in wonderful detail in her letter to Lord Bath. She notices the bright copper colour of their face and their makeup which she later compares to the rouge of Saloniers in Paris and she writes the general cast of his physiognomy is not a miss nor is he different in features from an English man as our new neighbour the French. She feels a real empathy with the chief of the Cherokees and there's something of a sense of emerging relative cultural relativism in her conclusion. I wish that interpreter was arrived he had sadly perished on the journey some thought he had been poisoned. I should be glad to hear their observations on what they see here all civilised people have prejudices in favour of their national customs and therefore do not judge people with candour those of other countries. So she's aware that they're in the process of judging her and she articulates that very clearly. I think the other way in which she brings the global to London is through the power of her salon. Now this was a fascinating space because it was in competition with the court but it was far more open and diverse to different influences and parties so it soon became known for the support of female education but also as a place to seek patronage. She wrote to her fellow Blue Stocking Elizabeth Faisy at the beginning of her Hill Street Salon about the fact that she is living as a time of great cultural achievement the most famous men of the day and the most famous and talented women of any day. Later when she more ambitiously built her Portman Square mansion on the profits of her coal mines which we'll come to later she described a little assembly she planned at her house that evening it will be composed of persons of so many different nations that if each should speak his mother tongue it would resemble the company at the building of the Tower of Babel. Now Elizabeth you mentioned the two houses that Montague built at Hill Street and in Portman Square and I wanted to turn to Utica to talk a bit about how its globalization affected the material culture of the time. At her Hill Street house where her salon was held Montague had a Chinese room. Was this typical? Have a minute as well please. That's a really interesting question. It was quite typical of the time there was a real interest in acquiring furnishings and decorating houses in the styles and designs inspired by Asia and a lot of this was fueled by the growing maritime trade with the eastern seaports and merchants and traders often bought back goods that they had commissioned privately through private trade channels as supercargos and this is a great example in that Montague's brother Robert Robinson who was a naval captain worked for the East India Company and brought back presents for her very often and she is known to have said you know my house looks like an Indian warehouse I've got so many figures jars etc you would laugh at my collection the gown that I bought out of the ship is very pretty and the work extremely neat so she was using these these furnishings and these presents to adorn her dressing room which was which was the main the main space in the house itself where where she met her intimate friends and also the the style that became really popular in the 1750s was Shinoiserie which was basically inspired design designs inspired by China and that these were incorporated within you know wallpaper furnishings curtain designs etc and she brought in a young architect by the name of Robert Adam who I encountered in my other work at Osterly when I was working for the East India Company at home project so Adam was brought in to refurbish or her existing Shinoiserie inspired dressing room and he sort of adapted it to a sort of more neoclassical taste but with Chinese inspiration with the Shinoiserie sort of inspiration and in fact one of the really striking pieces of designs that we have in this in the Johnstone Museum is the carpet that was used in the Hill Street dressing room of which we do have a slide today and one can see from that particular slide it was a really interesting mix that Adam came up with of a sort of very neoclassical aesthetic but then you know he interspersed these roundels that you see on the corners with again scenes inspired from China and also the central roundel itself is something that has been talked about in terms of having this inspiration from from the East so she really really fancied her dressing room in its earlier phase when it was very Shinoiserie oriented and this later phase which was more pared down as well and she often called it the she's quoted as saying that it was the dressing my dressing is the female of the great room this is what she called it so it's quite interesting that the material culture of the time had this real inspiration you know from the growing trade links well that's great but of course we must remember it wasn't just pretty pictures was it Montague herself complained about the the Nabobs coming back from from India and buying up country houses in her area of Baksa and their immense wealth came as we must recognise from exploiting and indeed later on from plundering the resources of the East so what did she think of that? Not pretty patterns at all there was an entire sort of sensibility in a way around the use of Shinoiserie and other such inspirations from Asia the sensibility of taste making and self-positioning that also went along with the connoisseurs connoisseurly interest in these designs and you're right I mean these objects were in some cases acquired through private trade but a lot of what Montague was observing in in her vicinity was a sort of arrival of these Nabobs and the Nabob is really a term which was a corruption of the word Nawab which actually refers to provincial governors and men of influence in in the subcontinent who were