The list of bluestocking ladies given by Hannah More in her poem, Bas Bleu, is as follows: ‘Vesey of verse the judge and friend,’ ‘Boscawen sage,’ ‘bright Montagu,’ and Elizabeth Carter. To this we should of course add the name of Miss More herself. The men enumerated as members are Lord Lyttelton, Pultney, Earl of Bath, and Horace Walpole. Exactly the same list is given by Forbes in his Life of Beattie, save that he adds the name of Stillingfleet. Miss More mentions certain famous men as former habitués of the blue drawing-room, Garrick, Mason, Dr. Johnson, Burke (‘apostate now from social wit’), and Sir William Pepys. These five, with the exception of Pepys, are thought of rather as frequent visitors than as recognized members.
We must not assume from the use of the word club the existence of a formally established society, like the great Literary Club, with rules and election of members. The blues were drawn together simply by the desire for mutual intercourse, and the group expanded freely as fit associates appeared. No exact list of bluestockings can therefore be made. Indeed, the list of ladies in Hannah More’s Sensibility, described as participating in ‘the charm of friendship and the feast of sense,’ is somewhat different from the one already quoted: Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Walsingham, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Barbauld. Fanny Burney, like Miss More herself, is thought of as a younger member,[203] almost as a protégée of the club. Mrs. Thrale, with her own coterie, was always more or less of an outsider, as was also Mrs. Ord. Later, as we shall see, the name bluestocking came to be applied to women who had only the remotest connection with the original group.
The origin of the little company which was to develop into the Bas Bleu is now difficult to discover. Miss More’s poem in praise of it did not appear until 1786, many years after its fame was fully established. The verses, begun in 1783, circulated for many months in manuscript and frequently retouched, are the official handbook of the society; but it is necessary to remember that the author did not come into contact with the group during its earlier history, and that her account of its origin is therefore not to be taken as indubitable evidence. She divides the honour of having instituted the bluestocking conversazioni between Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Boscawen. Madame D’Arblay, on the other hand, assigns it exclusively to Mrs. Vesey.[204] In any case, it is certain that Mrs. Montagu speedily became the leading person in the club, for Lyttelton, apparently as early as 1765,[205] refers to her as ‘la belle présidente.’ The earliest meetings may well have occurred at her literary breakfasts, which have been already described.[206] It is not unreasonable to assume that the ‘club’ was already in existence during the later fifties, for it was well known to Admiral Boscawen, who died in 1761. A prominent member of it, mentioned by Miss More, was the Earl of Bath, who died in 1764. But the Bas Bleu did not attain the meridian of its fame till many years later.
From its very beginning the object of the club was to promote literary conversation as the chief pleasure of social life. That such conversation was a stiff and solemn business one hardly needs to be told. Bluestocking letters alone are a sufficient proof of it. In the Bas Bleu we hear much of the false wit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet,
The English bluestockings will have none of this. They repudiate wit that is French and wit that is tainted, and exalt common sense in its stead. Hannah More declares that the solid basis of conversation is learning; it is for conversation, she cries, that
Such praise of serious conversation enables us to guess at the preparation which earnest souls made for the conversazioni in which they hoped to shine. To Lady Louisa Stuart the group at Mrs. Montagu’s had about it a suspicion of acting before an audience. ‘If you had good luck,’ she says, ‘you might not only be greatly amused at Mrs. Montagu’s, but carry away much that was well worth remembering. But then, also, the circular form is not less convenient to prosers and people who love to hear themselves talk, so you might, on the contrary, come in for the most tiresome dissertations, the dullest long stories, the flattest jokes anywhere to be found.’[207] Lyttelton himself gave similar testimony. Fanny Burney’s words seem to show that the bluestockings were occasionally bored with themselves: ‘I respect and esteem them,’ she writes in April 1784, ‘but they require an exertion to which I am not always inclined.’ There is, moreover, the indirect evidence afforded by Boswell. The greatest judge of conversation then living had been repeatedly in the presence of the bluestockings; he never wearied of expressing his admiration for them; he had watched them swarming about his master; he had taken the trouble to investigate the origin of their society; but he never thought it worth while to record their talk.
Much of the fame of the bluestockings was due to the name by which they had come to be known. It caught the public attention quickly, and has remained a useful addition to the English vocabulary. The word bluestocking presents an interesting but perhaps insoluble problem in etymology, or rather in slang. Various explanations of the term exist, but, though they are not irreconcilable, they are not wholly satisfactory. It would seem as though a source ought to be found in seventeenth century France or sixteenth century Italy[208]; but none has yet come to light. Mills in his History of Chivalry[209] (1825) traces the word back to the Society ‘de la Calza,’ founded in Venice in the year 1400. The society lasted till 1590, when, he continues, ‘the rejected title’—by which presumably he means calza turchina, though he nowhere mentions it—‘crossed the Alps, and found a congenial soil in the flippancy and literary triflings of Parisian society.... It diverged from France to England.’ No evidence for the remarkable migrations of this title is adduced by Mills. The words bas bleu are unknown to French lexicographers save as a translation of the English bluestocking;[210] so that Mills’s statements respecting the peregrinations of the term seem to be the result of his own imagination.[211]
On the other hand, when we turn to English literature, we find that the term was used as early as the seventeenth century. The first occurrence of it noted by Murray, in the New English Dictionary, is in Bramston’s Autobiography (1683), in reference to the Little Parliament of 1653: ‘That Blew-stocking Parliament.’ It is here plainly used as a sneer at the unostentatious dress of the Puritans, who eschewed silk stockings. Reference to coarse or ugly stockings had been a well-known form of abuse for years. Prince Hal makes use of a similar term, ‘puke-stocking’—puke being a kind of bluish-black woollen, not worn by courtiers—in sneering at the keeper of the Boar’s Head tavern.[212] The word bluestocking, even after its application to literary ladies, retained something of a derogatory flavour; it was considered by some a term of reproach,[213] and was bitterly resented.
