“Complying with her constitution’s earnest call”

Sarah Robinson (1720–1795, shown here) was the younger sister of Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu.

In 1748 Robinson started sharing a house in Bath with Lady Barbara Montague (c. 1722–1765). This lady’s Montague family was different from the Montagu family that Sarah’s sister married into.

Two years later, Robinson penned her first novel, The History of Cornelia—published, like all her work, anonymously or pseudonymously, and for money.

In 1751 Sarah Robinson married George Lewis Scott (1708–1780), one of George III’s instructors—a job she had helped to secure for him, apparently.

However, that marriage broke up within a year, with the Robinson family stating it was never consummated. The unhappy couple grumbled about each other for the rest of their lives. (George Lewis Scott would later introduce Thomas Paine to Benjamin Franklin, but that’s another story.)

The woman now called Sarah Scott went back to “Lady Bab” in Bath and back to earning money with her pen. By the end of that decade she was also translating from the French, creating educational materials, writing history books about Protestants on the continent. Scott’s most successful novel appeared in 1762: A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent. Almost everything she wrote had a moralizing element.

By 1778 Lady Bab had died, but Sarah Scott had gained a comfortable income through family gifts and inheritance. She stopped publishing, but she kept up her lively literary correspondence with her sister.

In October of that year, Catharine Macaulay left Bath for Leicester, and the next month word got back that the celebrated historian had married William Graham. But that wasn’t all people heard.

On 27 November, Sarah Scott sent this news to Elizabeth Montagu, as transcribed in The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, edited by Karen Green:

Mrs Macaulay’s marriage was reported in good time to change conversation, of which the Duel between the two gaming counts had been the sole topic, and it was entirely worn out.

A Gamester appears to me so far from being a loss to the world that I consider the marriage as the more melancholy event of the two, because it is a dishonor to the sex. If I had not more pride than revengefulness in my temper I might derive much consolation from the moral certainty that her punishment will equal her offence.

The man she has married is in age about 22, in rank 2nd Mate to the Surgeon of an India man. He is brother to a Dr [James] Graham, who etherized and electrified her, till he has made her electric per se.

She wrote a letter to Dr Wilson acquainting him with her marriage, and her reasons for it, which she tells him in the plainest terms are constitutional; that she had been for some years struggling with nature but found that her life absolutely depends on her complying with her constitution’s earnest call (perhaps she calls it nature’s, but I shall not, for it is not the nature of woman, and woman cannot find her excuse in the nature of a beast) and she would have chosen him, if his age, as he must be sensible, did not disqualify him for answering a call so urgent.

In other words, Macaulay had discovered that all those medical symptoms that had crippled her for years—fatigue, weakness, “pains in my ears and throat,” “irritations of my nerves,” and above all “a Billious intermitting Autumnal fever”—would go away when she had sex. Really good sex. Sex with a man less than half her age just returned from the sea. Sex that her doting seventy-five-year-old patron, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson, simply wouldn’t have been able to supply.

Which of course ticked Wilson off, as Scott’s letter went on to describe:

The Doctor shews the letter, but I have not seen it, and the Gentlemen declare it cannot be shown to a woman. Old Wilson is rewarded for his folly; he is in the highest rage, and having some years ago by Deed given her the furniture of the house they lived in and 300 peran[num] for her life, he intends to apply to the law to be released from this engagement; on pretence of its having been given without value received. It will make a curious cause, . . .

If there is any zeal still remaining in the world for virtue’s cause the pure Virgins and virtuous Matrons who reside in this place, will unite and drown her in the Avon, and try if she can be purified by water, for Dr Graham’s experiments have shown that fire has a very contrary effect on her, being a Salamander it is the element truly congenial to her. Were she flesh and blood one could not forgive her, but being only skin and bone she deserves no mercy.