very wealthy and it is known it is very well known that these East India Company merchants and officers who served in the subcontinent became very wealthy very soon especially before 1813 before they were they were regulated so to speak by the government so in this sort of phase you know between the 1750s and 1813 of deregulated sort of corporate governance of the subcontinent there was a real worry about these company servants coming back extremely rich it said for example that they were seen to be dripping in diamonds or stuffing their menageries with beasts and it's it's true as as their control of the colonies grew their wealth grew and when they came back they they exercised their they used this wealth to exercise influence over things like buying parliamentary seats or funding investments in new properties or business ventures and some of these business ventures would have been also in the Caribbean so unlike the the West Indian company servants you know people serving in West India in the West Indies they were known they were looked down upon quite a bit and one great example is Samuel 4th 1788 play entitled the Nabob which made fun of the Nabobs but they they were a very divisive figure in society well I think we might we might pursue that theme a bit but I'm just going to take the opportunity here to say to the audience that if anyone would like to send in any questions you can do so online and I think it's in the chat box or the Q&A box and we'll be able to put some of your questions to our panel members later on but I want to come back to this this theme and I'm wondering whether women in Elizabeth Montague's circle were they cheerleaders or critics of imperialism I mean what was their attitude to to to his important issues like slavery Emma can you tell us something more about that thanks um Joanna yeah I think the answer has to be they were both cheerleaders and critics the women of the blue stocking circle supported the idea of a moral British empire some it's an idealized view of empire which would spread the benefits of trade internationally but they also condemned slavery as a blot on Britain's reputation um Elizabeth Montague was born in 1718 so she was 70 years old by the time the campaign to abolish the slave trade really got going but she took a keen interest one of the younger blue stockings Hannah Moore became a leader of the abolitionist movement and introduced Montague to William Wilberforce who was its main representative in parliament but earlier in her life there are really interesting connections between Montague and African intellectuals in London these links might have influenced her and spurred her interest in abolition I feel sure she knew about the visit of the African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley from Boston in 1773 Phyllis Wheatley travelled from America to London to see her book poems on various subjects through the press she was something of a sensation treated as a celebrity by the London Literati while Wheatley was in London we know that she met one of Montague's closest friends George Littleton Baron Littleton and it was reported in the newspaper an advertisement for Wheatley's poems that Littleton and other cultured aristocrats were in awe of her genius Montague would certainly have come across another leading light of the African diaspora Ignatius Sancho shown in in the next picture a really beautiful portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from 1768 now in the National Gallery of Canada Sancho was the protégé of members of the extended Montague family first as a valet and later when he set up independently as a shop owner in a fashionable part of Westminster Sancho achieved success as a musician as a composer and as a writer and he socialized with well-known actors artists and authors white and black he famously corresponded with Lawrence Stern the author of Tristram Shandy who also happened to be a relation of Elizabeth Montague by marriage you can't get get away from Montague's at this time in cultural circles now Sancho first wrote to Stern in 1776 asking him to quote him to give one half hour's attention to slavery as it is at this day practiced in the West Indies his letters were published in 1780 two years after his death and became a best-selling book circulating his strong views on slavery the young Christian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes he wrote about the illegality it's his word the illegality of the slave trade the horrid wickedness of the traffic for more on Sancho and other black Londoners you should go to an essential study by the historian Gretchen Gozina Black London life before an emancipation Gozina describes very vividly the significant black presence in the capital there are around five to ten thousand people of color and she's able to show the way they experienced urban life in England in the period drawing on documents like Sancho's letters which by the way is available in a modern paperback edition like Wheatley's poems one of Sancho's sons incidentally became a publisher now within the blue stocking circle um Sarah Scott Montague's sister was one of the first novelists to represent and condemn plantation slavery in the West Indies in a work called The History of Sir George Sir George Ellison published anonymously in 1766 she was a reformer rather than a radical but in their correspondence Montague and Scott showed their enthusiasm for abolition as he shared one of the letters with me from 1788 right at the start of 1788 as the campaign for abolition of the slave trade gets going Ignatius Sancho praised Scott's novel and in fact he described her to Stern along with Stern as one of his favorite authors so perhaps um Elizabeth can carry on that theme um but you're making it sound as if the women were in some way