Eighteenth-Century Fiction

In book XII of Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746), a letter from a reader criticizes the amount of time that English women spend with their “Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tire-women.”¹ Several issues later, in book XV, another reader responds with a counter-example shifting the focus to men, asking, “If we have [End Page 667] our Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tire-women to take up our Time, have they not their Taylors, Barbers; aye, and their Face-menders too, to engross as much of theirs?”² The narrating eidolon of the periodical, the Female Spectator, takes the first letter, in book XII, seriously, saying that it makes a “just” proposal and responding to it at length (2:418). In contrast, she states that the second letter, in book XV, deals only with “trifling Things” that are not “of any great Moment” (3:102). Nonetheless, the Female Spectator introduces each of these letters—and others throughout the paper—with an invitation to the reader to use their own judgment to consider the arguments. She states before the letter in book XII: “I shall leave my reader to Judge of those Remarks contained in this Epistle; and as I shall hear... what is said upon it, answer hereafter the various Opinions” (2:415). As this example shows, The Female Spectator stages a dialogue with and between readers by addressing them directly, printing reader letters, and inviting and reporting on reader responses.

In this article, I suggest that the “dialogue” with readers in The Female Spectator offers an interpretive model for reading Haywood’s novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). Applied to the later novel, the periodical’s interpretive model enables a practice of critical reading that challenges the authoritative voice of the narrator. I analyse exchanges in the periodical about dress and the clothing industry, like that quoted above, to show that the periodical provides a model of interpretation that readers should apply to understanding Betsy’s engagement with the clothing industry in the novel. Moreover, the shared focus on clothing and fashion suggests that Haywood was using her text not only to instruct readers in critical reading practices but also to instruct them in critical buying practices. The text of Betsy Thoughtless embeds a critical reading that operates against the authoritative voice of the narrator, inviting attentive and well-trained readers to question the narrator’s statements and thereby reflect on their own consumer practices in relation to clothing and fashion.

Scholars have recognized the importance of constructing an exchange with the reader as a feature of periodicals since the late seventeenth century, and scholars of Haywood, notably Manushag Powell and Eve Tavor Bannet, have examined how The Female Spectator, [End Page 668] in particular, shapes such an exchange through incorporating letters from readers.³ Others have examined the use of direct addresses to the reader in mid-century novels, with particular attention to Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Carol Stewart enumerates the ways in which Haywood and Fielding both encourage, allow for, and include readerly objections to the claims of their narrating eidolons, stating that “in terms of form and relationship to the reader, [Tom Jones] owes a good deal to The Female Spectator.”⁴ Marta Kvande reads the narrators in Haywood’s 1720s’ fictions as part of the author’s experimentation with strategies for authorizing print as a legitimate medium for fiction.⁵ Kvande argues that Haywood’s use of first-person narrators is one strategy for directing “uncontrollable readers” towards “safe” interpretations.⁶ These studies illuminate Haywood’s significance to literary history and genre formation, and they provide a foundation for my examination of how the construction of the reader–author relationship in periodicals influences the interpretation of novels.

In resituating the narrative strategies of Betsy Thoughtless in the context of the periodical convention of inviting, printing, and responding to reader responses, my approach shares a methodological approach with Karenza Sutton-Bennett’s analysis of Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762) through the lens of its original publication as a serialized novel, The History of Harriot and Sophia, in Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760–1761). Sutton-Bennett argues that the meaning of Lennox’s novel is shaped by the material that surrounds it in the periodical.⁷ Her analysis illuminates how conventions [End Page 669] of periodical form and subject matter could provide situational framing for a novel’s subject matter, shifting a reader’s interpretation of the text. Although Betsy Thoughtless was not serialized in The Female Spectator, its subject matter reflects many of the anecdotes in the earlier periodical, particularly those interested in the clothing industry. Applying Sutton-Bennet’s model for reading the fiction in the context of the periodical essays helps me examine how the periodical teaches readers how to engage critically with the novel and, through that critical reading, participate in debates about women’s consumer choices, conspicuous consumption, and the temptations and promises of the expanding market for personal, domestic, and luxury goods.

