Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -

 

It was her name that first drew me to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  In it the Christian, the Old English and the French  mixed together to encapsulate her families passage down through the years. And also just because I like the sounds it makes.

As is the way with a name or a concept one has recently encountered, the name kept cropping up in different contexts ranging from the poetic to the scientific, to the medical; and as a feminist. She was being revealed as one of those brave, rebellious Early Modern women whom I was winkling out from under the dusty pall of almost unexplored dismissal. 

Mary was born c1689 in the reign of William and Mary of Orange, so no doubt she was one of hundreds of baby girls all over England who were given that same name. From a young age she was resentful of  the expensive education to which her brothers had access but which was forbidden her because of her sex. However, she had complete access to her father's remarkable library and it was there she succeeded in teaching herself Greek and Latin.

In what comes to be part of her legend: when, at 21, she translated the Enchiridion of Epictetus from Latin, she sent a copy of this to Bishop Gilbert Brunet as proof of her accompanying paper proposing and defending women's right to education. One of the earliest woman to have done so.

Though Mary Wroth 1621 is known as the first woman to publish her own work, in the hundred years since first she and then Margaret Cavendish (1650s) had broken the taboo on women's publications things hadn't much changed for women as writers. Mary Wroth was protected by the backing of the large & influential Sidney family; and Cavendish both her personal acquaintance with the King and the encouragement of her Husband. This allowed both women to take the transgressive step of putting their works into the public sphere.

But women engaging in any of the manly occupations such as study, learning, or writing were still required to remain bashfully in the shadows.Coming forward into the public sphere still earned women the title either of whore or madwoman -unless they could learn how to negotiate safe passage through the dangerous waters of social condemnation and earned respect.

Mary, the ermine-wearing Social hostess, with one of her children.

It is no great surprise to learn that something else about which Lady Mary had strong feelings, was the "cattle-market" of the marriage scene where women were but pawns in games of family ascendance and land ownership. When arrangements (in which she participated) were made for her own arranged marriage, she managed to escape her fate by eloping with Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712.

It's thought that this was not a successful marriage as both parties spent less and less time in each others company as the years went by until, eventually, they were virtually separated.  However, he appears not to have been able to halt her in her course to present women's thoughts, fancies, knowledge, skills and ideas in the public sphere.

 Edward Wortley Montagu, the Whig politician with whom Mary eloped in 1714.

When Mary married Edward she began to spend more time with his friends such as Pope and John Gay and, in particular, her husband's closest friend, Addison. Two years into the marriage her first  published writing appeared in Addison's 'Spectator' - it is unlikely that without her inclusion in her husbands circle she would ever have been able to contribute to this popular publication.

It's also unlikely that, had her wit been neither stringently satiric nor informed by the same Classical education as the Literati and Wits, she would never have got her little silk slipper wedged firmly into any of the doors which allowed her into the public sphere. And her enmity with Alexander Pope; which entertained the public sphere, would never have entered into the Canon.

Frith specialised in painting episodes from the lives of famous historical personalities. Here he depicts the disastrous moment that spelled future enmity between the poet Alexander Pope and his potential patron Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Frith explained the situation for viewers of the 1852 Royal Academy exhibition. 'Her own statement, as to the origin of the quarrel, was this: That at some ill-chosen time, when she least expected what romancers call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her, that in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immediate fit of laughter: from which moment he became her implacable enemy'. 

That's a story worth going into, for her poetry and prose share her feelings about male-dominated society; while illustrating that women were not the quiescent receptors of such regimes as they are commonly portrayed.

Over the years I've come across students who have deconstructed her published poetry; pored over her accounts of life in the 'mysterious East', dug up stories of her public crossing of swords with the most esteemed members of the literati - but had very little idea about the next phase of her life, solely concentrating on her literary persona. Which she deserves utterly.

 But which saddens me greatly.

For, in 1716 Lady Mary's husband was posted to Constantinople and, unlike many of the European wives who stayed safely at home when their husbands' were sent on 'dangerous' (anywhere which was not Europe) foreign postings, Mary went too. Even more significantly, and a great deal more fortuitously, unlike many of those wives, she came back again.