becoming intellectual leaders can we really justify thinking in that way absolutely Montague was known for her leadership not only of the salon but also of the business in Newcastle where she increased the coal trade to fund her cultural projects so she's an extraordinarily powerful woman a leader in many different spheres but as an intellectual that was her her intellectual leadership was her definitely her most prized identity and it was as a defender of Shakespeare that she very cleverly became most famous as a writer her essay on Shakespeare published in the same year as Garrix Jubilee um defended Shakespeare as a poet of the vernacular who hadn't who didn't have the classical languages similarly to women who were not generally educated in the classical texts she also defended him against Voltaire's criticisms in a very witty way showing his mistranslations of English by re-translating them back into English from his French which is rather a dynamic witty way of showing up his lack of sensitivity to the British to the English language so through this very close celebration of Shakespeare's language she becomes known as an intellectual who's prepared to defend a different kind of drama the drama the more natural drama of the people and in fact she gets invited to France in the end of the 1770s to defend her position in the academy in the French Academy of Literature which by the way has only honored a woman Asya Jeba in the last decade so women I think it's very important to remember that in this age very few institutions allowed women to participate and Montagu created something of an institution for women who were barred from universities a space from which they could develop their intellectual conversation and she banked upon the philosophy she's very pragmatic in promoting the philosophy of the time women's civilizing force or something practical leaders in conversation her salon was famous for its quality of conversation which was so strictly maintained that alcohol was forbidden lemonade and hot chocolate were the favorite drinks delicacies which can be stimulants to good conversation I'm sure but what's very interesting I think in broader terms when we consider Montagu's impact historically is that despite her relative conservatism she's an Anglican and she's definitely pro-amoral empire as Emma suggested she becomes taken up by much more radical figures in the French and American revolutions Helen Marie Williams a radical contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft who opened a salon in post-revolutionary Paris dedicated her poem Peru to Montagu and described her salon in Portman Square as a shrine of intellect further afield at the beginning of the 19th century mercy Otis Warren the American writer published her poems in Boston and this was the first of her literary works to bear her name and she dedicates it to Montagu in a very moving passage she celebrates Montagu's achievements and says will she across the Atlantic stretch her eye look over the main and view the western sky and their Columbia's infant drama see reflects that Britain taught us to be free and it's that sense of freedom what Anna Barbold terms freedom of the mind which is so important to Montagu and I think makes her a very valuable figure to to have as a resource in any kind of study of the 18th century because she was also a supreme networker um Elizabeth I'm going to ask you to go back I think to the material culture we looked at some pictures that Utica showed us earlier on of Hill Street and in in the late 70s I think about 1780 she built this huge mansion in Portman Square and this this was known for how I think even the queen visited didn't she yes um there she came with the princesses for breakfast and it was reported in the national papers Montagu wrote rather grandly to Elizabeth Carter that um she could read about the success of the great room in the in the papers she didn't have any energy left to describe it herself and we have a drawing of the great room as envisioned by Joseph Bonamy her architect here you can see it's on a different scale from her previous salon it's not really a domestic room and I think that's what's so interesting about Montagu in creating a space that is neither private or public it has a certain sense of intimacy and cache and it's somewhere that everyone desires to be seen sociability was a very performative thing by this time and Montagu was well known for her controlling ways creating a semicircle where people were ordered by rank and intellect as to who was nearest to her and it's believed that she even asked her carpet to be designed with um circles on the floor to guide people into groups that would promote ease of conversation um so in some ways she's an exponent of a kind of social control but I think she's unfortunately this building was bombed in the Second World War so it's no longer possible to visit it but we do have some extraordinary descriptions of it in her correspondence and one of my favorite accounts of it is William Cooper's poem on Mrs Montagu's feathered hangings which describes this extraordinary tapestry of feathers taken from all over the world and in many ways they represent the fact that she collects people because several of these feathers were donated to her by correspondence from around the world over the period of her lifetime so for example her her cousin Thomas Robinson who had been a governor in Barbados her brother Robert Robinson who's who sadly died in the middle of his life at the center extraordinary examples of feathers and she used them in this remarkable interior decoration taking featherwork which was considered to be a feminine accomplishment for fire screens or fans and built it on a scale quite extraordinary it covered the end wall of the salon and it was larger than