Over the last three decades, early modern consumerism has bourgeoned as a critical field with increased attention to the growth of consumerism in the eighteenth century, literary representations of the new consumer culture, and literature’s participation in shaping consumer practices.⁸ Periodicals, most notably The Spectator (1711–1712, 1714), have garnered much critical attention to their explicit aims to shape consumer tastes and habits.⁹ Meanwhile, scholars have traced the significance of specific consumer goods in eighteenth-century literature and culture in relation to a range of issues, from constructions of the female shopper to anxieties about Britain’s expanding empire.¹⁰ Surprisingly, few of the foundational studies in these fields consider the representations of consumerism in Haywood’s works, despite The Female Spectator, Betsy Thoughtless, and many others engaging explicitly with the issues of central concern to these critical fields. [End Page 670]

Increased critical attention to Haywood and to women’s periodicals in recent years has begun to correct some of these oversights, highlighting Haywood’s engagement in various political controversies as well as her activity in the literary marketplace.¹¹ Robert W. Jones, for example, notes and seeks to correct the oversight of Haywood in studies of “taste” in print culture of the period.¹² The critical neglect of women’s engagement with periodical culture is addressed by the volume Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s, which includes essays that examine a range of issues taken up in periodicals by and for women throughout the period. For example, Chloe Wigston Smith and Serena Dyer each examine the relationship between periodicals and consumerism, and Catherine Ingrassia provides new insight into Haywood’s works in the context of war.¹³

My analysis of interpretive practices and the clothing industry in The Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless contributes to this critical body of work by attending to another under-examined facet of Haywood’s work—her contribution to the formation of novel reading practices and the importance of those practices in the context of anxieties about women’s consumerism. My reading of dialogic form as a parallel to consumer exchange shares some critical interests with Katherine Binhammer’s work that she describes as operating “between new historicism and new formalism” and “at the crossroads of critical finance studies and literary criticism.”¹⁴ Binhammer’s study of late eighteenth-century sentimental novels provides a model for articulating how literary forms embody the processes underlying [End Page 671] capital. Her analysis of Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) as a plot of “risk management” is particularly helpful for illustrating how sentimental novels structure plots that cope with the futility of individual will and action in the face of unpredictable events, a condition that also structures capital, such as in speculative investment and insurance policies.¹⁵ While my article does not provide a full-scale analysis of Haywood’s dialogic form in the contexts of capital, I do follow Binhammer’s methodology in part to take up a specific relationship between reading practices and consumer practices. Specifically, I show how Haywood’s form aligns a dialogue about consumer choice with a dialectical reading practice, suggesting that reading novels and purchasing goods both should be critical and reflective, rather than passive and compulsory, practices.

The Female Spectator encourages dialogue with and among its readers by modelling female intellectual exchange and referring to the potential responses of readers. Although the first reader letter does not appear until book V, the periodical represents an exchange of ideas from the outset by describing the collaborative creation of the issues. Book I introduces three female contributors who have been invited to assist in creating the periodical, explaining that the “Female Spectator,” as the periodical’s eidolon, should be understood as the representative voice of a collaborative group (1:18–19). Book II describes the process of collaboratively generating topic ideas, reviewing written contributions, and selecting what to print (1:53). The very structure of production of the periodical is rooted in conversations among women about their experiences, observations, and reflections, a process that mirrors the shaping of fashion trends and buying practices in consumer culture.

The periodical also takes up as a central and recurring theme the importance of reflection in solitude and the ability to entertain oneself with contemplation during reprieves from the fashionable whirl of entertainments. Book IV focuses on the benefits of exercising the human power of reflection when encountering new experiences or new ideas (1:119). Joined with the dialogic structure of soliciting, sharing, and evaluating reader responses, the periodical’s emphasis on reflection prioritizes active intellectual engagement with what one reads. The periodical’s multilayered representation of the importance [End Page 672] of active and critical reading echoes Enlightenment philosophical practice like John Locke’s instructions to the reader in his preface to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in which he tells the reader to evaluate the essay through their own thinking and not through the opinions of others.

