Reform the morals and improve the manners: improvement and politeness in the female spectator

Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator, a 1740s periodical, was dedicated to the pursuit of personal improvement, with the ultimate goal of educating readers in how to achieve politeness. It did so through letters, anecdotes, and essays that detailed appropriate behavior for its readers. The popularity of The Female Spectator suggests that it may have influenced readers to follow its suggestions: in this case, by encouraging women to venture into county gardens to study natural philosophy and to moderate their attendance of public events. In recent years, scholars have explored the significance of The Female Spectator with special emphasis on Haywood’s political stance or her portrayal of women; however, scholars have not adequately addressed Haywood’s recommendation to her readers that the casual study of natural philosophy was appropriate for women in so far as it would prepare women to partake in polite conversation, and thereby create improvement within their community. Scholars have also disregarded Haywood’s prescription of moderation when attending social spaces and public events as the over attendance of these events would distract readers from their goal of personal improvement. In this thesis, I examine Haywood’s use of the eighteenth-century concepts of improvement and politeness as they related to appropriate conversation topics and polite sociability.