life size so I think that's another way which she subtly subtly uses stereotypical accomplishments to perform ambitious spectacle and to draw people further into her power that's um that's an arresting image um in the spirit of the salon we want to involve other people in this so we've got quite a number of questions coming in that I'm going to put to you all uh in a minute um but I I don't want to miss the opportunity to remind you that um the emco digital edition will launch on the 15th of October and after that I can't give you the the URL the the web address today because um we're at the digital version of you know painting the walls and hanging the curtains we're not quite ready to launch it upon the world but it will be there in in three weeks time and I'm sure that by then you will just be able to put Elizabeth Montague letters into your search engine and you will find it um but I want to turn to some questions um there's a very interesting one coming um from Lisa Nicholson um who asks us whether aside from conversation did the members of Montague Salon engage in other activities did they read out works together or exchange books or or listen to lectures um Emma did did you want to say a bit about this yes most certainly yeah they they were great encourages of each other's um writing activities and um I I love the example of um uh Elizabeth Montague Elizabeth Carter Catherine Talbot the first generation of blue stockings who um provided tremendous moral support to each other and suggestions for where they might place their writings quite often they they wrote privately circulated um works in manuscript form among friends and it took a quite a lot of um courage actually to take that final step into print and so um they they were they were a terrific support network as far as um women's entry into print culture was concerned and there's another question here from Sarah Green which I think it actually steps back a bit and says well what do we know much about Elizabeth Montague's own education and the people who would have influenced her before she was this grand dame of international London um Elizabeth do you want to tell us about that yes well she was very lucky in that um when she was a child she was born into the gentry um quite a humble background relatively and when she was a child she went to stay with her step grandfather who lived in Cambridge Conyers Middleton who was a scholar and librarian of the university and he was also librarian to to to uh uh of Oxford who's living at at Winpole uh safely home close to came to Cambridge and he took his young granddaughter to visit and Edward Harley had a daughter himself Margaret Cavendish Harley later Duchess of Portland who of course was of a great aristocratic collector and being so child of her father inherited his incredible collection of natural history and books the books that form the tower in the British Library in fact the Harley collection um found their way to the British Museum at the great sale of her collection at the after her death so she became connected with this aristocratic learning circles at a very young age but she was also very she also had great initiative during that time she read the whole of the spectator and copied it out at the age of eight and she was required by her grandfather to sit and listen to his conversations with academics in Cambridge um and visitors including Voltaire when she was a young young girl and that I think that habit encouraged a very formal ability to to converse in a way that was intellectually rigorous um from the start thank you um I've got a different question here and I'd like to see if Utica could um answer this one it's a question about interracial marriage to what extent was this common in London at the time and what would social attitudes have been to them you're on mute still Utica that's a difficult one for me because I haven't really worked on that but I do understand that um the their interracial marriages mostly um happened in the colonies and in some cases um the wives came back um the BBs so to speak did come back with um some of the officers um or certainly that their children did um in many cases for example I can speak to what happened in the Indian subcontinent for example there were cases for example where um men maintained sort of two families at a time one family that they had left behind um in Britain and the other family that they started in India and um once their tenure in India was finished the children would then travel back and and reside with the with the parent with the original family and grow up there and go to boarding schools or you know be well educated and then come up in the world like that but um this this um and if you're interested to find out more there's a really interesting um book by the Arvaghosh on this um on the colonial family which you should definitely look at which which really talks about um the structure of the domesticity and and and the and interracial marriages as well um so I would definitely point you towards that thank you that's very interesting now I've got a question here I don't know who to put this to um it's um it's asking us whether the Blue Stockings discussed um the discoveries of Caroline Herschel um who was of course an astronomer at the time from a completely different background and not part of their circle um but apparently she was mentioned by Fanny Burney and that does give us a link for the Blue Stockings because she was one of the younger members of the Blue Stockings circle so um Emma you're nodding can you can you help us with this I'm just pleased that Burney is getting a mention um yeah I mean I I can't I really not sure about um Caroline Herschel herself but I I am certain that they were very interested in previous generations of learned women I'm sure