Improving the Inside: Gender,Property and the 18th-Century Self

Introduction: ‘Things of Paper’

This article focuses on questions of politeness, conduct and civility in the 18th century to explore what they can tell us about how individuals imagined owning themselves as market actors and as members of an emerging civil society. In the course of the century, a new ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor 2002) emerged which allowed people to participate in the capitalist market without being branded as gamblers or as hopelessly self-interested. It was an imaginary that came into being by attaching itself to gender relations and to the morality of the market. The article explores what I have called elsewhere ‘the politics of emptiness’ (Brace 2007) or the fragility of self-ownership and its connections with the division between the private and public spheres. It seeks to draw attention to the unpredictability and riskiness of property as the basis for understanding and envisioning the self, in particular for women (and some men) who do not fit into the spaces created for them within a moral economy of rational improvement and a disciplined self. The inside/outside distinction at work in the 18th-century conduct literature and in the wider discourse of politeness was part of a search for ‘some guarantee or anchor of what we truly are, for what we can imagine to be our “authentic” nature’ (MacInnes 1998, 13) and as such was inextricable from ideas both about property and about gender.

My starting point was J. G. A. Pocock's famous opposition between the landed and the moneyed. Within this binary, property in land was real, inheritable, fixed and permanent. It was figured as natural, as organic, as an anchor that gave people a real, unassailable footing in the world. In this configuration, property functioned ‘to affirm and maintain the reality of personal autonomy, liberty, and virtue’ (Pocock 1975, 463). Land and inheritance were regarded as the real substance of property, a solid and durable base for fixing individual virtue and integrity. For Pocock, the new morality that emerged from the financial revolutions of the 1690s rested on what were understood to be ‘terribly fragile’ foundations (1975, 441), built on the fictitious value of money and on the complex relationship between trade and corruption. Forms of property that relied on fantasy to sustain them were fragile because they were all too easily corruptible. It was not that land had lost its value, but that the ‘landed personality’ had been superseded by an individual whose reputation rested on the value placed on him by his fellows and maintained by their constant scrutiny and re-evaluation, until ‘the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual’ (Pocock 1975, 464). In such a situation, fiction and fantasy threatened to engulf reality, and in the world of money and symbols, there was ‘a danger that all men, and all sublunary things, will now become things of paper, which is worse even than to become things of gold’ (Pocock 1975, 452). I am particularly interested in these ‘things of paper’, and what it meant to be figured as so insubstantial and empty as to be understood to be paper thin.

Pocock locates the shift from one side of the binary to the other in the early 18th century, a result of the financial revolutions of the 1690s. Michael McKeon counters that by then land had long since lost the ‘pristine meaning’ given to it by civic humanism's interpretation of classical antiquity. By the end of the 17th century, he argues, ‘people were already familiar with the idea that all property had the potential separability and autonomy that come with the circulation and exchange of substantive things as insubstantial commodities’ (McKeon 2005, 26). Land, in particular, with the abolition of feudal tenures and the development of economic discourse in the 17th century, had been ‘disembedded from common use’ and so abstracted from the permanence ascribed to it by Pocock (Brace 1998, 62–67; McKeon 2005, 30).

This ‘disembedding’ of the land was part of a wider rethinking of the market and of the emergence of the early modern public sphere. For McKeon, this is about a movement from the actual marketplace to a more elastic and virtual market, an imaginary space within which private desires could create both wealth and public virtue (McKeon 2005, 32). This article explores aspects of this messy, complicated process as people tried to envisage themselves and others as ‘things of paper’ but also as economic, social, moral and gendered actors on this new stage. The social practices and the texts explored here were part of the contest over the meaning of property, offering ways for 18th-century moralists, thinkers and conduct book writers, and for us, to describe and discuss self-ownership in this developing context. Their language and vocabulary, about sociability, politeness, gambling, effeminacy, emptiness and solidity, expressed ideas and strategies that affected the development of ideas about property in the self and the moralising of the market. A rich variety of writers and commentators struggled to create a vision of the selves who could inhabit the imaginary space that had opened up between the inside and the outside. To get inside this space, I draw on 18th-century conduct literature which has proved to be a fascinating and illuminating source of discussion about the possessive aspects of the self underpinning the making of a coherent bourgeois identity. As Carolyn Williams argues, conduct ideology produced rather than reflected pre-existent desires and conduct literature was written in an atmosphere of changing social practices and debate within which reading was ‘an active process of negotiation’ (Williams 1996, 115). Codes of civility and courtesy were a matter of active practice, generating their own concepts, values and behaviour which could then be ‘deployed and developed as a set of power relations’ (Bryson 1998, 15). Part of what was being negotiated in this space was how to come to terms with the unpredictability and riskiness of property, to manage the contradictions of being made of paper but needing to be solid, independent individuals who could engage with the market and still improve the world. In the process, the writers and their readers found ways of making property, and in particular self-ownership, part of the ‘social imaginary’ of the new moral order.