Given Sarah Scott’s own unorthodox domestic history, perhaps she shouldn’t have looked down on Catharine Macaulay’s choice of a second husband. But, as the two poems that Christopher Anstey shared a week later demonstrate, all the fashionable people in Bath were gossiping about the Grahams.

COMING UP: The lawsuit.

“A sweet pretty nostrum, quite pleasant and new”

After Christopher Anstey won Lady Anna Miller’s biweekly poetry contest at Batheaston on 3 Dec 1778, as described yesterday, he waved aside calls to read his ode “Winter’s Amusement” again.

Instead, he pulled out what he later called an “Epode.” That word signals that it was part of the ode, though written with a different metre and tone.

When both poems were published in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1786), Anstey’s lines were simply headed: “LINES Repeated by the Author, on Being Asked to Read the Preceding Stanzas a Second Time.”

That’s the version I’m following rather than the one in the collection of Anstey’s work published by his son in 1808, on the assumption that it’s closer to the original:

Must I read it again, Sir?—So—here do I stand,
Like the priest that holds forth with a skull in his hand—
Repeat such a dreadful memento as this is,
To spleen the young fellows, and frighten the misses?
When beauties assemble to laugh and be gay,
How cruel to preach upon beauty’s decay!
How hard, that the fairest of all the creation,
Should suffer one wrinkle by anticipation!
What delicate nymph but must shrink when she hears
Her charms will all fade in the winter of years?
What languishing widow would e’er wish to know
Her charms were all faded a long while ago?
Unless one could bring some receipt to supply
Fresh Cupids to bask in the beam of her eye.
Recall the lost rose, or the lily replace,
That have shed their dead leaves o’er her ever green face!
And this (thank the gods) I can promise to do,
By a sweet pretty nostrum, quite pleasant and new,
Which learned historians and doctors, I find,
Have lately reveal’d for the good of mankind.
A nostrum like which, no elixir yet known,
E’er brac’d a lax fibre, and strengthen’d its tone.
Nore’er was so grand a restorative seen,
For bringing back sixty—to lovely sixteen!
To you then, ye fair, if old Time should appear,
And whisper a few little hints in your ear,
That Cupid his triumphs begins to resign,
Your nerves are unstrung, and your spirits decline,
You have no other physical course to pursue,
Than to take—a young husband your springs to renew;
You may take him—I think—at—about twenty-two!
For when both the spirits and nerves are in fault,
Platonic affection is not worth a groat.
The conjugal blessing alone is decreed
The truest specific for widows indeed;
And I trust they will find it, as long as they live,
The best of amusements that winter can give!

The opening line shows that Anstey wasn’t surprised to win the poetry competition that day. He’d already prepared this encore.

While people might have wondered about the relevance of Anstey’s ode to people they knew, they couldn’t miss his allusion to “learned historians and doctors”—the famous historian Catharine Macaulay had recently left nearby Bath and married Dr. William Graham.

Macaulay had indeed been a “languishing widow,” complaining about her “nerves,” albeit more than a decade from “sixty.”

Graham was indeed “about twenty-two!” In fact, he was twenty-one, but that didn’t rhyme.

Even the phrase “Platonic affection” was a jab. The previous year, a London publisher had issued this print of Macaulay with her then-housemate, the Rev. Thomas Wilson, calling them “The Political Platonic Lovers.”

TOMORROW: Audience response.

(The photograph above by Ian is here via Flickr shows a statue in the form of a large ornamental vase standing in the Royal Victoria Park in Bath. Many sources say this is the vase the Riggs-Millers brought back from Rome and used at their literary salons, or a replica of that vase. It’s neither of those things. It doesn’t look like the engraving the couple published in 1775, and it’s not even hollow. Like Anstey’s second poem, it’s a heavy-handed follow-on to an original.)

“Poor Mrs. Macaulay! She is irrecoverably fallen.”

In October 1778, the historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath and the home she shared with the Rev. Thomas Wilson.