The Female Spectator’s encouragement to its readers to exercise their own understanding and develop the power of reflection turns Enlightenment philosophy into injunctions for navigating the social, political, and economic questions of everyday life, with particular attention to women’s issues. As Kathryn R. King observes, the periodical addresses a range of topics beyond “feminine” or “domestic” concerns typically geared toward women. She asserts that the periodical’s scope is more properly considered that of “mid-century intellectual life” into which Haywood invites her male and female readers by encouraging the study of science, philosophy, history, literature, and more.¹⁶ Nevertheless, “dress,” listed as one of the former obsessions of the Female Spectator in her earlier coquetting days, is a recurring motif throughout the issues. Matters of dress are connected to a range of social, economic, and political concerns, and passages about dress or the clothing industry often are included in reader letters or related to reader responses. Encouraging women to consider the consequences of their dress—its political significance, economic impact, social messaging, and more—is one means of instructing them in reflection, in applying their power of mind to understanding the larger stakes of their daily activities.

Even before the first reader letter appears in the paper, the Female Spectator regularly speculates about reader responses, invites her readers to reflect on her instructions, and instructs readers to take actions to correct their behaviour where they find fault. In book III, an essay primarily about avarice and luxury, the Female Spectator criticizes the use of dress as a means of conspicuous consumption rather than as a sign of taste:

Then as to dress, they seem to study now not what is most becoming, but what will cost the most. ... Our sex is known to be so fond of appearing fine and gay, that it is no wonder the Tradesmen’s Wives should even exceed their husbands in the article of dress; but it is indeed prodigious that so many of them should, merely for the sake [End Page 673] of being thought able to afford any thing, destroy the reasonable end of finery, and render themselves awkward, nay preposterous, instead of genteel and agreeable. When a gold and silver stuff, enough to weigh a woman down, shall be loaded yet more with heavy trimmings, what opinion can we have of either the fancy or judgment of her who wears it?

(1:94–95)

The passage is an example of the literary convention to use dress as a trope for women’s frivolity and imprudence within the expanding consumer market. In the context of book III’s larger concerns, it places issues of dress at the crossroads of middle-class prudence towards business profits and irresponsible spending of those profits in emulation of wealthier figures. The Female Spectator follows this passage with a speculation on reader reactions:

I fear what I have said on these Topics will be but ill relished by a great many of my Readers; but if I have the good Fortune to find it has had an Effect on any one of them, so far as to cause them to see the Error they have been guilty of, I shall be the less chagrin’d at the Resentment of the wilfully Blind.

(1:95)

She acknowledges the possibility of contradictory opinions from her readers, but she dismisses them by separating readers into those who “see” their errors and those who are “blind” to them. She expects the readers who “see” to respond by taking action to correct their behaviour. While this is not an invitation for dialogue, it does suggest a relationship of exchange in which the reader is not passively consuming the text but seriously considering and then reacting to its message.

In book V, the first letter from a reader appears, initiating the representation of an ongoing dialogue with readers that continues throughout the rest of the papers. The Female Spectator’s “First Correspondent,” Mrs. Sarah Oldfashion, opens her letter by pointing out that the Female Spectator has “not thought fit ... to invite any Correspondence” and acknowledging that she “is wholly ignorant whether a Hint, communicated to [her] in this Manner, will be acceptable” (1:153). Mrs. Oldfashion’s letter to The Female Spectator, with its implied criticism of the lack of invitation for reader responses, signals that the soliciting and printing of reader letters was by that time conventional and that the creators of The Female Spectator have been remiss in neglecting this convention. At the same time, the letter [End Page 674] affirms the Female Spectator’s expectation of readerly engagement with the paper, signalled in many earlier references to readers like above.

The first reader letter uses dress to illustrate its critique of new public entertainments, particularly Ranelagh’s “public Breakfasting.” Mrs. Oldfashion complains about the disruption to her daughter’s education, stating that “nothing seems worthy her Regard but how to appear in the genteelest Deshabille at Ranelagh.” She goes on to lament the dangers of young ladies “gadding eternally to these pub-lick Places” and asks the Female Spectator to write “a public Reproof,” suggesting that young ladies will be more persuaded by the periodical writer than by their own “friends” (1:155–56). Mrs. Oldfashion’s concern over her daughter’s frequenting of public places and neglect of her lessons is manifested in complaints about the time spent on dressing that is encouraged by these social events. The first reader letter to appear in the periodical uses women’s concern with dress as a means of directing the Female Spectator’s attention to young women’s attendance at public social events, and later letters continue to reference women’s concern with dress as a point of entry into broader discussions.