Corrupt Inside/Composed Outside

Anna Bryson draws attention to the importance of the history of manners before the 18th century and the development of civic humanism, especially once we look outside the political theory canon. In 16th-century England, Italian models of virtue originally developed in the context of the bourgeois city were mapped on to the rural aristocratic order and linked to the court, so that the value of civility in manners ‘was loaded with the “allure” of gentlemanly courtliness and positively detached from the explicitly bourgeois’ (Bryson 1998, 62). Within this rural aristocratic context, the skills associated with courtesy were all about symbolic deference, household duties and hospitality. Traditionally, this gave the aristocracy ‘a monopoly of the techniques whereby moral values could be clothed in social and cultural prestige’ (Bryson 1998, 66). This monopoly was gradually broken down well before the 18th century with the Elizabethan expansion of the court, which brought with it a new kind of urban social life for the aristocracy and the gentry, gathered in London as a centre for arts, sciences, conversation, entertainment, fashion and social amusement. By the mid-17th century, manners were less about the courtly rituals of the household and more about membership of this wider civil society as people strove to manage the relative anonymity of city life, and to envisage themselves as a governing class which could engage in public social life, and so take on the social and cultural prestige that had formerly attached itself solely to the aristocracy (Bryson 1998, 130, 150).

Bryson's argument is that during the 17th century, as new connections were made between ordering the self and the ordering of society, a sense of belonging to civil society was no longer guaranteed by blood and inheritance, but required ethical and social virtue expressed through civility, discipline and politeness. She identifies the development of ideas about authenticity and sincerity in the 16th and 17th centuries, linked to social mobility and notions of honour that needed to survive the dangers of theatricality and flattery implicit in linking manners to morality (Bryson 1998). It is important to get at this pre-18th-century context for thinking about civility and politeness. In its preoccupation with ‘accommodation’ to others, its sense of ‘unease’ about social contact and its consciousness of membership, it not only foreshadows many of the themes of the 18th century (Bryson 1998, 133), but also feeds back into an older discourse of improvement and commonwealth that informed a particular vision of the self in relation to others (Brace 1998, 157). This ‘improving’ agenda moves across from the 17th-century preoccupation with land and conscience to an 18th-century moralising of the market and of self-proprietorship.

The process of moralising the virtual market and giving it an ethical dimension required what Lawrence Klein calls a new mode of cultural discourse, a rethinking of what it meant to be a gentleman in the commercial context (Klein 1994, 4–7). There were clearly dangers inherent in the new possibility that the pursuit of self-interest and individual desires could generate the common good. Without the certainties of land and service, the world needed a new, more refined sociability, a culture of politeness to manage the constant scrutiny and re-evaluation and to offset the fragility of its foundations. It needed to be a space that could contain the vertiginous feeling of being asked to re-imagine your self and be imagined by others. (Klein 1994, 36) argues that this ‘space of gentlemanly conservation’ was defined by Shaftesbury and the emphasis he placed on humans' innate sociability and affection. Shaftesbury stressed the importance of connectedness with others, and the fundamental demand to act to benefit others. Our ‘innate endowments’, our sense of fellowship and affection, were the origins of human virtue. Unlike the fixed individual autonomy of ‘landed personality’ in Pocock's account, (Shaftesbury 1999, 8) needed to produce a gentlemanly notion of virtue that had a substantial social dimension. This was a fundamentally risky undertaking because politeness was full of pitfalls. As Rousseau argued, this was the ‘Art of pleasing’, and it risked drawing everyone into a world of perpetual constraint and uncertainty, where ‘One no longer dares to appear what one is’ (Rousseau 1997 [1750], 8). For both Shaftesbury and Rousseau, the real dangers lay in living in the opinion of others, becoming what Shaftesbury called ‘an Entertainer’ (Klein 1994, 94). A preoccupation with the art of pleasing risked creating a ‘hypersociability’ that would empty the inner life of any meaning, and reinforce a facile sociability and a love of trifles, surfaces and enamelled snuffboxes.