One possible reason for Macaulay’s move was that Wilson kept pressing her to marry him. Everyone knew the minister was besotted with the widowed author. He’d already signed over a lease to his house, erected a statue in London, and published a book of fawning poetry. But she declined to make him her second husband.

As Bob Ruppert described in this Journal of the American Revolution article, Macaulay moved across England to Leicester in the East Midlands. That was the city where her friend Elizabeth Arnold lived.

Arnold was the sister of Macaulay’s physician, Dr. James Graham, and wife of another physician who managed an asylum for the mentally ill. The two women had visited France together in late 1777.

On 14 November, a minister in Leicester married Macaulay to Dr. Graham. Not James Graham, who was with his wife and children in Scotland. That would have provided plenty of scandal and confirmed a rumor that John Wilkes had recorded earlier in the year.

Rather, the historian married William Graham, younger brother of Dr. James Graham and Elizabeth Arnold.

Much younger brother, in fact. William Graham was only twenty-one years old. He was barely a doctor, having studied in Edinburgh and trained as a surgeon’s mate for the East India Company. 

Even by the modern standard of “half your age plus seven,” William Graham seemed “too young” for Macaulay, who was forty-seven. And of course Macaulay was a woman. A woman who had put herself into the public eye by writing about history and politics.

The reaction was swift and negative. One acquaintance at Bath, Edmund Rack, wrote to Richard Polwhele, an eighteen-year-old admirer of the historian, on 29 December:

Poor Mrs. Macaulay! She is irrecoverably fallen. “Frailty, thy name is Woman!” Her passions, even at 52 [sic], were too strong for her reason; and she has taken to bed a stout brawny Scotchman of 21. For shame! Her enemies’ triumph is now complete. Her friends can say nothing in her favour. O, poor Catharine!—never canst thou emerge from the abyss into which thou art fallen!

And that was one of the more sympathetic responses.

COMING UP: More reactions.

[The portrait of “Mrs. Catherine M’Caulay” above is a woodcut printed in Nathaniel Ames’s Astronomical Diary; or Almanack for 1772. Paul Revere supplied versions of this cut to both Ezekiel Russell and Edes and Gill for their competing editions. Printing this illustration of Macaulay shows the admiration, or at least curiosity, that she inspired in New England at that time. (The almanac’s other images featured John Dickinson and the dwarf Emma Leach.) This image comes courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.]

“As rotten as an old Catherine pear”

In April 1778, John Wilkes was back at Bath (if he had ever left). On the 28th he wrote to his daughter Polly about the well known author Catharine Macaulay:

Yesterday we went to Kitty Macaulay, as she is still called. She looked as rotten as an old Catherine pear. Lord I[rnham]. was disgusted with her manner, &c.

Darley has just published a new caricature of her and the Doctor, which she owns has vexed her to the heart. It is worth your buying.

Back in May 1777, the artist Mattina Darly had published a cartoon of Macaulay writing while the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson looked on, titled “The Historians.” Behind them was a bust of Alfred the Great, reflecting both Whiggish admiration for that early king and how the minister had named his mansion Alfred House. The image above comes courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

The “new caricature” from Darly was evidently the one at the bottom of this post, showing Macaulay stalked by death while she applied makeup. That picture also included Wilson’s profile.

Wilkes knew that Macaulay didn’t like that portrayal. Nevertheless, he recommended that his daughter buy the picture.

And then a few lines later Wilkes wrote: “To-day I dine with Mrs. Macaulay and the Doctor.”

What a delightful man.

TOMORROW: A more flattering, less recognizable picture.

John Wilkes’s Gossip about “Kitty Macaulay”

Catharine Macaulay was a celebrity in Britain, so her return from France at the start of 1778 attracted notice.