The repeated phrase “milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women,” with which I opened this article, places into conversation two reader letters that take up issues around how women spend their time, men’s neglect of women’s intellectual development, and questions of taste. These letters are framed by essays on gaming and on taste, and each essay includes a multitude of references to various correspondents, as well as to discussions in previous issues, creating a polyphonic representation of opinions on all of these issues. Book XII begins with a reader letter on gaming, a topic already addressed by the Female Spectator in a previous issue. Adrasta, the writer of the letter, uses gaming to introduce her concerns about how women spend their time, which becomes the central topic of this book. Later in the issue, the Female Spectator introduces a letter from Philenia (the first to use the phrase “milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women”) by referring to her previous promise to include it, inviting the readers to judge of it for themselves and expressing her expectation that she will hear of their opinions, as quoted above. Philenia begins her letter by referring to a previous essay in which the Female Spectator addresses inappropriate uses of time; she cites the book specifically, saying, “I think it was Book the Fourth” (2:415). Then, Philenia refers to a letter [End Page 675] by Cleora with another specific citation: “which you have favoured the Public with inserting in your tenth book” (2:416).¹⁷ Thus, in the first few pages of book XII, the contributing voices proliferate, representing at least three different views on one topic. Moreover, the references by readers to previous issues and to specific letters by other readers construct an image of a community of attentive and dedicated readers who record and catalogue the topics of each book and take the time to write lengthy, thoughtful responses.¹⁸

The multi-voiced conversation about how women spend their time develops around references to dress, but encompasses issues of national identity, gender relations, and women’s opportunities for intellectual exercise. In her letter, Philenia criticizes the amount of time that English women spend concerned about dress in comparison to French women, in the context of explaining how French women have more knowledge than their English counterparts of a broad spectrum of topics, including “Philosophy, Geography, and other Sciences” (2:416). She observes that French women gain such knowledge without long application to study by conversing regularly with Men of Learning:

all Men of Learning, Wit, and Genius have not only a free Access to the Ladies, but are received by them with particular Marks of Distinction. – They have them with them at their Toilets, in all their Parties of Pleasure.

(2:416)

Philenia goes on to compare French women’s intellectual use of time to the time that English women spend on dress:

The time which we allow to Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tire-women, is with them taken up in the Conversation of Men of Letters, for tho’ the French ladies are certainly the genteelest Creatures upon Earth, they take the least Pains to be so of any—They leave the whole [End Page 676] Care of their Dress to their Women, and never think of what they are to wear, till it is brought to them, and put on.

(2:416)

The passage encompasses a three-fold critique: of the attention that English women are taught to spend on their appearance, of the failure of English men to allow for women’s capacity to learn more, and of the prudishness that limits the interactions of men and women, thus preventing their potential discussion of intellectual topics. The Female Spectator evaluates Philenia’s complaints as “just,” which aligns with the periodical’s constant recommendation that women study philosophy, the natural sciences, and similar fields instead of spending time on their appearance and frivolous or expensive entertainments. The incorporation of the reader letter, therefore, serves as a mechanism to provide an external viewpoint on the page as if in conversation with the Female Spectator, but the Female Spectator’s commentary frames that view to guide the readers’ judgment of it.

The pattern is repeated but with a difference in the treatment of a letter by Leucothea included in book XV, which reuses the phrase “milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women” to situate her views in response to Philenia’s letter (3:102). Before introducing Leucothea’s letter, the Female Spectator responds to, but does not include in print, a letter from Mrs. Sarah Oldfashion, the first correspondent of the periodical. In response to Mrs. Oldfashion’s accusation that the Female Spectator gave her the bad advice to send her daughter into the country, the Female Spectator defends herself by stating:

Whoever will give themselves the Trouble to turn back to the Fifth Book of the Female Spectator, will find I was totally averse to her sending the young Lady into a Place, where she could meet with no Diversions to compensate for the Want of those she left behind.

(3:100)

The reference asks the reader to engage with the text by physically turning back to an earlier issue. The Female Spectator once again assumes a dedicated readership who not only has saved past issues but also is following the conversations that develop over multiple issues and over time. She constructs her defence of her advice through reference to documentary evidence, reminding readers, including Mrs. Oldfashion and others who are unable or unwilling to consult past issues, of the existence of printed documentation of her advice and opinions. The statement in essence disciplines readers to fact-check [End Page 677] before sending their correspondence. Philenia is a well-disciplined reader, referring by book number to past letters and topics, while Mrs. Oldfashioned is not, relying on her personal views and misinterpretations to shift blame away from herself.

