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The City as Portal: Late Georgian Women on the Stage and in the Public Sphere

In Hannah Cowley's 1782 comedy The Belle Stratagem, Lady Frances tells Miss Ogle, the play's fashion proctor: "I have yet hardly form'd an idea of London" (2.1.23), to which Miss Ogle replies: "Why ... as Lady Frances had the misfortune to be bred entirely in the Country, she cannot be supposed to be versed in Fashionable Life" (2.1.25). This observation reflects late Georgian depictions of London as a complex and thriving metropolis, but more importantly, this exchange reveals the relationship between dramatic space and geographic space. The performative nature of London life, the activities one pursues, the people with whom one associates, the places one visits, the identities one assumes are all connected to theatricalized spaces. Imaginary worlds on stage collide with actual, physical places presumably visited by the performers in their theatrical space and to which theatre-goers may adjourn following the curtain. The interactions between human spaces and imaginary theatrical spaces may help to map the dynamic of cosmopolitan London at the end of the eighteenth century. It is this dialectic, the one between physical human spaces and imaginary theatricalized spaces, I claim, problematizes and yields more nuanced understandings of the city than over-generalized contrasts between the city and the country have allowed. The ways in which people understood and acted out the idea of private and public spaces were also affected by the rapidly changing London scenes. By the end of the 18th century, new spaces such as coffee houses, assembly rooms, and the pleasure gardens created new and multiple middle-class public spheres, each with its own rules of entry and engagement. These new sites of leisure were shaped by an expanding marketplace and transformations in domestic life. The domestic sphere developed an intimate geography, with the household as social and material space. A culture of politeness and virtue emerged with an intricate topography (Ogborn and Withers 9-11). The London streets with their increased foot traffic required new standards of civility and etiquette, a politeness that might be associated with the refining influence of female sensibility (Robinson 17). The city street scene became a new geography where conduct was redefined and gendered. "Geography" in the Georgian era, as Robert Mayhew observes, was a form of knowledge, a scale of enquiry, its discussions involving the entire globe (196). All the world of Georgian London was a stage, and the city was a theatricalized space as imaginary and as spectacular as the drama in which it is represented. In the London represented in late Georgian comedy, where one performs social and professional activities is a marker of class, an economic distinction that was key to woman's role in the public sphere. Class is geographically specific, with certain sites or theatricalized spaces being linked to bourgeois identity performances. According to Nicholas Rogers, while the middling class at the end of the 18th century defied precise sociological definition, its upper end included merchant princes and wealthy bankers of London, and its lower end encompassed the master-craftsmen and yeoman farmers. The middling class was independent from both government and aristocratic domination (162). While class escapes precise sociological definition, however, it could be marked by geography within the capital. Class is indicated, for example, in Frances Burney's 1800-1802 comedy A Busy Day, or An Arrival, from India by its setting in the West End of London. While the City, an area of one square mile within the walls first built by the Romans, was the center of trade and finance, its inhabitants, "cits" or cockneys were the tradespeople in service to the genteel bourgeoisie. The Watts family of the play are resident cits, and the "other" against which the Tylneys can perform their West End superiority. Eliza Watts registers her disorientation in London when she tells a hotel waiter at the very beginning of the play: "Pray where are we now? …