Catherine Talbot

Artist Info

Catherine TalbotBerkshire, 1721 - 1770, London

LC name authority rec. nn85067429

LC Heading: Talbot, Catherine, 1721-1770

Biography:

Talbot, Catherine (1721–1770), author and scholar, was born on 21 May 1721 in Berkshire, the posthumous and only child of Edward Talbot (1690/91–1720), archdeacon of Berkshire and preacher of the Rolls, and his wife, Mary (c.1691–1784), daughter of George Martin, prebendary of Lincoln. Although both parents came from ecclesiastical families, the Talbots were the more eminent. Catherine Talbot's grandfather, William Talbot (1659–1730), was bishop of Durham. Her uncle, Charles Talbot (bap. 1685, d. 1737), was lord chancellor. Five months before her birth, Catherine Talbot's father died of smallpox on 9 December 1720, at the age of twenty-nine. He left few resources, but Catherine was in a measure adopted by his close friend Thomas Secker, a distinguished scholar and cleric, who had benefited from the Talbot family's preferment. In 1725 Secker married a friend of Mary Talbot, Catherine Benson (d. 1748), with whom Mary had lived since her husband's death; the Seckers offered their home at Houghton-le-Spring, Durham, to the mother and her four-year-old daughter. Mrs Talbot and Catherine remained with the Seckers, who were childless, until Thomas Secker died in 1768. From 1737 they resided in the summer in the bishop's palace in Cuddesdon, near Oxford, and in the winter at the deanery of St Paul's. In 1758, when Secker was made archbishop of Canterbury, they moved to Lambeth Palace. Secker provided the Talbots with an allowance, and they inherited £13,000 in the 3 per cent annuities from his estate.

Within the Secker household Talbot received a liberal education, learning classical, English, French, and Italian literatures, as well as history, scripture, drawing, painting, music, and astronomy, and she benefited from the intellectual preoccupations of Secker, his associates, and family friends. She was encouraged in her friendships, talents, and pleasures, and was indeed viewed as a delightful prodigy, whose letters and verses were circulated. In 1729 Thomas Rundle wrote a letter praising the eight-year-old girl, and anonymous poems celebrating her beauty and wit appeared when she visited Bath as a young adolescent in the 1730s. Even as late as 1753 the duchess of Somerset remarked on Talbot's childhood reputation. By the age of twenty-four, though, Talbot had come to abhor such praise and recognition, protesting her ‘hatred to this detestable fame’, and she dreaded being characterized as a pretentious literary lady—‘a Phoebe Clinkett’ (Beds. & Luton ARS, Lucas MSS, L 31/106). This fear of publicity no doubt contributed to her refusal to publish any but a few papers during her lifetime. At the same time she was gratified that her girlhood friends Jemima Campbell (later Marchioness Grey) and Mary Robinson encouraged and celebrated her scholarship and writings, just as she was bolstered by the admiration of other bluestocking friends such as Elizabeth Carter, her confidante and literary ally from 1741 until her death, and, in the early 1750s, by the literary patron and woman of letters, the duchess of Somerset.

Talbot was subject to a host of inhibitions and constraints that may also have contributed to her reluctance to publish. It would appear that she deferred to Secker's powerful personality and public stature. Moreover, celibacy was not her choice, but was determined by social convention as well as her relative poverty. In the early 1740s she pined for an unattainable and unidentified young man; in 1752 her family undertook unsuccessful negotiations to arrange a marriage with a man she never met; in 1758 she refused a proposal of marriage to George Berkeley on the grounds that the friends of neither would approve. When Berkeley married in 1761, she was deeply grieved, as her poetry of the subsequent period indicates. Meanwhile, for more than a decade before Secker's death in 1768, she carried out the quotidian business of being his housekeeper, personal secretary, and companion. Her journal and letters communicate a morbid anxiety about her usefulness, and record an arduous, self-imposed regime that included the duties of housekeeper and hostess, catechizer of servants, and supervisor of children, as well as the pursuit of scholarship. She engaged in agonizing introspection, and was afflicted with self-loathing. Occasionally, she voices a sardonic recognition of the narrow range of choices available to her.