For Rousseau, politeness was a deceitful veil, barely concealing the suspicion, fear, hatred and betrayal beneath the veneer of urbanity and enlightenment. Commerce would inevitably bring with it a taste for ostentation, the dissolution of morals and the corruption of taste and courage. It was, in his view, impossible to manage the unreality of money: ‘with money one has everything, except morals and citizens’ (Rousseau (1997 [1750], 19). Shaftesbury and others needed to find a way of making sociability rational and moral so that it could form the basis of a transformed citizenship. For Shaftesbury, what was required was mental self-possession, the imposition of order on the inner world, the creation of a moral self (Klein 1994, 86). He was aiming for an enlightened, urbane and sophisticated, but still robust inner self. Only this kind of inner self would be able to withstand the buffeting of external forces and avoid being caught up in the rage of distinction. This was crucially about the development of character—an outward and an inward self, where one was not directly translatable into the other. This retreat into the self, and in particular into a decorous and disciplined self, was a crucial move in the discourse of politeness. In it, we can see the 17th-century concern to order the self and societythrough the improvement discourse resurfacing in the impulse to husband the self, and not just the earth.

(Shaftesbury 1999, 145) makes the move towards moralising the market by bringing together liberty and manners, and returning to the opposition between virtue and corruption, where virtue is figured as independence, public-spiritedness, martial strength, frugality and simplicity. These values are then set against luxury, and in particular the dazzling grandeur of courtly culture, especially in France. It is important to remember that Shaftesbury was writing from within a largely aristocratic dominant culture, but at the same time offering an immanent critique of some aspects of aristocratic ideology, and in particular of the notion of ‘peerless privilege’ (Mackie 2009, 43) which gave aristocratic men licence to impose their will on others without taking account of connectedness or fellowship, relying instead on the power of rank. This kind of privilege was in competition with the character of the polite gentleman, who was not supposed to rely on his inborn status, or on blood and inheritance, to guarantee his virtue or his inner self. Shaftesbury needed to make a clear distinction between the allure of courtliness and the solid ideology of civility. To do so, he criticised the aristocratic version of politeness as it was practised in France.

The French court, (Shaftesbury 1999, 183) declared, made its beholders complacent and passive, and warped their ethics, so that the French limited their own capacity to understand liberty, blinded as they were by an uncritical desire to get close to the ‘dazzle’. This was ‘hypersociability’ at its most intense, a world of complete egotism and narcissism where young men indulged their passions and failed utterly to cultivate the kind of inner self that might save them from ruin. False politeness, luxury and corruption reinforced and fed off one another until virtue was turned into an object of derision and despised. ‘The more the inside becomes corrupt’, wrote Rousseau (1997 [1750], 65), ‘the more composed does the outside become’. This kind of fevered, overheated sociability was closely associated with the absolutism of the French court, and Shaftesbury wanted to reject this inauthentic politeness and forge a new, alternative, more Whiggish (and more British) version (Cohen 1999, 175). This alternative version of politeness was in part about managing the tension between politeness and manliness, but it was also about how the British tried to disentangle politeness, property and self-ownership from their aristocratic legacy.

Games of Chance

The process of disentangling property and politeness from aristocratic traditions included the gradual transformation of bourgeois attitudes towards gambling as part of the (re-)moralisation of the virtual market. Gaming, or aristocratic gambling, became what (Phyllis Deutsch 1996, 638) terms ‘a multivalent metaphor’. Thomas Kavanagh in his study of French aristocratic gaming argues that we need to understand its significance in terms of ‘the gift’, and he draws on Marcel Mauss' (Kavanagh, 1993, 45) seminal book to argue that we need to think about wealth as subservient to prestige in this context. The key to the gift is that it has to be repaid with interest so that the debtor becomes the creditor. Gambling was crucial to aristocratic codes of honour: gambling debts had to be paid first, before any money owed to others (and especially to others further down the social scale). A gambling debt was a kind of gift, based entirely on trust, and it was this trust to which the debtor responded. The creditor had no legal recourse, and so the obligation between debtor and creditor was regarded as purely voluntary. Debts had to be repaid out of etiquette and generosity, in order to maintain social relations and a polite society. It was not about gain, or even about exchange: the truly noble gambler was supposed to gamble heavily and lose calmly, to express his disdain for money as money and so to consolidate his class affiliation (Kavanagh 1993, 46). The nobility were desperate to show themselves to be above the power of money. They were playing with its unreality, trying to make themselves and their codes of honour and prestige into the lasting, enduring thing that men could keep and turning money into something ephemeral and insignificant.

