The Bluestockings (c.1755- c.1795)

Etching by Thomas Rowlandson, "Breaking Up of the Blue Stocking Club."

Main Page | 18th-Century British Literature | 19th-Century Women Writers | What's New at LiteraryHistory.com

The group known as the bluestockings originated in mid-eighteenth century England with Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen, wealthy hostesses who entertained the leading minds of both sexes at "conversation parties" in their London homes. The term "bluestocking" referred to the habit of one of their guests of wearing blue worsted stockings instead of the more socially acceptable white silk. The hostesses liked the name, since it spoke for their wish to create an atmosphere in their drawing rooms that was informal, sociable, and based on friendship, unlike other parties of the time that were more stiffly formal. Their gatherings emphasized witty conversation on literary and philosophical topics, and brought together a wide range of social types, including artists and writers and many guests who believed in encouraging female learning. Because women played such a prominent role in the bluestocking circle, the bluestockings are sometimes said to be representative of the Enlightenment ideas of David Hume who, in his History of England (1754-61), saw women as centrally important for civilization and social progress.

As the cause of women's education advanced through the eighteenth-century and the fame of the bluestockings spread, the term "bluestocking" began to be applied to any woman who had literary or scholarly interests. Later, when the French Revolution produced a backlash against liberal ideas in early nineteenth-century England, "bluestocking" was sometimes used as a term of ridicule and abuse for learned women, and at other times the "bluestocking" was held up as a conservative ideal and foil to more radical ideas about the advancement of women.

The eighteenth-century bluestocking circle included the poet and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld; the poet and philosopher James Beattie; the diarist and biographer James Boswell; the politician and author Edmund Burke; the writers Frances Burney and Hannah More; the poet, translator, and writer Elizabeth Carter; the essayist Hester Chapone, author of Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773); the actor and playwright David Garrick; the playwright Elizabeth Griffith; the author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson; the artists Angelica Kauffman and Joshua Reynolds; the novelist Charlotte Lennox; the historian Catharine Macaulay; the writer Elizabeth Montagu, author of Essay on Shakespeare; the singer and author Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (nee Linley); and the diarist Hester Thrale. The circle was celebrated in Richard Samuel's well-known painting, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1778), which featured a group image of nine women portrayed as the classical muses: Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Carter, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Sheridan, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah More, and Charlotte Lennox. The poet Ann Yearsley, a milkmaid from Bristol, was a protegee of the bluestockings, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was inspired by them, as were the later Langham Place group and Bloomsbury group.

For more information, see Elizabeth Egar's entry on the bluestocking circle in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and her Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Palgrave MacMillan 2010).

The Bluestockings (c.1755- c.1795)

Further Reading