that that uh Elizabeth could say more about this but um there were many um interestingly many publications at this time um cataloging almost brilliant women um from usually from about this the renaissance onwards um and I think that this was seen at the time as symbolic of a country's advancement the fact that women could share in learning um that uh women were permitted an education um and could achieve and be celebrated you know the very act of celebrating learned women became something of a ritual in Enlightenment Europe um but maybe Elizabeth could say a bit more about the specific case of Caroline Herschel and whether Elizabeth Montague knew about her I don't remember that there being a specific letter between them but I'm sure that it's very possible that they knew of each other um we'll have to look look in the letters when they're on the on the database but I think um they definitely appear together in several of the catalogs of famous women such as um Emma has mentioned one of my favorites is by a very young 13-year-old poet called Elizabeth Ogilvy-Benger who writes the female geniad and she talks about knowledge being on the stretch in a way that's very dynamic and includes the natural sciences I think um a figure that we could mention here is Mary Delaney of course um who who's a great botanist as well as a an embroiderer and is famous now for her collages paper collages that she made of plants specimens in the collection of her great friend the Duchess of Portland who I've mentioned already as being responsible for educating Elizabeth Montague when Cook's Cook's went to the Pacific and when Joseph Banks came back he came just he came straight to Balls Road the Duchess's country estate to ask Mary Delaney to make specimens of the plants he brought back from the from the from the South Seas so she was not only celebrated by fellow women but explorers and scientists of the day who we hear so much about in the history books um were actually relying on women's knowledge to record some of their discoveries um he could have chosen many other illustrators but he went straight to Mary Delaney now I'm getting lots and lots of questions here um and one of them is is highly topical because it's asked whether um Elizabeth Montague in her correspondence is anything about vaccinations now I guess vaccinations would be a bit later because it wasn't discovered by Edward Jenner until I think the 19th century but of course they did have inoculations which were introduced to um to to Britain by another Montague Lady Mary Workley Montague who I think Elizabeth I'm right in saying her husband was Elizabeth Montague's cousin but that's an aside tell us can we say anything about Elizabeth Montague and inoculations? Yes well she inoc- she decided to inoculate herself against the smallpox um which her sister caught um and that was a very tragic difference between them in terms of their success in society um and there's a very moving letter in which she describes having to visit her sister after a period of 14 days and remain at six feet distant from her which I think would ring lots of bells for people today um it it was very important for William to not to have their face scarred by by the pox and it ruined their capital in the marriage market just to put it bluntly so it is a fascinating question a topic that I think would reward a whole salon. All right well we'll probably move on then um I've had a question here that we really should have addressed earlier on which is why were they called the Blue Stockings? Who would like to answer that? Emma, I'll pick you. I feel like uh that Elizabeth has an absolute right to this having having worked so extensively on the blue stockings but yes wasn't it something about the informality? Not if I if I'm getting this right the informality of the original gatherings it was actually the men who wore the blue stockings is that right? Yes the men in this a specific man yes Benjamin Stilling Fleet was the first blue stocking and it was if there was something homely about it compared to silk stockings is that right they were worsted stockings stockings? Yes I think the connotation is that he was working in his study and he forgot to change into his white silk silk so I always liken it to the to the fact of someone today going to a gentleman's club in jeans and instead of being turned away he was welcomed by the blues who said come in your blue stockings because we are promoters of a new informality and sociability so and what's fascinating to me is that while the blue stockings were a heterosocial body men and women mixing freely it was a very fashionable term and people longed to be blue stockings but as soon as it became more solidly associated with the female sex and it it did that gradually over time because of Montague's focus on female education it then very quickly became derogatory so it's um a mark of the misogynist misogynist labelling of history that the term has become to represent something far more ambivalent than it did initially. Yes because of course it would have been very rude in those days to speculate about color related stockings. Yes those were not on view. Um now I've got some a series of very serious questions um perhaps perhaps more serious than the than the stockings um and it's really what perhaps we can link them and what was the influence of the sales did the did the opinions um that Elizabeth Montague and her other salon saloniers have did they did they influence policy did they were they taken seriously did they helped to change the laws um and did they all have a similar view or would you imagine that you'd have a whole variety of views in the salons from you know radical to to conservative so it's quite quite a serious one that isn't it I can't think myself that there were any laws that were