According to (Kavanagh 1993, 48), in this quest to define themselves as independent of the power of money, the traditional nobility grounded ‘its personal identity in a fixed, inherited sense of self’. They had the personal ancestry, the inherited titles and the permanent estates to counter the vulgar pull of money. However:

Once the nobility started to play to win, to apply the principles of self-interest to the gaming table, they ceased to be aristocratic gamblers. Instead, they were willing to play with anyone who had the money to pay the high stakes involved. In effect, they welcomed them as equals at the gaming table (Kavanagh 1993, 55), and so undermined the equation of gambling with trust and gift-giving between social equals. In the end, high-stakes gambling confirmed the traditional nobility's dependence on the money they so despised.

Kavanagh argues that gambling as a social practice was central to the conflicts within the French nobility, and he traces how the ennobled bourgeoisie and those members of the aristocracy who had made themselves rich by not despising trade and the power of money began to denounce gambling as a scandalous vice. They needed to set themselves apart not necessarily from the landed values of the traditional nobility, but from gambling itself. The ennobled bourgeoisie stigmatised gambling as the ‘pure circulation of money’ and used their condemnation of it as a way of distancing themselves from their own gain and greed, and so covering over their shame at rooting their own nobility in money (Kavanagh 1993, 56–57). The advantage of this approach was that it ‘assumed that there existed an essential difference between gambling as a self-interested manipulation of money and those various other manipulations of money through which the bourgeoisie had acquired its wealth’ (Kavanagh 1993, 56–57). In Britain, over the course of the 18th century, risk-taking and unpredictability were ‘eliminated from descriptions and definitions of legitimate capitalist transactions’ (Deutsch 1996, 642, n. 15, emphasis in original). The bourgeoisie took the moral high ground, equating the pursuit of wealth with self-improvement, productivity and civility, and commercial activity with rational self-control. Gambling unleashed uncontrollable passions, and those who gambled risked losing all self-control, bringing rational individuals into disarray and rendering them unpredictable (Kavanagh 1993, 61).

This meant that the aristocratic gamester or statesman was explicitly not to be trusted. He was ‘an essentially disordered individual’ (Deutsch 1996, 638), represented as lacking the autonomy and independence identified by Pocock. Instead, he was vulnerable to patronage, to the undue influence of others, and so likely to prove opportunistic, spendthrift and corrupt. Deutsch sums up the argument: ‘Gamesters … lacked that solid economic base (and the moral fibre that landownership implied), and so would be driven by material need to act in their own best interests, rather than in the best interests of the state’ (1996, 644). Gambling was in itself a kind of landlessness, meaning that gamesters lacked fixed loyalties and stable identities (Deutsch 1996, 647). They made themselves into partial outsiders, resisting the model of civility that required an ordered self to sustain an ordered civil society and a moralised market. They relied instead on their own social practices and in particular their own codes of honour and masculinity. For their opponents, gaming, invented by the court, was taken to be established on the two great pillars of self-interest and pleasure, and so could be characterised as part of ‘a vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY’ that had infected the manners of the time (Anon. 1757, 29, emphases in original). Vanity, luxury and selfishness were the very opposite of the values required to underpin a stable, ‘civil’ and civilised society, and those with the leisure and resources for drinking, gaming and whoring were understood to be deliberately transgressing the codes of civil nobility, and indulging in ‘the will to outrage others, rather than simply to enjoy excess’ (Bryson 1998, 246). While they were denounced for their effeminacy, they were also read as holding on to outmoded codes of aristocratic masculine honour that relied on privilege, violence and competition rather than on ‘well mannered masculinity’ (Cohen 1999, 52).

Deutsch argues that aristocratic gaming in the 18th century was in its definitive aspects ‘specifically feminine’: ‘the unpredictable and personally hazardous elements of games of chance linked deep play to female emotionality, irrationality and vulnerability’ (Deutsch 1996, 647, emphasis in original). Gamblers relinquished self-control and responsibility, and female gamblers were always shadowed by the figure of Fortuna, the goddess of chance and the personification of the unstable stock market and of risky commercial ventures. Aristocratic women were ‘noble gamestresses, who, absorbed all night at play, cast aside familial duties, mix with disreputable people and compromise their virtue’ (Deutsch 1996, 649). Staying up late was regarded as dangerous to health and as likely to ‘soften’ the understanding. Bad hours introduced ‘ill-mix'd Company’ (Wilkes 1748, 183), and gambling ought to be avoided. Aristocratic women ran their tables as virtual businesses, in the process undermining the norms of genteel sociability and breaking down social distinctions in the same way as the men who played with anyone as long as they had the money: ‘If a Lady plays high, in hopes of winning, she makes a Trade of it, not a Recreation; and, if she fills her Purse by it, she does it, too often, at the price of her Reputation’ (Wilkes 1748, 184). The women's participation heightened the visibility of aristocratic vice, wearing away their moral authority and threatening a dangerous instability. They were inconstant, unpredictable and elusive: the very opposite of the solid, landed personality of the gentleman of property, and in danger of destabilising and demoralising the market itself.