Which is something all women should celebrate. For her doing so was to save the lives of thousands. (would it be a gross exaggeration to put that figure in the millions?) Not only in the UK but across Europe. 

In the 19thC Europeans who adopted Native dress and customs were not just disparaged but, in some instances utterly ruined, for 'going Native'. But in the early 18thC, when travel to "exotic" lands gained one star attraction in the drawing rooms and Guild Halls of London, it earned a glamorous label for those who returned from far off lands.

By which measure Mary - who had already gained fame in London drawing rooms before her travels -  threw herself into the foreign clime she found herself in and gained even more notoriety amongst the Social Set than she had gained through her writing.

In Turbans, quasi-military attire and "freakish"  jewellery - including dagger - portraits of Mary from this time showed a confidant woman, arm akimbo (in defiance of Drawing Room poses!) with a look of private amusement  upon her face.

All Mary's adventures, conclusions and discoveries are chronicled in her writing from her time in Constantinople - including a description of many local, female skills and customs. Amongst them are her encounters "with a group of elderly woman" who, each spring,  visited people's home to perform a vitally important procedure: they "ingrated" all those who had not yet had the most dread disease of all: Small Pox.

 Small Pox had been scourging humanity for thousands of years - as constantly evolving technology allows us to verify.   Mary herself had lost a beloved brother to it and, though she herself survived it, it left her with the all-too-familiar facial scars which toppled many a "beauty" of the time and condemned them to social ostracism, by nullifying their value in the marriage stakes. No-one had ever discovered how to cure it.

.Yet a small gaggle of women in a dusty street in Instanbul in the Eighteenth century matter-of-factly informed her that it killed no-one here. They hadn't found the cure for it - they had simply eradicated it by making people immune to it!

It is extremely likely that, had these woman approached any of the English men in the city to share this knowledge; it would have dismissed as some sort of local, and dreadfully mucky-sounding, women's tale. 

But this was a subject which had caused Mary herself much suffering; and had the potential to cause her even more; as she and Edward by now had a son. It was an illness which lay in the back of one's mind anytime someone confessed to not feeling well.  It was in women's hearts from the first moment they learned they were pregnant; it struck all people equally; it underlined the impermanence of  life.

Thus she began to observe and to ask questions about this "ingration". Not only about the process itself but its effects all around her: where not a pockmarked face was to be seen. The evidence before her convinced her to have her own child undergo the procedure.

And immediately, she began to write about it. As a public poet, who sparred with the greatest intellects of the day, her words carried a certain amount of weight. While her faith in the procedure needed no more validity than the fact that she felt it the right thing to do for her son. But she was still a woman. It was all very well to have entered into literature on an equal footing with illustrious, male aficionados. But it was quite another thing to go messing about with science and medicine! Inasmuch as both were learnt from peasant women in a far-off  and foreign country.

However, by the time Mary arrived home to England, she was determined to let as many people as possible know that there was a procedure called, in English, "inoculation" which could protect you - for your entire life - from Small Pox. It seemed that while most mothers agreed that inoculation could indeed be the saviour of humanity; most of the men - especially those in the medical profession  remained sceptical. 

After Mary gave birth to her second child, a girl, she had enlisted the help of an English doctor to perform an 'inoculation' on the child. It was this which convinced some of the women who had wavered on whether or not to follow Mary's example, to have themselves and their children undergo the procedure. Many did, and many took up and advocated for, the strange practice - which, of course, might not always have had paternal permission. But it was through this uptake of inoculation that thousands of lives were saved.

Mary also introduced the practice to the Queens and Princesses of Europe, leaving up to them the subject of whether they would train their own medical practitioners in the practice or not.  They did.

One hundred years later one Thomas Jenner - who had himself been inoculated at an early age - set to work on Mary's discovery to introduce his process called 'vaccination' . Rather than introducing matter from a pustule of someone with Small Pox, Jenner used matter from those suffering from a much milder disease - Cow Pox - instead.

Whether you'd like to see how early Feminism was expressed; or to find out how women in other countries were treated; to discover the full extent of her services to humanity by introducing inoculation; or why in 2022, the only person cited as stamping out Small Pox is a bloke...learning more about this remarkable satirist is a really rewarding adventure.