Not the least among the Bluestockings' merits was the fact that by the example some of them gave they accustomed the British public to seeing females engaged in different occupations which before had been the exclusive work of men. Where ladies of such a strong sense of propriety did not shrink from appearing before the public as authors, and even pseudonyms were often thought unnecessary, the domain of literature ceased to be the exclusive property of men. Strangely enough, the notion that female knowledge should be carefully concealed, originating in Molière's Femmes Savantes and prevailing all through the 17th and 18th centuries in both literatures until Mary Wollstonecraft openly disregarded it, was implicitly obeyed by the Bluestockings.
Not all the Bluestocking ladies were authors; Mrs. Vesey for instance, probably the most loveable among the hostesses, who understood better than any of her rivals the art of making her guests comfortable, has left us no literary legacy. Of the others, Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Boscawen concentrated their literary energies chiefly upon their correspondence, while Mrs. Carter's clever translation of Epictetus which elicited the unstinted praise of Mr. Long, a later translator, who repeatedly, when in doubt, consulted her text, is of no importance to her sex. The principal literary contributions to the subject of feminism were made by three Bluestockings: Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Hannah More, the nature of whose contributions corresponds closely with their respective characters.
The natural bias of Elizabeth Robinson's character was strengthened by the circumstances of her education. In her early youth she was often at Cambridge, where her grandmother's second husband, Dr. Conyers Middleton, took great delight in her keenness of understanding, and often kept her in the room while he was conversing with his visitors, among whom were the greatest philosophers and scholars of the day. Her father was also amused at the child's precocity and they used to have frequent "brain cudgellings", until he became painfully aware that he was no longer a match for his clever daughter. She was a furious letter-writer, which occupation, if it sharpened her wit, also developed in her that insatiable intellectual vanity which afterwards became her ruling passion, distinguished her as a Bluestocking from her more modest rivals and prevented her from being as universally liked as a Mrs. Vesey. Her biographer Mr. Huchon says that "she was all mind, if not all soul", and was more respected than loved. Sentimentality was not among her weaknesses, her sound practical sense dictated both to herself and to others. She strongly opposed the love-match which her ward Miss Dorothea Gregory—one of the daughters to whom the well-known physician of that name addressed his legacy of advice—asked her permission to make, and the ubiquitous Fanny Burney writes that Mrs. Montagu once asked her, "if she should write a play, to let her know of it", which vexed Fanny's "second Daddy", Mr. Crisp, as it "implied interference". Her own marriage (1742) was purely a "marriage de raison", the husband being considerably older, and a man of great wealth. Mrs. Chapone afterwards called her with reason "an ignoramus in love", which did not in this case prevent the marriage from being fairly happy.
Neither was Mrs. Montagu free from affectation. Much-praised simplicity and humility were not among her virtues, and no flattery seems to have been too gross for her to accept. Lady Louisa Stuart—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's granddaughter, to whom we are indebted for some humorous pictures of Bluestocking society—describes her as thoroughly satisfied with herself. Her speech is described as affected, although ready wit can scarcely be denied her. Her reply on being informed that Voltaire, Shakespeare's translator, had boasted of having been the first Frenchman to find "quelques perles dans son fumier": "c'est donc un fumier qui a fertilisé une terre bien ingrate" is a good specimen both of her proficiency in the French language and of her quickness of repartee. However, she often descended from the heights of rhetoric, and her affectation of speech seems to have been a weakness into which she was occasionally betrayed by a momentary lapse of her fine judgment. Speaking of Mr. Gray she once said: "I think he is the first poet of my age; but if he comes to my fireside, I will teach him not only to speak prose, but to talk nonsense, if occasion be."
She loved to make a display of her learning, and Johnson said of her that "she diffused more knowledge in her conversation than any women he knew." At the same time she criticised others freely, which procured her many enemies. Mr. Crisp thought her "a vain, empty, conceited pretender, and little else"; Wraxall judged that "there was nothing feminine about her"; and an essay by Cumberland in the Observer of 1785 describes the "Feast of Reason" at Mrs. Montagu's house in Portman Square, where the lady herself is satirised under the name of "Vanessa". It describes her as stimulated to charity, affability and hospitality exclusively by the dictates of inordinate vanity, and even accuses her of bribing her critics: "Authors were fee'd for dedications, and players patronised on benefit nights".