For women, to be making a trade of it meant that they risked blurring the distinction between gamblers and whores, and even between women and monsters as the author of the Devil upon Crutches (Anon. 1755, 9) declared: ‘Behold at that Table the greatest Monster the World ever produced; no Object the Sun ever shone on is half so deformed—A FEMALE GAMESTER’. These ‘monsters’ compromised their virtue by having only their bodies to back their stakes. This kind of blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private and between creditor and debtor were particularly dangerous for women. The female gamester risked not only losing her fortune, but also being ruined by playing until ‘she was obliged to prostitute her Body to the Wretch that had won her Money, to recover her Loss’ (Anon. 1755, 10). Her femininity took her outside the notions of honour and trust that informed traditional male aristocratic gambling. She could expect to be refused forgiveness from her husband because ‘The Lust of Gaming had absorbed all other Desires’ (Anon. 1755, 13). The love of gaming was likely to corrupt good principles and encourage cheating, so that all sorts of criminal and dishonourable practices would follow from it (Wilkes 1748).

These aristocratic, gaming women were involved in public, and explicitly political, life. They were part of the new and complex social world of arts and sciences, and conversation and public opinion. Their gaming took them outside ‘the private spheres of domestic relations and intimate friendship’ (Bryson 1998, 222) and into a virtual space that contemporaries found far from civil. Their ‘dynamic plasticity’ was a threat. The ‘Faro ladies’ of the late 1790s crystallised the ‘sexual, financial and class power of the aristocratic woman’ (Russell 2000, 482). They combined the class privilege of the aristocracy with the entrepreneurialism of the market, and the ‘deep play’ of politics. Gillian Russell argues that they ritualised the gamble involved in the negotiation of political alliances, the competition for patronage and the brokering of marriages. Their gambling was in itself a spectacle, a kind of theatre, and so deeply corrupt and corrupting. As Rousseau argues about the dangers of the theatre, these spectacular women had symbolically ‘left home’, and ‘a woman outside of her home loses her greatest luster, and, despoiled of her real ornaments, she displays herself indecently’ (Rousseau 1960 [1758], 88). The underlying question was always, what was she seeking among men? Rousseau concludes, ‘Whatever she may do, one feels that in public she is not in her place’ (1960 [1758], 88).

Waste, and Wild and Unimproved

I want to explore this notion of being ‘out of place’ and link it to a wider politics of emptiness which connects to the construction of property as a particular form of self-ownership based on self-possession, productive work and civility. This ‘third space’ between the public and the private gets squeezed out by the triumph of models of property connected to improvement, the feminine ideal of domestic retirement and the new civil society. What gets disavowed is not just the lust of gaming, but many other kinds of ‘bad femininity’ associated with being out of place. Women were warned by conduct and advice books to be on their guard when they ventured into the world, to take care not to break their attachments or neglect their domestic duties, in case they found themselves infected by the ‘rage of rambling’ (Gisborne 1797, 293) or ‘snatched into the vortex of amusements’ (Gisborne 1797, 317). This frightening, raging vortex was a space governed not only by dissipation, but also by contingency and chance. Thomas Gisborne set it up in opposition to settled habits, methodical employment and adherence to a plan, to calmness and deliberation. We are so used to associating property with these rational and improving traits that we tend to forget or obliterate property's ‘anti-history’, its connections with femininity and with chance.

Kavanagh argues that gambling is the ‘empty space’ in the Enlightenment discourse of reason, the chink in the armour that allows chance to enter and disrupt notions of timeless rationality and an ultimately knowable order (1993, 113). Modernity and Enlightenment were, in his view, built on the systematic denial of chance, implicit in their opposition to the degeneracy of the nobility and the superstition of the peasantry as antiquated and primitive (Kavanagh 1993, 250). The Bank Crisis of 1797 revealed the limits of this denial, and the excess and insubstantiality of paper credit re-emerged to reveal the underlying ‘metaphysics of the gaming table’ where public credit was ‘not a stable signifier, rooted in the substantiality of property, but a hideous old woman whose gaudy trappings and make-up conceal a possible lack or corruption’ (Russell 2000, 499). As Mackie argues, Credit personified as a woman had a ‘disturbing potential for emptiness’, which was both a promise and a threat (Mackie 1997, 132). An empty woman might be accessible to masculine management, but only if she could be subject to ethical reform, and her ethical reform closely paralleled the improving project of investing the ‘empty’ market with its own morality.