Although Talbot could not after 1750 be persuaded to publish or even to circulate her work except among her closest friends, she herself generously advised authors and edited private and commercial works, most notably Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Richardson called her ‘the Queen of all the ladies I venerate’ (Eaves and Kimpel, 364). Talbot also urged, encouraged, and assisted Elizabeth Carter in her translation of Epictetus, and she herself never stopped writing. In the 1760s she even taught herself German, so as to be able to read Salomon Gessner's The Death of Abel in the original.

Talbot died from cancer on 9 January 1770 at her home in Lower Grosvenor Street, London. Catherine's mother bestowed on Elizabeth Carter her daughter's manuscripts, which included essays and occasional pieces recorded in ‘the green book’ often referred to in Catherine's correspondence (Series of Letters, 342). In the months following, Carter published her friend's Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week, a work of practical theology. Thirty-five separate editions and reprints were published between 1770 and 1861. Written as a series of homilies, the text is designed to help prepare the reader to take holy communion on Sunday morning. This work, together with her Essays on Various Subjects (1772; also published by Carter), which includes essays, dialogues, pastorals, allegories, occasional thoughts, prose poems, a children's story, and poetry, marks Talbot as an early rational moralist. Although new editions of her works continued to be published, aside from the posthumous praise of Susannah Duncombe's ‘Sketch of the character of the author’ (1772), Mary Scott's verses in The Female Advocate: a Poem (1774), and information included in biographies of Secker, little discussion of her life and works occurred until the 1790s. Talbot was then constructed as devout, self-effacing, and effortlessly, yet laudably, accomplished. This unproblematic identity was amplified and idealized over the following years when previously unpublished letters and occasional poems appeared within the context of biographies and anecdotes about various men of her acquaintance. By the end of the next decade, after Montagu Pennington's publication of the correspondence between Talbot and Carter, the significance of Talbot's female friendships was affirmed, but her standing as a woman to be revered as a model of femininity was diminished. Her formal literary work came to be viewed as an effect of Secker's paternal influence over her innate feminine characteristics. While subsequent nineteenth-century biographers and bibliographers merely repeated or emphasized aspects of Pennington's account, some twentieth-century commentators viewed Talbot's nineteenth-century reputation as justifying her eventual obscurity. Her work is criticized as insipid. Reynolds found ‘Miss Talbot's moralizings pale and anemic’ (Reynolds, 243). Similarly, critics after the mid-twentieth century have tended to read her letters with interest, but to dismiss her books as arid and conventional. Other literary historians ignore her writing altogether, to note her as only an extra among literary actors such as Richardson. Myers, however, examined both the context and the content of Talbot's work, and a feminist historicist reading of Talbot's life and work does indeed explain the popularity of her posthumous publications.

Talbot's early work of the 1740s in the Athenian Letters is presented in a sexless style, with a sober narrative voice. Nevertheless, by addressing matters of practical religious concern rather than abstract theological matters, and in seeking to direct the reformation of masculine conduct while arguing for the dignity of female celibacy, she constructs a specifically female voice within a male text and social universe. Later work similarly synthesizes learning, politeness, and morality. During the 1750s Talbot's promotion of piety in her Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week, in a paper contributed to The Rambler, and in essays and occasional writings, gains authority from their dispassionate tone and sense of immediate purposefulness.

A substantial proportion of Talbot's work is directed to women and their concerns about ethics, economy, manners, and learning. Personal letters to and about the young reveal the wit, charm, and care Talbot invested in the education of girls especially. Her essays, allegories, pastorals, imitations, and children's story reflect a keen sense of audience, as she seeks to educate and to persuade by means of direct language and use of character. By this means, she addresses the emerging role of middle-class women as teachers. Talbot's poems, like many of her letters to Carter and Berkeley, provide particular insights into the difficulty of achieving female dignity. The early poems typically welcome reconciliation with ‘the real state of things’ (C. Talbot, Essays on Various Subjects, 1772, 160). Employing classical allusion and conventional sentiment, the poetry attains formal resolution. By contrast, later poems, written after she had renounced her beloved, voice loss through a variety of forms and allusions, but each poem is a lament testifying to the cost of female honour. However, resignation to social codes does not, as her writings as a whole demonstrate, constitute compliance with an imposed identity. Talbot's work resists the notion of women's dependence and constraint and instead emphasizes the female capacity for individual development.