In reprimanding Mrs. Oldfashion for isolating her daughter in the country contrary to her advice, the Female Spectator digresses on the time women are expected to spend at their needle, emphasizing the socio-economic difference between elite women and working women through the issue of embroidery:

Nor can I by any means approve of compelling young Ladies of Fortune to make so much Use of the Needle, as they did in former Days, and some few continue to do: – There are enough whose Necessities oblige them to live wholly by it; and it is a Kind of robbery to those unhappy Persons to do that ourselves which is their whole Support: – In my Opinion, a Lady of Condition should learn just as much of Cookery and of Work as to know when she is imposed upon by those she employs in both those necessary Occasions, but no more: – To pass too much of her Time in them may acquire her the Reputation of a notable House-wife, but not of a Woman of fine Taste, or any way qualify her for polite Conversation, or entertaining herself agreeable when alone.

(3:100)

While for an elite woman, embroidery could be a decorative art and feminine skill, needlework could be some women’s only or primary means of earning a living. The Female Spectator associates embroidery, and sewing skills more broadly, with an elite woman’s household management skills, but she prioritizes the elite woman’s intellectual abilities—taste, conversation, and solitary contemplation—as more essential to her public reputation, as well as her own well-being.

The interwoven anecdotes and opinions from the Female Spectator and her several correspondents throughout books XII and XV represent a multi-voiced conversation about women’s engagement in all levels of the clothing industry among an attentive and responsive readership. The Female Spectator eventually returns to the primary topic of book XV, taste, and introduces Leucothia’s letter. Leucothia repeats the phrase “milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women” to position her letter as a response to the one in book XII; the repeated triad reminds us that the idea of the working women who make, repair, and maintain elite women’s costumes has remained present [End Page 678] in the Female Spectator’s comments from her admonishment about tradesmen’s wives to her advice to leave embroidery to women who need the work. After suggesting that men are every bit as vain and obsessed with dress as women, Leucothia illustrates her critique of men’s vanity with a story about wearing a new gown to the park and having it caught by the sword of a beau who was too extravagant in his dress. Leucothia’s anecdote and repetition of the phrase “milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women,” situated in the context of Mrs. Oldfashion’s earlier complaints about her daughter’s concern with dress when going into public spaces and the Female Spectator’s advice against women of quality spending time on needlework, relates concerns about dress and the economics of the clothing industry to questions of women’s intellectual development, the productive use of time, and women’s employment opportunities.

The eponymous heroine of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) bears a striking resemblance to several figures found in the pages of The Female Spectator, including Ariana in book XXIV as well as the Female Spectator in her younger days. In book I, the Female Spectator describes her past obsessions:

I have run through as many Scenes of Vanity and Folly as the greatest Coquet of them all. – Dress, Equipage, and Flattery, were the Idols of my Heart. – I should have thought that Day lost which did not present me with some new Opportunity of shewing myself.

(1:17)

Ariana, introduced in book XXIV, similarly “looked upon herself as a little Goddess, and imagines she was formed for universal Adoration”; her vanity is illustrated further with an anecdote about her pleasure in showing off a “new Suit of very rich Clothes” (4:413). Not only do these two bookend figures to the periodical have qualities that later appear in Betsy, but many of the short fictions in the periodical are related to Haywood’s later novels through characterization, plot, setting, or moral. The similarity between the periodical and the later novel, of the types of stories told and the lessons which they seem intended to carry, suggests the applicability of the dialogic form of the periodical to reading the novel as well.

Applying the periodical’s model of dialogical reading to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless allows readers who have benefitted from Haywood’s lessons—in both how to read and how to shop—to read the [End Page 679] narrator’s commentary critically. Such critical reading in turn reveals that the heroine’s concern with dress, which may at first seem to be a conventional indication of her vanity, in fact signals her discernment, wit, and compassion. Betsy’s care in her consumer choices is demonstrated through a series of episodes that develop around dress, textile production, and interactions with women who work in the clothing industry, and these episodes can be read to contradict the surface meaning of much of the narrator’s moralizing. The novel begins with a paragraph that could be the opening to an essay by the Female Spectator, introducing the theme of women’s vanity and advising that women would experience fewer instances of “guilt” or “scandal”

were some part of that time which is wasted at the toilet, in consulting what dress is most becoming to the face, employed in examining the heart, and what actions are most becoming of the character.¹⁹

The narrator’s statement of purpose echoes the Female Spectator’s moralizing about the use of time and her injunctions for self-reflection, which were also taken up in various reader letters. The nature of the novel’s narrating persona, themes, and characters invites readers familiar with the form of The Female Spectator to respond with critical reading, exercising their own understanding to evaluate the narrator’s claims.