The ethically reformed woman was expected to be a ‘discreet Manager’ of the self (Wilkes 1748, 74), and she could demonstrate this in her external conduct by comforting those in distress, making allowances for the defects of others, advising the ignorant, softening the prejudiced, forgiving injuries and subduing her own passions. As John Tosh argues in his discussion of masculinity, ‘respect for inner qualities is not the same as interiority’, and 18th-century authenticity was about the repression of the self, and in particular the control of the passions, the restraint of appetites and self-discipline (Tosh 1999, 232). For men, these were qualities that underpinned a particular form of self-possession linked to civility and productive work. For women, very similar qualities enabled them to take on ‘the wifely role of governor’ and take their place inside civil society (McKeon 2005, 189). A wife could contribute to the improvement of her husband's fortune through her discreet management of the affairs of the house, and her meek and quiet spirit. Management of domestic affairs was the ‘proper business’ of women, ‘and, unfashionably rustic as such an assertion may be thought, it is not beneath the dignity of any lady, however high her rank, to know How to educate her children, [and] to govern her servants’ (Pennington 1752, 47). The art of housekeeping was the most immediate female business and neither wealth nor greatness could absolve a woman from her domestic duties (Wilkes 1748). Within her proper sphere of household economy, a wife needed to set an example of steadiness and regularity, and be capable of giving practical orders and conducting the house in regular methods.

This had implications for her character, which had to be worthy and virtuous. Like her male counterpart, she could no longer trade on her blood and inheritance; she had to follow the rules of purity and virtue, and ‘in the Exercise of these Qualities the finest Breeding consists’ (Wilkes 1748, 39). She needed to take care not to create jealousy and distrust, not to dissimulate and not to disguise her disposition (Burton 1793, 82). These attributes made her the opposite of the aristocratic gaming women, the ‘Faro ladies’ who had been duped by artifice and insincerity. Instead of seeking adulation and flattery, these more sensible (and bourgeois) women sought and inspired ‘a permanent esteem’ (Burton 1793, 83) based on sincerity, good nature and discretion. They were able to judge themselves, to examine their own motives and to consider carefully whether they deserved the approbation of the world (Wilkes 1748). These rational, domestic women were capable of turning their understanding in on themselves to reflect on their own operations and make them the object of their contemplation (McKeon 2005, 104). They were reflexive subjects, with an inside and an outside, and so with the potential to become characters as long as they remained within the province of the family. Within the family, their disturbing potential for emptiness was manageable as long as women remained in their place, regulating morals and finances within the household and protecting men's property (McKeon 2005, 191). Such improving women could contribute to the economy and society through their ‘proper consumption’ based on frugality and elegance, without excess (Burton 1793, 112). Their internal qualities could even contribute to the virtual and moralised market and to the virtue of civil society by supporting their husbands in the pursuit of wealth and merit. The Reverend Wilkes advised his female readers:

The influence of these women, far from being unsteady and unpredictable, could contribute to domestic happiness and the interests of the commonwealth. Burton recommended education to make women useful and agreeable members of society, obedient daughters, faithful wives, prudent mothers and sensible companions.

The rational domestic character of women could only function within the household, where she was safe and ‘enclosed’, but she was always haunted by her double, the foolish woman who failed to cultivate herself, to manage herself discreetly and prudently. Nearly all the conduct book writers relied heavily on the contrast between those sincere and dignified women whose practice of religious duty led to the proper discharge of the social, and those of a ‘restless temper’ who neglected the ‘valuable improvements which would lay the foundation of a more solid and permanent felicity’ (Pennington 1752, 38). William Law drew the comparison between two maiden sisters, Flavia and Miranda, each with £200 a year whose parents had died 20 years ago. Flavia used her moderate fortune to have everything in fashion, to take part in every diversion and to buy books of wit and humour. She was orthodox in her religion, but not charitable towards the poor. She was idle, careful of her body rather than her soul, and by the time she was 30 years old,

