Materials for thy future use.
Such praise of serious conversation enables us to guess at the preparation which earnest souls made for the conversazioni in which they hoped to shine. To Lady Louisa Stuart the group at Mrs. Montagu’s had about it a suspicion of acting before an audience. ‘If you had good luck,’ she says, ‘you might not only be greatly amused at Mrs. Montagu’s, but carry away much that was well worth remembering. But then, also, the circular form is not less convenient to prosers and people who love to hear themselves talk, so you might, on the contrary, come in for the most tiresome dissertations, the dullest long stories, the flattest jokes anywhere to be found.’[207] Lyttelton himself gave similar testimony. Fanny Burney’s words seem to show that the bluestockings were occasionally bored with themselves: ‘I respect and esteem them,’ she writes in April 1784, ‘but they require an exertion to which I am not always inclined.’ There is, moreover, the indirect evidence afforded by Boswell. The greatest judge of conversation then living had been repeatedly in the presence of the bluestockings; he never wearied of expressing his admiration for them; he had watched them swarming about his master; he had taken the trouble to investigate the origin of their society; but he never thought it worth while to record their talk.
Much of the fame of the bluestockings was due to the name by which they had come to be known. It caught the public attention quickly, and has remained a useful addition to the English vocabulary. The word bluestocking presents an interesting but perhaps insoluble problem in etymology, or rather in slang. Various explanations of the term exist, but, though they are not irreconcilable, they are not wholly satisfactory. It would seem as though a source ought to be found in seventeenth century France or sixteenth century Italy[208]; but none has yet come to light. Mills in his History of Chivalry[209] (1825) traces the word back to the Society ‘de la Calza,’ founded in Venice in the year 1400. The society lasted till 1590, when, he continues, ‘the rejected title’—by which presumably he means calza turchina, though he nowhere mentions it—‘crossed the Alps, and found a congenial soil in the flippancy and literary triflings of Parisian society.... It diverged from France to England.’ No evidence for the remarkable migrations of this title is adduced by Mills. The words bas bleu are unknown to French lexicographers save as a translation of the English bluestocking;[210] so that Mills’s statements respecting the peregrinations of the term seem to be the result of his own imagination.[211]
On the other hand, when we turn to English literature, we find that the term was used as early as the seventeenth century. The first occurrence of it noted by Murray, in the New English Dictionary, is in Bramston’s Autobiography (1683), in reference to the Little Parliament of 1653: ‘That Blew-stocking Parliament.’ It is here plainly used as a sneer at the unostentatious dress of the Puritans, who eschewed silk stockings. Reference to coarse or ugly stockings had been a well-known form of abuse for years. Prince Hal makes use of a similar term, ‘puke-stocking’—puke being a kind of bluish-black woollen, not worn by courtiers—in sneering at the keeper of the Boar’s Head tavern.[212] The word bluestocking, even after its application to literary ladies, retained something of a derogatory flavour; it was considered by some a term of reproach,[213] and was bitterly resented.
Just when the term was first applied to literary ladies, it is difficult to say;[214] the period of its great popularity was in the decade of the 80’s. By that time it had caught the attention and roused the curiosity of Boswell, who gives the following explanation of it:
About this time [1781] it was much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men, animated by a desire to please. These societies were denominated Blue-stocking Clubs, the origin of which title being little known, it may be worth while to relate it. One of the most eminent members of those societies, when they first commenced, was Mr. Stillingfleet, whose dress was remarkably grave, and in particular it was observed, that he wore blue stockings. Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss that it used to be said, ‘We can do nothing without the blue stockings’ and thus by degrees the title was established.[215]
Forbes, in his Life of Beattie, throws new light on the matter:
Mr. Stillingfleet, being somewhat of an humourist in his habits and manners, and a little negligent in his dress, literally wore grey stockings, from which circumstance, Admiral Boscawen used, by way of pleasantry, to call them the ‘Blue-Stocking Society,’ as if to indicate that when these brilliant friends met, it was not for the purpose of forming a dressed assembly. A foreigner of distinction, hearing the expression, translated it literally, ‘Bas Bleu,’ by which these meetings came to be afterwards distinguished.[216]
Madame D’Arblay, writing in 1832, asserted that it was Mrs. Vesey who first encouraged Stillingfleet to appear in his homely dress; ‘“Pho, pho,” cried she ...“don’t mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!”’[217] and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting this additional detail. It is at least not inconsistent with the facts already cited.