Her charity was, indeed, of a condescending kind. Thus her annual feast to the chimney-sweeps on May day rather smacks of the doctrine of Good Works pointing the way to Salvation, and to the working people in her coal-mines she was a dutiful but immeasurably superior patroness. In a few isolated cases, however, there were flashes of real kindness. She gave unstinted financial support to Mrs. Williams, the blind poetess whose lot had aroused Johnson's compassion, and her letter of condolence to Mrs. Delany on the occasion of the death of their mutual friend the Duchess of Portland has the genuine ring of grief and sympathy. It tries to find solace in considerations of eternity. Mrs. Montagu's religious views were strict, and religious worship was a serious matter with her. However, her strong individuality would not suffer her to bow her intellect before that of any man. Beyond the admitted fact that "God is the loving father of all", she has only Hope, but no definite knowledge of the certainty of a future state.
Such was the character of the lady whom Johnson called "Queen of the Blues", and Fanny Burney "our sex's glory". The incident which had a determining influence on her further life was the death of her only child. Grief of that kind may be to some extent drowned in religion or in social intercourse, and Mrs. Montagu tried both. She emphatically believed in the social state as productive of good through the friction of minds. Thus it came about that in the middle of the century—the exact date is nowhere given, which makes it difficult to decide whether Mrs. Montagu, or Mrs. Vesey, or Miss Frances Reynolds had the right to consider herself the first Bluestocking hostess,—Mrs. Montagu opened her salon in Hill Street, where she entertained a great number of guests of the most widely different description, her rooms being often filled from eleven in the morning till eleven at night.
The best descriptions of Mrs. Montagu's parties are to be found in Hannah More's correspondence and in Mme du Bocage's "Letters on England, Holland and Italy." The latter visited England at a time when Mrs. Montagu's breakfasts were all the fashion, served "in a closet lined with painted paper of Pekin and furnished with the choicest movables of China", the so-called Chinese Room, recalling the splendours of the "Chambre bleue" of the marquise de Rambouillet. It was probably at Mrs. Montagu's and at Mrs. Thrale's that Dr. Johnson chiefly indulged in his tea-orgies, and Mme Du Bocage describes his hostess as pouring out her delicious tea, attired in a white apron and a large straw hat. On the whole the English ladies paid more attention to gastric delights than their French sisters, and in Mrs. Montagu's case her well-provided table often relieved her from the wearisome duty of keeping up the flow of conversation. In this lay the characteristic difference between Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey. The latter wanted her guests to forget her and to consult their own inclinations in the forming of groups of conversation, contenting herself with listening to her literary lions; Mrs. Montagu on the other hand, to quote Fanny Burney, "cared not a fig, as long as she spoke herself". That her intellectual queenship involved the duty of maintaining conversation at a high pitch seems to have considerably worried her upon occasions.
The Bluestocking hostesses kept a great variety of hours. In the last decades of the century late teas were in vogue, but the usual entertainments were breakfasts and dinners, in which there was a great variety. We read of Mrs. Garrick's dinner parties to a select company of eight chosen friends, among whom Hannah More was proud to find herself, and according to Horace Walpole Mrs. Montagu's breakfasts at her house in Portman Square sometimes included seven hundred guests, from royalty downwards. To this magnificent abode she removed in 1781, six years after the death of her husband. She spared no cost in fitting it up in the most gorgeous fashion, and although Walpole thought her decorations in good taste, one cannot help feeling doubts as to the room with the feather hangings of which Cowper wrote in 1788 that "the birds put off their every hue, to dress a room for Montagu." The famous "Room of the Cupidons" made her a little ridiculous in the eyes of the more sober-minded ladies, one of whom (Mrs. Delany) in a letter refers somewhat spitefully to "her age".
There are no references to any of Mrs. Montagu's parties taking place out of doors, but some of the minor hostesses would sometimes send out invitations to tea, followed by a walk in the Park or fields. This custom was perhaps an imitation of the habits prevailing among Rambouillet-circles. Neither do we find anywhere mention of stated days, such as were kept by the French hostesses, although Sundays were objected to by some of the more orthodox.