John Wilkes was in Bath when Macaulay arrived home. He wrote to his 28-year-old daughter Mary (called Polly, and shown here with dad) on 4 January:

Mrs. Macaulay returned to Dr. [Thomas] Wilson on Friday. I saw her yesterday very ill indeed, and raving against France and everything in that country. She even says their soups are detestable, as bad as Lacedemonian black broth, and their game insipid, all their meat bad, and their poultry execrable. Yet she says, that she dined at some of the best tables and was infinitely caressed.

She saw Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, but refused his invitation to dinner, for fear of being confined on her return in consequence of the Habeas Corpus Act.

“Lord J——s C——t, Mr. Wilkes, you know, I am very fond of partridges. I saw them often served up, but could not eat them, I found them so hard and ill-flavoured.[”]

I stayed with her nearly an hour, in which time, I believe, she exclaimed twenty times, [“]Lord J——s C——t.” She was painted up to the eyes, and looks quite ghastly and ghostly. She has sent away her English woman, and has only a French valet-de-chambre and friseur, at which the reverend Doctor is indignant, and with whom the English servants already quarrel.

Three days later Wilkes told his daughter that his health had improved and he was thinking about returning to London. He added:

The rage of politics is, I think, more violent at Bath than even at London, and nothing is talked of but America, except Kitty Macaulay, who grows worse daily. The doctor [Wilson] looks stupid and sulky.

And the day after that Wilkes suggested Macaulay was having an affair:

It is not only my opinion, but that of the generality of Mrs. Macaulay’s friends, that her head is affected, and some indiscretions with Dr. G—— are the common topic of conversation.

Dr. James Graham had treated Macaulay’s headaches and other neurological symptoms, using her endorsement to build his career. Wilkes evidently thought their relationship went beyond doctor and patient. And of course he would know.

TOMORROW: Wilkes gives unabashed gossip a bad name.

Catharine Macaulay “just returned from a Journey to Paris”

Today, after a gap of more than four months, I’m picking up the story of the British author Catharine Macaulay.

To catch us up, I’ll quote Macaulay’s own letter to the Earl of Buchan dated 23 Feb 1778:

The favor of your Lordship’s letter found me just returned from a Journey to Paris where I resided a few weeks for the recovery of my health after a long and dangerous illness.

Macaulay had gained the strength to undertake that journey only after Dr. James Graham had provided her with “a judicious mixture of the Bark” to treat her “Billious intermitting Autumnal fever,” as I quoted here. The doctor’s sister Elizabeth Arnold was Macaulay’s traveling companion.

Both Macaulay and Lord Buchan supported the American cause. France had just become a formal ally of the U.S. of A., and Macaulay wrote:

I have the pleasure to inform your Lordship that sentiments of liberty which are as you observe lost in these united Kingdoms never flourished in a larger extent or with more vigorous animating force than they do at present in France.

That reflected the Enlightenment circles that Macaulay visited since France was, after all, still a less democratic regime than Britain.

The author also told the earl: “I have this month published a vol of the history of England from the revolution to the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole.” That was the first volume of a never-completed set titled The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend. It was less formal than Macaulay’s earlier histories.

The “Friend” was the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson—Macaulay’s patron, host, and unrequited suitor in Bath. A portrait of Wilson with Macaulay’s daughter set me off on the author’s story last May. That daughter, Catherine Sophia, was “at a Boarding School at Chelsea” when her mother wrote to Lord Buchan; she would turn thirteen the next day. 

TOMORROW: The Wilkesite view.

The Changing Image of Catharine Macaulay

In the mid-1760s, as I wrote yesterday, Catharine Macaulay became an icon for British Whigs.

Her History of England from the Accession of James I reinforced the Whiggish story of restoring and preserving ancient British liberties from the tyrannical encroachments of the Stuart monarchs.

Macaulay herself was from a respectable family, the sister of a Member of Parliament, after 1766 the widow of a physician with a young daughter. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, with her thin face and long nose, but that face made her quickly recognizable.

