“Miss Melinda Harley, of Yorkshire, may pass well enough for a country body; but really her history was not worth bringing up to town.”
    So goes one of several dismissive contemporary reviews for The History of Melinda Harley, Yorkshire (1777). The Westminster Review gave it only one sentence: “the history of an ephemera, that is born and dies on the same day.”
    Another reviewer joked: “It is the general character of many romances, that they are good for nothing; but we must except the History of Melinda Harley from this censure, for we can affirm, from our own experience, that it is admirably calculated—to procure sleep.”
    Ouch, ouch, and ouch, anonymous authoress! I feel for you. Yes, the plot is slight, the characters are wooden, and the detail is sparse, but I became quite interested in the wide variety of moralizing comments that Melinda Harley trades with her BFF Amanda Beaufort while Melinda is away visiting with family friends. The girls share their thoughts on the folly of dueling, the pending loss of the American colonies, and the consolations of religion.
   Some of their exchanges are the sort Mary Bennet would approve of:​​ “Most of our wants are artificial, and his happiness is much better assured who has learned to contract his desires.” “It is a great inducement to the exercise of benevolence, to view human nature in a fair light, and to put the best construction on one anothers’ actions.” Some remarks are explicitly political or feminist in tone.
  Some of these epistolary sermonettes touch on situations with similarities to Austen novels. I am not saying Austen drew from this novel, rather, that both writers drew from topics and situations prevalent at the time. I will share a few examples but I won’t point out which passage in which Austen novel they remind me of. If you’re not a Janeite, it won’t be relevant to you, and if you are a Janeite, you don’t need me to tell you...

    ​In an earlier blog post, I referenced The Banker’s Daughters of Bristol, or, Compliance and Decision (1824) as a prime example of a novel which portrayed the Bristol mercantile class as avaricious and eager to rise in society. 
     But most of the novel has nothing to do with Jane and Maria Milsom, the titular characters. The central heroines, representing Compliance and Decision, are Louisa Gordon and Fanny Woodville. Louisa lives in a rustic cottage with her genteel but impoverished mother, and Fanny is the orphaned daughter of  a star-crossed love match. 
       The Banker’s Daughters of Bristol is a strange mixture of hackneyed prose ("pellucid waters," “woo danger in the tented field”) and conventional morality punctuated with strong editorial outbursts. The narrator and some of the characters randomly exclaim against the government, the church, the army, and British society at large. That surprised me, since the novel is a product of the Minerva Press, printers of popular romance and gothic horrors for the reading public.
​    I wonder, did the publisher even notice these little protest speeches? Maybe he just gave the manuscript a brief glance--

• young man from good family is friendly with a poor family who have a beautiful young daughter whom he is forbidden to marry, check,
• brother kidnapped by Algerine pirates, check,
• another young man from good family is friendly with a poor family who have a beautiful young daughter whom he is forbidden to marry, uh... okay, check,
• dissolute old nobleman tries to force heroine into mercenary marriage, check, 
• long-lost brother shows up under an assumed name but drops some exceedingly broad hints that he's not who he claims to be, check,
• hero returns from the dead, check,

--but he missed the political parts. I am surprised at how openly critical these remarks are. We are told female authors could not express bold political opinions in these times--right?
​    And another strange thing about this story: we open Volume I with “Lady Waldegrave” and her bratty little boy, then, without explanation, we turn to a completely different cast of characters. Not even a dividing line--

    In previous posts, I’ve shared information about novels and plays from the time of Jane Austen that featured Bristol merchants and their families.
     While novelists portrayed Bristol merchants chiefly in comic terms, today their reputation is tainted, to put it mildly, by the legacy of the slave trade. So what did people think of real-life Bristol merchants, not fictional ones, during the 18th century? The reaction was more nuanced than we might assume. According to this history of Bristol: "Civic pride ran high… during the 'golden age' of the eighteenth century, the business community of Bristol acquired an enviable reputation for shrewdness and entrepreneurial vitality."
   On the other hand, one man's "shrewdness" is another man's "underhanded." Bristol merchants also had a reputation for being insular, crafty, and vulgar. And yes, we'll tie this all back to Mrs. Elton, the Bristol merchant's daughter in Emma...

   In previous posts, I reviewed a novel called Nobility Run Mad which actually focused more on the marital mishaps of a wealthy merchant family from Bristol than on nobility behaving badly. It is one of several novels from the long 18th century which portray Bristol merchants as nouveaux riche who were given to flaunting their wealth and revealing their ignorance of true gentility. Later, I’ll give some historical perspective on real-life Bristol merchants but for now I am focussing on how these merchants were portrayed in novels and plays.
   As I mentioned, I got interested in finding examples of this comic stock character because of Mrs. Elton in Emma. It seems to me that she is an exemplar of a vulgar Bristolian, and Austen makes a point of specifying she is from Bristol, “the very heart of Bristol.”
    As I find these novels, I am looking carefully for references to the slave trade and the attitude of the authors as revealed through their characters. While many a novel relies upon the sudden acquisition of a West Indian fortune as a plot device, they usually mention the West Indies without remarking on slavery at all, let alone the evils of slavery. The stereotypical Bristol merchant and his family are held up to criticism and ridicule in these novels--not because they were involved in the slave trade, but because they were vulgar and presumptuous...