actually changed of course a lot of the um these women there were related to members of parliament. Yes and also I think it's worth pointing out that one of the crates the first flourishings in blue stocking history came about at the time of the argument for suffrage um at the end of the 19th century so that there are collectors and writers who seek out the example of the blue stockings at that point because women are always in search of models from the past. I think what's more disturbing is the achievements of the blues are so so had such a great impact at the time and yet were quickly forgotten at the big for a large part of the 19th century and it shows that the progress of feminism is never something simply positive and I think that's something that the British Library is brilliant in addressing in its forthcoming exhibition about the history of the progress of women's rights because there have been always been periods at which people have argued strongly for women's right to be included but it's it has also been been periods where she's been where women have been utterly restricted from having a public voice. That's a good point and I'm glad you made that because this whole panel really was inspired by the exhibition that the British Library is putting on which should have been launched this spring but of course other things took over but it will be launched in in October about the same time as the the MPO site and this is called unfinished business the fight for women's rights and I think the exhibition itself is taking a slightly different a slightly later historic time period from the one we've been talking about really from the the middle of the 19th century up until today and we could tell from the title unfinished business that they're they're saying that there are still things to be done today so we've we've sneaked in the blue stockings here really as precursors of those 19th and 20th century women who took up different different causes and so actually I think I might finish by asking each of you in turn to speculate because I've had a very interesting question here which is what if the Montague Salonistas were around today what would they be looking to reform what would they want to change or to influence do we think in today's society or culture Utica? I mean I think the fact that the salon you know operated in the way that it did and it was so in a way it was exclusive but also inviting it was intimate but it had a global outlook and so I suppose one can compare it in a way to the sort of new digital culture in a way that's that's that's starting where you know very much like our digital salon at the moment right and you might find you might you might find more sort of these small focus groups or small discussion groups you know that are coming up and and taking up a cause and I think very much the environment would be one very primary thing on their mind and I'm sure they would be very very vocal about that as well. I'm sure that's right Emma. Yes I mean they were women with great of great capacity and there's no doubt that Elizabeth Montague herself would have made a brilliant prime minister but I think that they were incredibly good at forging alliances with men who did have actual social and political power and so I think indirectly they did have quite a big impact on policy sometimes in government probably but also the tone of public life and I think that one cause they would have embraced very wholeheartedly is the everyday sexism movement begun by Laura Bates. I think they would have they're very concerned about equality gender equality in language and and I think that's what comes across very much in the correspondence I think it will it will demonstrate you know this wonderful sort of innovative um equal discourse between male and female intellectuals that really they established in a central way in British culture. Elizabeth? Yes I think I'd follow on from Emma there and agree that um they were primarily concerned with promoting judgment and critical this critical intelligence through education and writing. I think for women they really highlighted the connection between writing and rights that importance of having a voice depends upon a critical judgment. What's fascinating about Montague is that she managed to combine this with quite a material brilliance and splendor. I'm not sure what they would think of the inequality of today's society and the fact that two-thirds of the world don't have access to education. I think that's a very important question for feminists today and global feminism is about recognizing those inequalities which haven't been addressed but at her historical moment I think Montague was a great figure for pointing out the importance of language in in law Mary Wilson Cross' vindication of the rights of women was one of many texts she wrote including an autobiographical novel in which she tells the story of her life as an individual. I think that the the great emphasis on enlightenment, selfhood that Montague is also fascinated by is something that these women could can teach us today when we're thinking about modern feminism. That seems to me like a very good place to stop. I'm sorry for all of those who have put in questions that we haven't had time to answer but I really appreciate all the contributions that everybody has made that enabled us to hold this discussion and I am very grateful to our panelists Utica, Emma and Elizabeth for joining us today and thank you for all of those of you in the audience as well. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you to the brilliant speakers in our digital salon to Lizzie, Joanna, Utica and Emma and thank you to you for joining us. Please make a donation to the British Library if you can and be sure to check out the rest of our event program.