Read within the dialogical framework established by The Female Spectator, Betsy’s purchasing of textiles, interest in clothing design, and interactions with female workers in the clothing industry challenge her nominal characterization as “thoughtless” by showing her capacity to be rather “thoughtful” about her consumer choices. The descriptions of Betsy’s attention to clothing operate in tension with the narrator’s maxims about women and vanity found throughout the text. A key narratorial passage at the beginning of volume I, chapter XVIII directs the reader’s attention to these matters:

I am apt to believe ladies of this cast [...] value themselves on the number and quality of their lovers, as they do upon the number and richness of their cloaths, because it makes them of consideration in the world, [End Page 680] and never take the trouble of reflecting how dear it may sometimes cost those to whom they are indebted for indulging this vanity.

(142)

The next paragraph qualifies the claim by referring to Betsy’s typical reactions to others’ suffering, and it concludes with language that echoes The Female Spectator’s invitations to readers:

That this, at least, was the motive which induced Miss Betsy to treat her lovers in the manner she did, is evident to a demonstration, from every other action of her life: – she had a certain softness in her disposition, which rendered her incapable of knowing the distress of anyone, without affording all the relief was in her power to give, and had she sooner been convinced of the reality of the woes of love, she sooner had left off the ambition of inflicting them, and perhaps have been brought to regard those who labored under them, rather with too much than too little compassion; – but of this the reader will be able to judge on proceeding farther in this history.

(142)

The ambiguity of the passage in its shifting perspectives and judgments falls in line with Dorothee Birke’s analysis of the novel’s authorial narration, which demonstrates how the self-reflexive narration creates ambiguity in the target of its moral judgments.²⁰ The passage at first seems to confirm that Betsy treats her lovers like she treats her clothes—as props to her vanity—but as it continues, the meaning of “the motive” shifts to refer to Betsy’s unawareness that her lovers suffer at all, and it goes on to promise evidence that Betsy, in fact, would rather act to relieve suffering, once she perceives it, than to increase it. Furthermore, the passage begins with a first-person assertion, “I am apt to believe,” about the motives of ladies in general and ends with an explicit invitation to the reader to be an independent judge once the evidence has been provided. The use of the first person to address the reader in this instance operates differently from the examples cited by Kvande in her analysis of Haywood’s 1720s’ fictions. Kvande argues that in those earlier works, Haywood uses first-person pronouns and direct addresses to readers [End Page 681] to create a connection between author and reader and to encourage sympathetic readings. She explains that this narrative strategy

places the narrator on a level with the characters in the fiction, since she acknowledges experiencing the same problems she’s about to depict, and it includes readers with the narrator in the ability to sympathize with those characters.²¹

Conversely, in Betsy Thoughtless, the narrator’s use of “I” tends more often to introduce a standard moral judgment, serving more as a commonplace recitation than a humanizing expression of sympathy. Combined with the direction to readers to judge for themselves of the evidence, the rote moralizing seems to be presented more as a straw man for the reader to find means to knock down than as a universal truth with which the reader should sympathize.

Moreover, the analogy and the invitation to readers to use their own judgment to determine Betsy’s motives redirect readers’ attention to the representation of clothing as a counterpart of courtship and as a means of assessing the narrator’s claims. Several scenes early in the novel establish a parallel between women’s shopping for textiles and their attitudes towards men. Betsy’s selection of materials for a new gown, for example, establishes a parallel between women’s shopping for textiles and their courtship choices, foregrounding Betsy’s abilities as a consumer. Upon realizing that she had given into the self-interested persuasion of Lady Mellasin and the mercer to buy a piece of fabric, Betsy takes it back to the shop:

The mercer at first seemed unwilling to take it again; but on her telling him, she would always make use of him for everything she wanted in his way, and would then buy two suits of him, he at last consented. As she was extremely curious in everything relating to her shape she made choice of a pink colored French lustring, to the end, that the plaits lying flat, would shew the beauty of her waist to more advantage; and to atone for the slightness of the silk, purchased as much of it as would flounce the sleeves, and the petticoat from top to bottom: she made the mercer also cut off a sufficient quantity of rich green Venetian satin, to make her a riding habit; and as she came home bought a silver trimming for it of Point D’Espagne; all which, [End Page 682] with the silk she disliked in exchange, did not amount to the money she had received from Mr. Goodman.