Rhoda Zuk

Sources E. Berkeley, ‘A singular tale of love in high life’, GM, 1st ser., 66 (1796), 631–2 · S. Burder, Memoirs of eminently pious women, of the British empire, new edn, 3 (1815), 88–93 · W. Butler, ‘Some account of Miss Catherine Talbot’, Memoirs of Mark Hildesley (1799), 578, 583 · J. Campbell, later Marchioness Grey, Beds. & Luton ARS, Lucas MSS, L30/21/3–10; L30/21/3/12 · A series of letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot ... to which are added, letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, ed. M. Pennington, 2 vols. (1808), 342 · S. D. [S. Duncombe], ‘A sketch of the character of the author of “Reflections on the seven days of the week” and “Essays on various subjects”, by a lady’, GM, 1st ser., 42 (1772), 257 · T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: a biography (1971), 364 · A. K. Elwood, Memoirs of the literary ladies of England (1842), 127–43 · L. Faderman, Surpassing the love of men: romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present (1981) · J. Hamilton, ‘Advertisement’, Angelica's ladies library, or, Parents and guardians present (1794) · M. Heathcote, Beds. & Luton ARS, Lucas MSS, L30/21/4/6 [photostat, LPL, Arch P/A Secker, bundle 25] · The autobiography of Thomas Secker, archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. S. Macauley and R. W. Greaves (1988), 9, 26, 29, 32, 43 · S. Harcstark Myers, The bluestocking circle: women, friendship, and the life of the mind in eighteenth-century England (1990) · Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 6.204–7 · ‘Account of the life of Mrs. Catharine Talbot’, The works of the late Miss Catharine Talbot, ed. M. Pennington, 7th edn (1809), vii–xxxvi · M. Pennington, Memoirs of Mrs. Carter (1808) · B. Porteous, ‘A review of the life and character of Archbishop Secker’, in T. Secker, Sermons on several subjects, ed. B. Porteous and G. Stinton, 1 (1770), i–xcvii · M. Reynolds, The learned lady in England, 1650–1760 (1920), 243–6 · M. Scott, The female advocate: a poem, occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's ‘Feminiad’ (1774), lines 401–6 · duchess of Somerset, BL, Add. MS 19689, fols. 11–12 · journal at Wrest, Beds. & Luton ARS, Lucas MSS, L31/106 · journals, BL, Add. MS 46688, fols. 15–37; Add. MS 46690, fols. 1–107 · letters to Miss Campbell, later Marchioness Grey, and Lady Mary Grey, BL, Add. MS 4291 [copies] · letters to George, Anne, and Elizabeth Berkeley, BL, Berkeley MSS, Add. MSS 39311, 39312, 39316 · letters, LPL, MSS 1719 ff., 1349 · verses, BL, Add. MS 39316, fols. 41–56 · E. R. Wheeler, Famous blue-stockings (1910) · P. C. Yorke, The life and correspondence of Philip Yorke, earl of Hardwicke, 1 (1913), 207–8 · J. Todd, ed., A dictionary of British and American women writers, 1660–1800 (1984)

Archives Beds. & Luton ARS, journal at Wrest, Lucas MSS, L31/106 · Beds. & Luton ARS, corresp., L30/21 · BL, corresp., verses, and journals, Add. MSS 4291, 46688–46690; 39311–39312 :: BL, letters to George, Anne, and Elizabeth Berkeley, Add. MSS 39311, 39312, 39316 · BL, letters to Miss Campbell, and Lady Mary Grey, Add. MS 4291 [copies] · BL, ‘Reflections on the seven days of the week’, 1754, Add. MS 46689; [rev. copy] · LPL, letters, MSS 1719, 1349

Likenesses C. Heath, engraving, BM · C. Heath, stipple, BM, NPG; repro. in The works of the late Miss Catherine Talbot (1812)

Wealth at death negligible: Pennington, Memoirs, 281; ‘Account of the life of Mrs. Catharine Talbot’; Autobiography of Thomas Secker, ed. Macauley and Greaves, 32; GM, 38 (Oct 1768), 452; photostat, LPL, Arch P/A Secker, bundle 25

Rhoda Zuk, ‘Talbot, Catherine (1721–1770)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/26921, accessed 12 Nov 2015]