The National Portrait Gallery in London shares some engraved images of Macaulay from this period, such as the one shown above, framing her as a matron from the Roman republic. Another print spelled out that linkage.

In the late 1760s, however, Macaulay’s public image began to change. The more she wrote about the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, the more radical she seemed. Then in 1774 she moved into the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson’s house in Bath, as discussed back here. And of course she was a woman in the public eye.

Those developments raised questions in people’s minds, which came out in this engraving issued in 1777, a double portrait of Macaulay and Wilson titled “The Political Platonic Lovers.” That label swirled together the two reasons people might look askance at Catharine Macaulay: her politics and her living arrangement.

Over the next couple of years, Wilson commissioned Robert Edge Pine to paint a portrait of Macaulay holding one of her letters to him. He commissioned Joseph Wright of Derby to paint himself and Macaulay’s daughter. He commissioned John Francis Moore to sculpt a statue of Macaulay as the muse Clio, which he eventually pressed upon the church he was supposed to be serving in London. He published odes to Macaulay on her forty-sixth birthday in 1777 from himself, the teenager Richard Polwhele, and Dr. James Graham. Clearly the minister was besotted with the historian.

Macaulay obviously appreciated the house to live in and the promised bequest to her daughter. But she resisted any offers or hints of marriage from Wilson. She maintained that the septuagenarian minister was merely a friend. Indeed, when she published the first volume of a less formal History of England from the Revolution as “a Series of Letters to a Friend,” that friend was Wilson.

In those same years, Macaulay was struggling to continue her history of 17th-century England; no volume had appeared since 1771. She was feeling sick much of the time. That was how she had become a patient and patron of Dr. Graham, who presented himself as an eye specialist with extra-special training from America.

Given her personal state, Macaulay surely would not have appreciated this crude colored print published later in 1777 and now digitized by the British Museum. Captioned “A Speedy and Effectual Preparation for the Next World,” the picture shows the historian, recognizable by her long nose, putting on her makeup as Death shakes sand out of an hourglass. A portrait of the Rev. Dr. Wilson hangs above her table.

TOMORROW: A journey for her health.

“A great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences”

When the historian Catharine Macaulay contacted Dr. James Graham, he was changing his field of medical practice.

In his advertisements in American newspapers, similar notices in Bristol, and his 1775 London pamphlet, Graham presented himself as a specialist in problems of the eyes and ears.

But in 1776 he published another pamphlet whose title suggested new treatments for many more ailments:

A Short Inquiry into the Present State of Medical Practice, in Consumption, Asthmas, Gout in the Head or Stomach, Hysterical, Spasmodic, or Paralytic Affections of the Nerves in Every Species of Nervous Weakness and in Cancerous and Other Obstinate Ulcers and a More Elegant Speedy and Certain Method of Cure by Means of Certain Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications—Recommended.

To which is added an Appendix on the Management and Diseases of the Teeth and Gums

In this pamphlet Graham declared that the electrical lectures he had attended in Philadelphia had inspired him to develop new methods of curing people. (He also mentioned trips to Germany and Russia, which must have been very short because I have no idea when he fit them in.)

This essay may well have been what prompted Macaulay to consult with Graham. And she was pleased with the results. On 18 Jan 1777 she wrote to the doctor from the home she shared with the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson in Bath:

…I was unfortunately born with a very delicate constitution, and a weak system of nerves; that from my earliest infancy to the age of maturity, my health was continually disturbed with almost every species of fever, with violent colds, sore throats, and pains in the ears, attended with all the variety of symptoms which accompany a relaxed habit, and an irritable state of nerves.

In this very weak state of health, I undertook the writing the History of the Stewarts; and I do not know whether it is not impertinent to add, that seven years severe application reduced an originally tender frame to a state of insupportable weakness and debility: continual pains in the stomach, indigestion, tremblings of the nerves, shivering fits, repeated pains in the ears and throat, kept my mind and body in continual agitation; and marked, those which would otherwise have been the brightest of my days, with sorrow and despair.