(62–63)

Betsy’s savvy in negotiating with the mercer shows that she can be serious, frugal, and intentional when able to act with autonomy in matters of importance to her, suggesting the potential for her seriousness in matters of courtship if allowed the time and freedom to come to it on her own terms.

In contrast, the self-interested pleasure-seeking of Lady Mellasin and her daughter Flora is shown in both their non-serious perusal of goods in shops and their promiscuous encounters with men. For instance, at the end of the sequence above, in which Betsy’s negotiating her textile purchases demonstrates her wit and discernment, Betsy returns from exchanging the fabric to catch Gayland and Flora alone in a bedchamber together with the door locked. When they emerge from the room, Betsy notices Miss Flora’s dishevelled looks. The image of Miss Flora “tumbling” or being “tumbled by” Gay-land resonates in the later description of her shopping practices with her mother when they have “gone among the shops, either to buy something they wanted or to tumble over goods, as they frequently did, merely for the sake of seeing new fashions” (144). Thus, this sequence creates a parallel between women’s attitudes toward textiles and fashion and their attitudes towards men and sex.

The narrator’s commentary on women’s lack of consideration for either lovers or labourers, and Lady Mellasin’s and Flora’s shopping habits as well as their treatment of men, reveals their lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Serena Dyer examines competing representations of the female shopper, contrasting the vilification of the female shopper who browses for “personal pleasure and social spectacle” but not for the “public commercial good,” with messages about how careful and skilled browsing signalled “financial awareness through bargaining” and required “skills to assess the quality and workmanship of items.”²² Explaining that “economic and material literacy were central to the productive consumer figure” by the late eighteenth century, Dyer identifies the emergence of a “a new, productive consumer character, who epitomized patriotic spending and polite fashionability” in periodicals towards the end of the [End Page 683] eighteenth century.²³ The contrasting images of female shoppers in Betsy Thoughtless demonstrate that this figure was under construction in print culture before mid-century, and suggest that Haywood’s representations of female consumers in both her periodicals and fictions were participating in the emerging construction of the productive consumer even while perhaps reifying ideas of the idle female shopper.

Later in the novel, Betsy’s charitable actions towards Mrs. Jinks, a seamstress and linen-starcher, provide an image of the productive female consumer who uses her consumer choices to practice empathy and relieve suffering:

On her first coming to town, a woman had been recommended to her for starching, and making up her fine linen: – this person she had ever since employed, and took a great fancy to, as she found her honest, industrious, and very obliging. – The poor creature was unhappily married, – her husband was gone from her, and had listed himself for a soldier; – being born in a distant county, she had no relations to whom she could apply for assistance, – was big with child, and had no support but the labour of her hands. – These calamitous circumstances so much touched the commiserative nature of Miss Betsy, that she frequently gave her double the sum she demanded for her work, besides bestowing on her many things she left off wearing, which though trifles in themselves, were very helpful to a person in such distress.

Miss Mabel, for whom she also worked at the same time, was no less her patroness, than Miss Betsy. – In fine, they were both extremely kind to her, in so much as made her often cry out, in a transport of gratitude, that these two good young ladies were worth to her all the customers she had besides.

(248)

The scenario destabilizes the narrator’s critique of women’s vanity depending on others’ suffering, and in doing so, simultaneously affirms the narrator’s qualification of their own statement and provides the further evidence that the reader will need to “be able to judge.” It also shows how a wealthy woman’s engagement in the clothing and textile industry might be used to support working women. Betsy exhibits a “commiserative nature” in response to the working woman’s “calamitous circumstances,” which are described [End Page 684] in the passage with emphasis on her labour and industry as her only resource in such distress. Betsy’s gestures—double pay and gifts of second-hand clothing—are labelled as “trifles” to show how insignificant they are in value or importance to Betsy, even though they are of substantial value to the linen-starcher.