Just when the term was first applied to literary ladies, it is difficult to say;[214] the period of its great popularity was in the decade of the 80’s. By that time it had caught the attention and roused the curiosity of Boswell, who gives the following explanation of it:
About this time [1781] it was much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to please. These societies were denominated Blue-stocking Clubs, the origin of which title being little known, it may be worth while to relate it. One of the most eminent members of those societies, when they first commenced, was Mr. Stillingfleet, whose dress was remarkably grave, and in particular it was observed, that he wore blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do nothing without the blue stockings’ and thus by degrees the title was established.[215]
Forbes, in his Life of Beattie, throws new light on the matter:
Mr. Stillingfleet, being somewhat of an humourist in his habits and manners, and a little negligent in his dress, literally wore grey stockings, from which circumstance, Admiral Boscawen used, by way of pleasantry, to call them the ‘Blue-Stocking Society,’ as if to indicate that when these brilliant friends met, it was not for the purpose of forming a dressed assembly. A foreigner of distinction, hearing the expression, translated it literally, ‘Bas Bleu,’ by which these meetings came to be afterwards distinguished.[216]
Madame D’Arblay, writing in 1832, asserted that it was Mrs. Vesey who first encouraged Stillingfleet to appear in his homely dress; ‘“Pho, pho,” cried she ...“don’t mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!”’[217] and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting this additional detail. It is at least not inconsistent with the facts already cited.
The ‘mistake’ made by the ‘foreigner of distinction’ is plainly referred to in a letter from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu, in reference to the title Bas Bleu: ‘Do not you remember last winter that Madame de Montier (or some such name; she was, however, the French Ambassadress) desired somebody to introduce Monsieur—son Mari to the Bas bleu?’[218]
These explanations, which form a fairly consistent series, and which commended themselves to the bluestockings, ought to be good enough for the twentieth century. Some, however, insist on a more picturesque interpretation, probably in protest against the implication that the first bluestocking was a man. An explanation first offered in 1861 by Mr. Hayward, in the second edition of his Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi, was given to him by a lady who said she received it from Lady Crewe in the course of a conversation held in 1816. It runs as follows:
Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the Duchess of Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation parties in imitation of the noted one, temp. Madame de Sévigné, at Rue St. Honoré. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs. Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu’s club, adopted the mode. A foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs. Montagu’s soirée, wrote to tell a friend of the charming intellectual party who had one rule; ‘they wear blue stockings as a distinction.’
It would hardly be necessary to notice this account at all, were it not that it has been seriously presented in the Dictionary of National Biography as the correct explanation, has been cited by an anonymous writer in the Quarterly Review (January 1903), and recently repeated with full approval.[219] It must be noticed, in the first place, that Mr. Hayward himself does not accept the story, inasmuch as he banishes it to a footnote, and retains the traditional account in the body of his work. Again, the sole source of his authority is the hearsay evidence of an anonymous lady given a century after the fact. We are three stages away from the original informant, without written evidence of any kind until 1816. Moreover, the anecdote bears upon its face all the marks of a story ben trovato. Those who can think of Mrs. Montagu and her friends as genially displaying blue stockings as a sort of badge are, to say the least, but ill acquainted with certain nice prejudices of our literary ladies.
It is clear, however, that there was about this phrase that vague yet eloquent connotation which is the peculiar property of slang and in which the explanations given above are, with the exception of the last, conspicuously deficient. In no other way can the sudden popularity of the word be accounted for.[220] The tendency to play with the phrase became evident at once: ‘When will you blue-stocking yourself and come amongst us?’ wrote Walpole to Hannah More.[221] ‘You may put on your blue stockings,’ wrote Mrs. Chapone to Miss Burney,[222] ‘if you have got any boots to walk about in the mornings, I shall like you as well in them.’ The word was of course presently reduced to blue,[223] partly, no doubt, because of the associations of this colour with the salons ever since the Rambouillet days. When Fanny Burney was asked what Johnson called Mrs. Montagu, she replied, ‘“Queen,” to be sure! “Queen of the Blues!”’[224] and at court she was amused at a gentleman who was ashamed to be found ‘reading to a blue.’[225]
Two facts emerge clearly from these quotations. In the first place, we derive from Mrs. Carter’s letter a definite date for the origin of the phrase bas bleu, the winter of 1782-3. In the second place, it is obvious that this French phrase and the anecdote connected with it account in large measure for the popularity of the word bluestocking. That word had, as we have seen, existed before;[226] indeed the French lady who first used the words bas bleu was but trying to translate an English phrase already familiar to her; but it was only when that phrase assumed a kind of international significance by appearing in French form that the English public generally took up the earlier word bluestocking. From 1782 onwards the word becomes common. Moreover, it was at the same period that public attention began to be directed to the Bluestocking Club, and the date 1782 may conveniently be taken as marking its florescence.