In one of these fits of despair, your pamphlet came to my hands. Its contents awakened my curiosity; I sent for you; you undertook my cure with alacrity, and gave me the pleasing hope of a restoration of health, or rather a new state of constitution; and I have the happiness to declare, that a great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences, your Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Applications; the pains in my ears and throat subsided, the fevers and irritations of my nerves left me, and my spirits were sufficiently invigorated to break from a confinement of six weeks, and to exercise in the open air.

Macaulay told Graham that she gave him “full liberty to publish this declaration,” and he seized the opportunity. He included the letter in a second edition of his Short Inquiry pamphlet and put her name on its title page, twice.

For that 1777 edition Dr. Graham also added an effusive 31 March letter back to Macaulay that filled seven printed pages, addressed her as “Madam” nine times, and used fifteen exclamation points (as well as slipping in “most hearty acknowledgements” to “the Revd. Dr. Wilson”).

In April 1777, as I wrote before, Wilson organized a grand celebration of Macaulay’s birthday. As a gift he gave her a gold medal that Queen Anne had presented to one of her negotiators at the Treaty of Utrecht—a historical artifact for a historian. The published description of that event then went on:

Next advanced the ingenious Dr. GRAHAM, to whom the world is so much indebted for restoring health to the Guardian of our Liberties, and thereby enabling her to proceed in her inimitable History;—he with great modesty and diffidence presented her with a copy of his works, containing his surprising discoveries and cures…

Furthermore, one of the odes presented to the lady that day and then printed was titled “On reading Mrs. Macaulay’s Letter to Dr. Graham.” It described Clio, “Th’ HISTORIC MUSE,” worrying about the lady’s health, even seeing the statue of her Wilson sent to his church in Walbrook as a “marble tomb.” But finally the god of healing Apollo promises:

“To stop the ravage of the foe,
My GRAHAM instantly shall go,
And set thy Fav’rite free;
No more let sorrow still thine eye—
On GRAHAM’s skill secure rely,
For he was taught by me.”

Those two 1777 publications—the doctor’s pamphlet and the birthday odes—publicly linked Graham and Macaulay. As he always acknowledged, her celebrity helped his pioneering ideas about “Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Aetherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications” reach a wider audience.

Later in the year, however, Catharine Macaulay took ill again.

COMING UP: Search for a cure.

“I would have her taste the exalted pleasure of the universal applause”

Yesterday I wrote about how in 1774 the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson (1703–1784) invited the historian Catharine Macaulay into his house at Bath, assigned her the lease, and adopted her daughter as his heir.

Some of Macaulay’s admirers looked askance at that arrangement. Not because Wilson was neglecting his parish of Walbrook in London by staying at Bath. It was rather common for older rich Anglican clerics to be absentees, so no one really complained.

Rather, on 18 Feb 1774 the Rev. Augustus Toplady, author of the “Rock of Ages” hymn, warned Macaulay about the “dapper doctor” in a letter; “beware of being seen with him in public,” Toplady wrote. “He would derive lustre from you, but, like a piece of black cloth, he would absorb the rays, without reflecting any of them back.”

Toplady’s metaphor makes an interesting note on the Joseph Wright of Derby painting shown yesterday, which plays Wilson’s black clothing off his adopted daughter’s shiny pink and blue garments.

In fact, Wilson was more than happy to publicize Macaulay’s genius. Soon the British press caught wind of the relationship between the septuagenarian minister and the fortysomething historian, both widowed. Writers began to hint that Wilson’s admiration for Macaulay was creepy. He didn’t help by organizing a public birthday celebration for her in 1777, presenting her with a gold medal, and then publishing the six odes read to her that day.

Already a patron of artists, Wilson commissioned Robert Edge Pine to paint a portrait of Macaulay holding a letter to him. Then he commissioned John Francis Moore to carve a sculpture of Clio, muse of history, based on that portrait.

