A resuscitated reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood

For two centuries and more it was official: Eliza Haywood was a dunce. In the Dunciad Pope had included her among his 'shameless scribblers'. What is more, she was a dunce with a reputation. As with her fellow scribblers, her 'profligate licentiousness' offended Pope, but his depiction of her as a sexual monster with 'Two babes of love clinging to her waist' opens one of the most vindictive passages in the whole of his poem, a passage in which an assault on her sexual morality is deemed sufficient to negate her as a writer. As the mother of two love children, she is presented as 'yon Juno of majestic size With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes'. Through this she has an odd place in the history of the language. She is the referent of the OED's only quotation for 'cow-like' and the only 18^th century example of 'ox-like'. But other evidence in the OED suggests that she was not so much of a dunce and considerably more domestic than Pope would have us believe. It tells us that she was the first person recorded as visiting a 'habit-shop' ('clothes shop'), to use a 'pig-iron' ('an iron plate used to protect a piece of meat when the fire gets too hot'), or to worry that the colours in her tablecloth might 'run'.

So was Eliza Haywood a whore or a housewife, monstrous or motherly? In fact, the question is invalid. It is an apparition produced by the dominating characteristics of English literary culture as they developed from the age of Pope and held sway at the time of the compilation of the First Edition of the OED. The examples I have given of the domestic Eliza are all from a posthumously published work, A New Present for a Servant-maid. This represents an oddity in her literary output and yet it accounts for 23 of the 61 citations from her works in the alphabetical range from M to R in the OED Second Edition. By contrast, her important journal, The Female Spectator, is cited 17 times, and her finest novel, the History of Betsy Thoughtless just ten. For a long time, the mud slung by Pope stuck. Sexual reputation was often used throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but especially by Pope, as a means of diminishing women writers - Aphra Behn fell foul of the same tactic, for example - and Eliza was an easy target. She had begun her career as an actress, proof enough of a dubious morality for many. And, when her early attempts at writing tragedy in the neoclassical mode which dominated literary culture at the time failed in both artistic and popular terms, she turned to scurrilous literary attacks on the genteel world to make her way. The only book-length work about her before the 1980s was G. F. Whicher's The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood, which as the title suggests concentrates more on her love life than on her literature. One article of 1918 is dedicated solely to documenting her relationships through a period left blank by Whicher.

Times have changed, however. Scholarship has moved on, and Eliza's reputation (both as a writer and as a woman) has been resurrected by recent scholars. This process can already be seen in the sections of the OED that have been revised or are in the process of revision. Access to full-text electronic versions of The Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless, amongst others, has provided Eliza with a new profile in the OED's current files and databases.

From the former, in particular, an interesting crop of antedatings have turned up. According to these, Eliza was the first to talk about the 'middling class', to refer to a person's final 'resting-place' (over half a century before Scott), and to describe a keenness or sharpness of feeling as 'poignancy'. She is no longer a sexual monster or a domestic goddess: she is a writer and social commentator, and one of the writers who developed the idea of feeling as a subject for the novel. Eliza Haywood was no dunce: it's official.