“The Artful Woman”: Mrs. Ellis and the Domestication of Elocution

ABSTRACT

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular and prolific writer, is now perhaps best remembered as Victorian England’s foremost “propagandist of domesticity.” Ellis, in her Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) “domesticated” women’s elocution by situating it within the home. Although women occupied the private rather than the public sphere, they nevertheless were responsible for much of England’s national greatness—its distinctive “domestic character.” In The Young Ladies’ Reader, elocution becomes a domestic duty supporting the English home and nation. Ellis restricts women’s reading to the private domain thereby reinforcing rhetoric’s traditional separation of male and female discourse.

Notes

1 I want to acknowledge the careful and through reading of this essay by RR’s two reviewers, Professors Suzanne Bordelon and Jane Donawerth.

2 A key word search of the British Library catalogue for term “elocution” 1700-1900 yields 597 entries. The same search of WorldCat yields 3699 entries. Although imprecise, such searches do indicate the extent of the elocutionary movement.

3 In Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, W.S. Howell calls elocution a “strange movement” which “endorsed a futureless idea that was destined against logic and common sense to have a two-hundred year future in England and America” (146). George Kennedy says the elocutionary movement “shares some features of sophistry” and devotes slightly over one page to it in his history of rhetoric (277-79).

4 Several recent major studies have examined women’s elocution in eighteenth-century Britain. See the works by Michaelson, Williams, and McDowell.

5 Women’s elocution in the nineteenth-century U.S. has been especially well studied. Important works include studies by Johnson, Buchanan, Bordelon, and Kimber. See also Donawerth, 105-25. Elocution is also a subject of several essays in Gold and Hobbs.

6 The Victorian era in England is customarily demarcated by the reign of Victoria: 1837-1901. However, some historians date it from the Reform Act (1832) until Britain’s entry into WWI (1914).

7 Recent studies of elocution provide a more complete and complex view of the movement than earlier scholarship. See, for example, essays by Harrington and Spoel. For a survey of elocution prior to the nineteenth century, see Williams, 11-35.

8 After the establishment of Christianity some rhetoricians substituted preaching for epideictic as the third type of oratory. Blair, for example, does this in his Lectures. See Lecture XXIX, “Eloquence of the Pulpit.”

9 Thomas Sheridan (1719-88), an influential early elocutionist, was also an actor. Many other elocutionists, such as Cresswick, pursued acting careers. For the role of female elocutionists on the English stage see Michaelson, 98-134.

10 For a comprehensive analysis of The Female Reader, see Abbott.

11 Ellis was obviously not the only author to write about women’s reading in the first half of the nineteenth century. She was, of course, preceded by Barbauld in England. In the U.S., Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies (1833), addresses elocution among many other subjects. This work was published in London in 1834 but Ellis gives no indication she is familiar with it. Ellis includes one poem by Sigourney in the Reader. Ellis, however, is exceptional because she writes a complete reader explicitly situating elocution in the English home.

12 Ellis was not, of course, the only Victorian proponent of domesticity. John Ruskin (1819-1900) was another important advocate. Earlier writers like Hannah More (1745-1833) remained influential.

13 The practice of female elocution had been domesticated before Ellis. See Michaelson, 137-79. However, not until The Young Ladies’ Reader does an elocutionary text presents a rationale for elocution in the home.

14 For a more detailed comparison between Enfield’s The Speaker and Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader, see Abbott 278-81.

15 Little is known about Cresswick but, for unexplained reasons, he appears as the author on the title page of Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader. See Abbott, 272-74.

16 One of the few literary historians to consider The Young Ladies’ Reader is Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, See 83, 100-2.

17 Many writers considered Shakespeare unsuitable for women and children. Charles and Mary Lamb and Thomas Bowdler retold Shakespeare’s plays for family audiences. Ellis, in contrast, recommends supervised reading rather than rewriting Shakespeare.

18 Recommendations of supervised reading to protect children and women from the deleterious influence of fiction were common before Ellis. See Williams, 204-38. See also Flint, 83-94.

19 For example, T.S. Pinneo’s The Hemans’ Young Ladies’ Reader (New York, 1847) was “a tribute of respect” to the English pory (“Preface”). There is no apparent connection between Hemans (d. 1835) and this work.

20 See especially Bell’s Ladies’ Reader which includes selections exclusively from poetry.

21 The Imperial Dictionary (1856) defines “artful” as 1. “Performed with art or skill” 2. “Artificial as opposed to natural” 3. “Cunning; practising art, or stratagem; crafty.” 4. “Proceeding from art or craft.” The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines “artful” in similar terms.

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Don Paul Abbott

Don Paul Abbott is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English at the University of California, Davis. He has written widely on the history and evolution of rhetoric in the Renaissance, the early modern period, and the contemporary era. He is the author of Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in the Colonial Spanish America. His essays have appeared in Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and other journals.