Through this sequence, Miss Betsy’s choice of whom to hire, how to pay her, and what her obligations are to a working woman in distress constructs a model of ethical consumer behaviour and suggests a political commentary on the exploitation of women’s labour in the textile and clothing industry. When the seamstress dies in childbirth, Betsy and Miss Mabel serve as godmothers, taking on the responsibility of providing the child with care and education; because of Miss Mabel’s inability to control her own allowance, Betsy manages all the payments for the child’s care (249). While Betsy’s economy in this situation is in line with her economic choices generally, which also are reflected in her earlier discriminating shopping and her later management of the household budget as Mrs. Munden, her feminine compassion becomes a liability through the nexus of Miss Mabel’s father’s avarice, Mr. Jinks’s ineptitude, and Miss Flora’s desire, suggesting the difficulty that women face in trying to uphold a moral code of consumption within the strictures of patriarchy. Betsy’s real concern for a working woman’s child places Betsy in the tenuous position of spending her own allowance to care for an orphaned child in secret. Miss Flora exploits her benevolent and generous actions to make her appear to be unvirtuous and deceitful by representing the child as Betsy’s own to Mr. Trueworth. The episode demonstrates how elite women could use their consumer activities to learn about and aid industry workers; however, it also shows how women’s reputations can easily be tarnished by the perceptions of their economic activities.

While reading Betsy Thoughtless straightforwardly means assuming that Betsy’s concern with dress is simply a sign of her female vanity or neglecting the importance of clothing and textiles entirely, following the model of critical dialogic reading established in The Female Spectator directs readerly attention to these matters and produces a counter-reading that critiques standard representations of women’s attention to dress. The text’s representation of the textile industry suggests that shopping for textiles and engaging in the design of clothing was more than a frivolous pastime for wealthy women, [End Page 685] the same message that The Female Spectator conveys about reading periodicals and fiction. Instead, these texts privilege women’s participation in both reading communities and consumer culture as a potential means not only for women’s fashioning of themselves but also for women’s fashioning of Britain through their engagement with social, political, and economic issues in a public arena.

In creating an implied reading community and guiding readers’ consumption of texts, The Female Spectator and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless represent a continuation of Haywood’s ongoing experimentation with how to engage and instruct readers. Kvande’s study of Haywood’s early fiction and Powell’s evaluation of the periodical qualities of Haywood’s Epistles for the Ladies (1748, 1750) and The Invisible Spy (1754) each suggest that Haywood was experimenting with how to provoke critical reading practices without explicitly staging a dialogue with the reader. Kvande identifies strategies of authority in Haywood’s earlier fiction, including ways in which the narrator’s direct address teaches readers “that they should be reflecting when they read printed fiction” and that “the distance that allows misreading also allows the instructional interventions.”²⁴ Powell traces how periodical conventions, like a direct address to the reader, mutate, disappear, or reappear in Haywood’s texts. She explains that in Epistles for the Ladies,

the direct engagement with the public reader seen in The Female Spectator or Young Lady, and indeed in most periodicals, simply never appears: to put it another way, the wisdom of authorities like Mira is always directed inward, to her private friends, rather than outward to the readers.²⁵

In Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood develops the experiments in her early fiction and those of her periodicals, as well as the less categorizable texts, to produce something new, which, in turn, becomes integral to the novel and assumptions about novel reading: an implied exchange between author and reader mediated through a narratorial voice.

The potential contrary readings of Betsy Thoughtless are not given voice in the text, but they are implied through the tension between the narrator’s claims and the evidence of the events narrated. We [End Page 686] cannot firmly attribute any specific interpretation to the intentions of Haywood: she might have intended that we take the narrator at surface value, or she might have intended that we read against the grain of their maxims by using our own understanding to reflect on the events in the text.²⁶ Yet, we can take her earlier work as evidence that she encouraged and invited critical reading of her texts. While in The Female Spectator, the narrating eidolon makes her intended morals explicit as instruction to her most attentive readers, in Betsy Thoughtless, the narrator’s one-directional authoritative maxims are undermined by the events of the plot rather than by objecting readers. Together, these works instruct readers in the critical consumption of texts and of textiles. [End Page 687]