To make sure no one missed the reference, Wilson had the statue (shown above) mounted on a plinth spelling out that it was “a Testimony of the high Esteem he bears to the distinguished Merit of his Friend CATHERINE MACAULAY.” The plinth also displayed quotations from her work. And it quoted from a 1775 novel titled The Correspondents, falsely rumored to be the letters of Baron Lyttleton (1744–1779) and his future bride:

You speak of Mrs. Macaulay. She is a kind of prodigy. I revere her abilities. I cannot bear to hear her name sarcastically mentioned. I would have her taste the exalted pleasure of the universal applause. I would have statues erected to her memory; and once in every age I would wish such a woman to appear, as proof that genius is not confined to sex…but…at the same time…you’ll pardon me, we want no more than one Mrs. Macaulay.

Abigail Adams had written a fan letter to Macaulay in 1774. When she heard about that statue and inscription, she told her sons’ tutor, John Thaxter:

It gives me pleasure to see so distinguished a Genious as Mrs. Macauly Honourd with a Statue, yet she wanted it not to render her Name immortal. The Gentleman who erected it has sullied the glory of his deed by the narrow contracted Spirit which he discovers in the inscription, and if a Quotation from Lord Lyttleton (as I understand it) it is a pitty that what was meant to perpetuate the memory of that Lady should cast a shade upon the character of that Nobleman for whom heretofore I have had a great veneration. Even the most Excellent monody which he wrote upon the Death of his Lady will not atone for a mind contracted enough to wish that but one woman in an age might excell, and she only for the sake of a prodigy. What must be that Genious which cannot do justice to one Lady, but at the expence of the whole Sex?

Dr. Wilson even had the statue of Macaulay/Clio and plinth installed inside his London church in September 1778—the church he hadn’t otherwise served for years.

But within a couple of months, the relationship between Macaulay and Wilson was in tatters.

TOMORROW: A transatlantic medical career.

New Faces at the Museum of Fine Arts

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts recently acquired this portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of my favorite British artists of the late eighteenth century.

On 15 Apr 1776, Wright wrote to a relative, “I am now painting a half length of D.r Wilson & his adopted Daughter Miss Macauley.” He described undertaking the job as “for reputation only” as he tried to build up a clientele in Bath.

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson was a distinguished London minister. He was also the main patron of historian Catharine Macaulay, who in 1763 began publishing her major work, eventually titled The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line.

Macaulay gave birth to a daughter in 1765. The next year, her obstetrician husband died. She continued to write, becoming more open about her radical politics both in pamphlets and in her history as the events she recounted approached the present day.

In 1772 the Rev. Dr. Wilson’s wife died. After that, he spent most of this time in Bath, inviting Mrs. Macaulay and her daughter to join him. In 1775 the childless widower adopted eleven-year-old Catherine Sophia Macaulay as his heir. He also granted her mother the lease of the Bath house and promised her an annuity.

The dealer of this painting, Lowell Libson and Jenny Yarker Ltd., points out that Wright showed Catherine Sophia and her adopted father reading her mother’s history, so Catharine Macaulay appears in the painting symbolically. Likewise, when Robert Edge Pine painted Macaulay the previous year, he depicted her with five volumes and a letter inscribed, “Revd. Dr: Thos Wilson Citizen of London and Rector of Wallbrook.”

The dealer also notes how Wright portrayed Catherine Sophia and Wilson as sharp contrasts: youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, pastels versus red, black, and white. Yet they are brought together in a discussion of her mother’s work.

The Wilson household was an intellectual center at Bath, and Wright hoped the minister would recommend him for more commissions. But jobs didn’t come in fast enough, and the painter returned to his home territory of Derby in 1777.

The year after that, a rift opened between the Rev. Dr. Wilson and Mrs. Macaulay.

TOMORROW: Celebrating a celebrity author.