Her poor, vain mind and the irreligion, folly and vanity of her whole life were all the result of the way she used her property, treating it as money to spend on herself and to gratify all her passions. She made herself empty, superficial and frivolous. Miranda, on the other hand, treated her fortune as a gift from God. She used her property for wise and reasonable ends, and for the relief of the poor. She set up nearly 20 tradesmen in new businesses and saved another 20 from failing. She educated several poor children and found them honest employment; she paid sick pay to her labourers; gave poor families who could not support themselves money for their rent and clothing, and allowances to old people ‘grown past their labour’ (Law 1729, 114). Law concluded: ‘There is nothing that is whimsical, trifling, or unreasonable in her character; but every thing there describ'd, is a right and proper instance of a solid and real piety’ (Law 1729, 119, emphases in original). It was a real and solid piety that could underpin her ethical intervention in the market, not as a frivolous consumer but as an ‘improver’ and a participant in civil society.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argued that we desire both to be respectable and to be respected. He described two different roads to respect and admiration. One involves the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue, and is based on modesty and justice. It creates and develops a core of real and solid merit that will attract select admirers. The other road leads to the acquisition of wealth and greatness, and is based on ambition and ostentation. It is all about love of the ‘gaudy and glittering’, and gains the attention of everybody (Smith 2002, 73). Such a glittering individual inspires a great mob of admirers and worshippers with the disposition to admire and imitate, and so becomes highly fashionable. This dualism is everywhere in the moral conduct books and advice manuals written for women in the 18th century. They are constantly warned against becoming ‘gaudy idols’ or ‘gilded butterflies’, and in particular of the dangers of relying on the exterior, on their bodies, to sustain their sense of themselves. The ‘empty’ woman who had no other recommendation than a fine face or a graceful form would find herself disappointed in the end because ‘she builds all her merit on the possession of what is superficial and sagacious’ (Burton 1793, 142). She was part of a small set of females ‘whose whole life, from the cradle to the coffin, is but a varied scene of trifling, trifling, and whose intellectuals fit them not for anything beyond it’ (Pennington 1752, 58–59). She would find herself deserted by her admirers and unpitied by her own sex, and then ‘to what asylum will she fly from the world and from herself!’ The horrors of solitude awaited her, with no ‘internal resources’ to dispel them (Burton 1793, 145). She had none of the ‘durable solidity’ of the sensible woman of property (Gisborne 1797, 398). It was this solidity, and this sense of having an ‘asylum’ within themselves that allowed some women to endure, to have a core self that could be the subject of a disciplined self-proprietorship that was not a threat to the newly moralised market or to the emerging civil society because it could be domesticated.

The moralists and conduct book writers mapped this empty/solid distinction on to the body/mind dualism. A woman who relied on her beauty for success lacked a proper sense of the dignity of the female character because while she had set out her body to advantage, she had failed to cultivate her mind. Rather like the aristocrats who relied on the force of rank to underpin their power, she had misunderstood, or miscalculated, where her real merit lay. She had gambled and lost, and in the process shown herself to be the opposite of a rational improver. She did not have the power of the Faro ladies to corrupt the market itself, but her intervention was incompetent and misplaced: it ‘is as if a Man should be at great expence, to build the Walls and outside of his House exceeding fine and stately, and shew no manner of contrivance in the inside of it’ (Fleetwood 1705, 247). She had been ‘building for the sight and pleasure of People passing by, and wanting in the mean time an Habitation for [her]self’ (Fleetwood 1705, 249). She had taken pains to make the exterior appear fine and handsome, ‘while the Mind within is suffered to lie wast, and wild, and unimprov'd’ (Fleetwood 1705, 248). In the end, she would find herself defined by her body and its mortality. Nothing she had done would help her to endure. ‘What is it’, Wilkes asked, ‘that the finest Lady in Being, has to be proud of? She is but Dust and Ashes, her Body is weak and infirm, subject to Diseases, Death and Corruption’ (Wilkes 1748, 95). Without her own discreet management, her potential for emptiness remained disturbing. Her beauty was vulnerable to sickness, and she should not value herself for her riches, or for her birth. She was weak in infancy, foolish in her youth, a sinner all her life, and after death ‘a stinking lump of Clay, offensive to her dearest Friends; a forgotten Heap of Rottenness and Corruption; a prey to Worms and Vermin’ (Wilkes 1748, 96). ¹

The relationship between the rotting inside and the showy outside was connected to the dualism between the real and the fashionable that plays out like some constant refrain throughout 18th-century culture. As Erin Mackie points out, ‘fashion’ was a critical term in the 18th century, linked to social and ethical suspicion of early modern commerce. Fashion was a threat to the integrity, the rational solidity, of bourgeois order. It mapped on to the distinction between the occasional and the permanent, and so between the trivial and the profound: ‘Being “fashionable” in this sense means being without substance, referent, content, and “true” value’ (Mackie 1997, 7). A person who was vain of dress could never have an upright mind, ‘nor is it possible for a gaudy Outside to have a thing wise or sedate within’ (Wilkes 1748, 98). Women needed to take care not to make themselves ridiculous or to ‘run into the extremes of fashion’, which was certain proof of a weak mind (Pennington 1752, 58). It was important not to make the ‘dangerous error of taking the shadow for the substance’ (Pennington 1752, 92–93). This seems to me to be the same fear as Smith, Shaftesbury and Rousseau share: that real and solid merit will be overwhelmed by the ‘easy empire’ of folly, presumption and deceit (Smith 2002, 68), and that without merit property becomes unsustainable because it has no kernel.

