Catharine Macaulay

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Standard Name: Macaulay, Catharine
Birth Name: Catharine Sawbridge
Married Name: Catharine Macaulay
Married Name: Catharine Graham
Self-constructed Name: Catharine Macaulay Graham
Used Form: Mrs Macauly
CM is best known as a radical historian (the only historian of England from a republican point of view for almost two centuries after she wrote). The eight volumes of her History of England took her another twenty years of work from the publication of the first volume in 1763, and ran to 3,483 quarto pages.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press.
26
She also wrote memorable pamphlets on political and other topics, and treatises on theology and gender politics.
Portrait of Catharine Macaulay by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1776. Pine had already done a full-length painting which renders Macaulay's head and shoulders very similarly, but clearly shows her dressed as a Roman matron with the sash of a Roman senator. (The dress was blue and the sash purple; now the colours are reversed.) Macaulay, still rests an arm on a volume of her monumental "History of England", but now within a painted oval, without the classical backdrop of the larger, more political picture. There she

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Wealth and Poverty Anne Marsh
Their move back to England was facilitated by a legacy of £5,000 from Anne's father.
Heath-Caldwell, J. J. “Letters, References and Notes (1780-1874), Relating to James Caldwell and Anne Marsh (Marsh-Caldwell)”. Ancestors and Relatives of JJ Heath-Caldwell.
1839-1842
They bought the estate the previous year for £13,000 (including standing timber worth £3,280). AM sold the house, estate...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susanna Haswell Rowson
Rowson's Outline of Universal History includes a defence of history as a study for young women. It is, she writes, only some persons of the opposite sex who fail to realise that history is the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Seymour Montague
The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier , and eleven British...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Carter
Poems printed here include some which are movingly personal. To the Rev. Dr. Carter thanks her father for his unusual interpretation of the paternal role: Ne'er did thy voice assume a master's pow'r, ....
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Scott
MS brings her list up to date with significant women writers who have published since the appearance of The Feminead. Her information is not perfect—she credits Anna Williams with some works actually written by...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Isabella Spence
The title-page quotes Burns and Scott . The preface remarks that books based on female impressions of national manners and moral character have succeeded in the past.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Sketches of the Present Manners, Customs, and Scenery of Scotland. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
prelims iv
The book is again made up...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Hays
She signals her intellectual seriousness by admiring accounts of Catharine Cockburn (formerly Trotter)
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
66
and of Catharine Macaulay ; she emphasises Macaulay's concern with the moral problem of oppression and inequity, and her desire that...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
For this her great support and encouragement was her brother (as he, rather than her husband , continued to be for her later publications). After he left home to pursue his studies, she sent him...
Textual Production Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
She wrote it before the death of Catharine Macaulay , though it appeared afterwards. Lucy Aikin said she wrote it at about fifteen, which exaggerates her youth by only a year.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Her...
Textual Production Mercy Otis Warren
MOW wrote a preface for Catharine Macaulay 's polemic Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke , on the Revolution in France (published at London in late 1790). She re-issued her preface...
Textual Production Lucy Hutchinson
LH wrote so that her children might learn about their father's life; she was also mindful of her husband's dying injunction to her to shew her selfe in this occasion a good christian, and above...
Textual Features Hannah More
HM writes her Hints in full political consciousness of the likelihood that she is trying to shape a future ruler. Her claim to have remained uninfluenced by Wollstonecraft or Catharine Macaulay (whom she called patriotic...
Textual Features Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare and Milton , as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton and Helen Maria Williams ...

Timeline

12 June 1638: By the thinnest margin of 7-5, the Court...

National or international item

12 June 1638

By the thinnest margin of 7-5, the Court of the Exchequer ruled in favour of King Charles I and against John Hampden on the latter's defiant refusal to pay ship-money, establishing one of the most...

1 February 1642: London women petitioned the House of Commons...

National or international item

1 February 1642

London women petitioned the House of Commons for peace; a second petition followed three days later.

23 April 1649: London women brought the Petition of divers...

Building item

23 April 1649

London women brought the Petition of divers wel-affected women before the House of Commons demanding the release of John Lilburne and other Levellers .

1 May 1649: Following the imprisonment of John Lilburne...

National or international item

1 May 1649

Following the imprisonment of John Lilburne and others, the Levellers issued An Agreement of the Free People of England, which Catharine Macaulay later judged their most important text.

21 May 1662: Charles II married Catherine of Braganza...

National or international item

21 May 1662

Charles II married Catherine of Braganza (daughter of the king of Portugal) in two ceremonies: one secret and Catholic, one Anglican.

15 January 1759: The first reading room of the British Museum...

National or international item

15 January 1759

The first reading room of the British Museum was opened.

1766: The Annual Register printed a Humorous Proposal...

Building item

1766

The Annual Register printed a Humorous Proposal for a Female Administration by Jacobina Henriques, proposing that the tired government and constitution would be revivified by women in public office.

February 1768: James Boswell published his composite work...

Writing climate item

February 1768

James Boswell published his composite work on the Corsican liberation struggle: An Account of Corsica; the Journal of a Tour to that Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli.

4 February-13 April 1769: Disputes occurred over John Wilkes's right...

National or international item

4 February-13 April 1769

Disputes occurred over John Wilkes 's right to take his seat in the House of Commons , from which he had been expelled for the first time in 1764.

1777: Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses...

Women writers item

1777

Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (or Portraits in the Character of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo) for Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778...

2 July 1781: At the Haymarket Theatre the final performance...

Building item

2 July 1781

At the Haymarket Theatre the final performance was given of The Genius of Nonsense, a play which mocked James Graham , health-and-sex pundit, as the Emperor of Quacks.

1783: James Graham announced in the Public Advertiser...

Building item

1783

James Graham announced in the Public Advertiser his intention of prosecuting the Rambler's Magazine (which was known for pornography) for printing his Lecture on Generation (i.e. procreation).

1785: Dialogues Concerning the Ladies, a celebration...

Women writers item

1785

Dialogues Concerning the Ladies, a celebration of famous women, was anonymously published; it borrows from Ballard 's Memoirs of Eminent Ladies.

Late 1790: William Holland published a print of Burke...

National or international item

Late 1790

William Holland published a print of Burke running the gauntlet of enemies with whips: women as well as men.

1804: The publisher George, George, and John Robinson,...

Writing climate item

1804

The publisher George, George, and John Robinson , whose list of women writers had been distinguished, went bankrupt.

Texts

Macaulay, Catharine. A Modest Plea for the Property of Copy Right. R. Cruttwell, 1774.
Macaulay, Catharine. A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth. A. Hamilton, Jr., 1783.
Macaulay, Catharine. An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the present Important Crisis of Affairs. R. Cruttwell, 1775.
Macaulay, Catharine. Histoire d’Angleterre. Translator Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel, Chez Gattey, 1792.
Macaulay, Catharine. Letters on Education. Dilly, 1790.
Macaulay, Catharine. Loose Remarks on Certain Positions. T. Davies, T. Cadell, and others, 1767.
Macaulay, Catharine. Observations on a Pamphlet. Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770.
Macaulay, Catharine. Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France. C. Dilly, 1790.
Macaulay, Catharine. The History of England. J. Nourse and others, 1783.
Macaulay, Catharine. The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time. R. Cruttwell, 1778.