Not all women were interested in the ‘proper consumption’ defined by Burton, but instead were figured as vulnerable to the fetish of the commodity, with a kind of childish, jackdaw-like attraction to the gaudy and the glittering, the surface appearance of things. These women, devoted to their fetishes, were outside rational social control and the discourse of proper consumption. They could not be incorporated into the morality of the market or purged of their ‘bad femininity’. They remained undomesticated, and so both wild and wasted. They risked being overwhelmed by the objects of their desire and sucked into the vortex, where they became disordered and in disarray in the same way as the female gamesters. This bad femininity attached itself not just to women, but also to fops and to certain aristocratic men, who invested too heavily in the economy of desire, and became ‘all image and no substance’ (Mackie 1997, 68). They failed, all too conspicuously, to discipline or to improve themselves.

Conclusions

This process of purging property of its ‘bad femininity’ resulted in a particular, gendered version of self-ownership that was about trying to forge a stable identity and permanent esteem without relying on landownership. In marking the importance of the distinction between having a property in the person and owning our bodies, (Janet Coleman 2005, 135) argues that property in the person ‘always entails obligations beyond that self, and one's own person is equated with the obligation to maintain one's very life and thereby one's identity in time’. Ownership in both external and internal domains is achieved through independent labour, appropriation and ‘acts on the outside material world’, which create ‘a process by which each and every individual is responsible for confirming himself to be a person in perpetuity’ (Coleman 2005, 135). It is almost exactly this confirmation that the ‘empty’ women lack. Sarah Pennington warned her daughters that time is invaluable, its loss irretrievable, and admonished them to ‘Look on every day as a blank sheet of paper put into your hands to be fill'd up;—remember the characters will remain to endless ages, and that they can never be expunged’ (Pennington 1752, 35–36).

The independent self-owned person can forge for himself the internal resources to resist the blandishments of fashion and ‘easy empire’ of folly and deceit. He is able to define himself, to extend his personality into the world through appropriation, and ‘then bring it back in’ through owning his own acts (Coleman 2005, 135–136). This kind of self-ownership built on real and solid merit is an attempt to manage the contradictions of being made of paper. The industrious and the rational could transform their desire for more into improvement and industry which would be of benefit to all. Unlike the wasted empty spaces of the gambler, these solid and independent individuals could engage with the market and with commerce while still improving God's world (Coleman 2005, 138). People could only fulfil themselves in appropriating effort, work and ‘private, and individualized self-creation’ (Coleman 2005, 138, emphasis in original), giving themselves a unique interior, a fixed foundation. Rather than turning the market into a gaming table and a spectacle, they could moralise the market, and associate there with one another in order to preserve themselves and the whole of mankind. With the disavowal of ‘bad femininity’ from the account of property, women's self-creation was expressed through their ethical participation in the market involved in directing the servants efficiently and taking care of the poor.

Except, I would want to argue, that property and its associations with the feminine and with chance and unpredictability are not so easily contained. There is much to be said for remembering that ownership, even self-ownership, is not all about improvement and rationality. If we go down the route of thinking about property as connected to moral virtue, then we will tend to keep affirming its status as a ‘lasting thing’, its ability to maintain personal autonomy and moral connections with others. We risk losing sight of the terrible fragility of its foundations, and of its potential to make ‘entertainers’ of us all, especially when we assume that we can easily and reliably tell the difference between legitimate capitalist transactions and gambling. It is important to remember how much women in particular were being forced to give up when their ‘emptiness’ was subjected to masculine management and ethical reform: not just operas and balls and hours spent in bed, but also their books of wit and humour, their rage of rambling and the possibilities of living out of place. Women were excluded from aspects of the virtual market and kept in their place when they were forced into a domesticated version of the private, and social and cultural prestige in the new civil society were monopolised by men (Brace 2002). The 18th-century conduct literature should remind us of the vortex of property, its viciousness and its playfulness, its disgraceful femininity as well as its robust masculinity.