[133] The use of "Miss" and "Mrs." between 1660 and 1750, and even later, is often confusing. The use of "Mrs." for all reputable persons of the female sex, even children, prevailed during the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century. On the tombstone of Milton's daughter, a child under six months we read, "1657. Mar. 20. Mrs. Kathern Milton." (Notes and Queries, 7th Series, vol. VII, p. 494.) A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Written by a Young Gentlewoman, Miss A. W. (1651, 2d edition, 1690), is a striking exception. There was sometimes a distinction between the married and the unmarried in that the latter had the Christian name after the "Mrs." as when Evelyn speaks of "Mrs. Margaret Blagge," but this custom was by no means invariable. The prefix "Miss" began soon after the Restoration to be used as a term of reproach. January 9, 1662, Evelyn says of Roxalana, "She being taken to be ye Earl of Oxford's Misse (as at this time they began to call lewd women)." In 1669 Flecknoe, in Epigrams of All Sorts, wrote a poem to Mary Davis, the King's mistress, under the title "To Miss Davis." In 1675 appeared "The 'Miss' displayed; with all her Wheadling Arts and circumventions, By the Author of the First Part of the 'English Rogue.'" In 1683, in Miss Barber's Poems, was a poem entitled "To the Town Miss," and in one of her novels (about 1715) she speaks of the "Town Miss" who pretends to modesty. In 1690 we find the Dutch Whore, or, the Miss of Amsterdam.
"Miss" in a reputable sense belonged to very young girls. In 1675 Lady Russell speaks of her daughter Rachel, who was then four years old, as "our Miss." When the little girl is thirteen her grandfather calls her "Mrs. Rachel." (Lady Russell's Letters, vol. I, pp. 14, 139.) In 1723, in The Gentleman Instructed, we read "As soon as Reason begins to sparkle, Miss is led to the drawing-room." The proper age for "Miss" seems a little advanced in two quotations made by Mr. Aitkin (Life of Steele, vol. I, p. 162) from Lillie's Original and Genuine Letters sent to the Tatler and Spectator. One young lady says: "Being arrived at sixteen I have left the boarding-school, and now having assumed the title of Madam instead of Miss am come home." A second quotation seems to indicate a still further extension of the proper age for Miss; "Let no woman after the known age of twenty-one presume to admit of her being called Miss unless she can fairly prove she is not out of her sampler."
Actresses were usually called "Mrs." in the bills. The first use of "Miss" that I can find is in 1685 in D'Urfey's Commonwealth of Women, where a part was played by "Miss Nanny" (Genest: Some Account of the English Stage, vol. I, p. 443). In D'Urfey's Don Quixote Altesidora was played by "Miss Cross." Genest (vol. II, p. 70) says: "She was called Miss because she was quite a girl ... she was afterwards called Mrs. Cross ... the case was the same with several other actresses—Cibber in The Lady's Last Stake calls two of the female characters Miss Notable and Mrs. Conquest, tho' they are both unmarried—but one is a girl and the other a woman." "Miss Cross" was "Mrs." on the bills within a year. "Miss Younger" came into the house at seven years old. Later she became "Mrs. Younger." So with Miss Mountfort, Miss Santlow, Miss Sherburn, Miss Booth, Miss Rogers, and other young actresses who entered the theatrical profession between 1700-1715.
By 1750 "Miss" for unmarried women is pretty well established. The list of subscribers to Ballard's Memoirs (1752) contains many ladies called "Miss." The Connoisseur, November 25, 1754, said: "Every unmarried woman is now called 'Miss.'" But "Mrs." for reputable unmarried women beyond girlhood was occasionally used through the century. Elizabeth Carter was always "Mrs. Carter," while her friend Catharine Talbot, about the same age, was "Miss Talbot." In Humphrey Clinker (1771) Tabitha Bramble, though a spinster, is "Mrs." Sir Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie "Mrs." in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Notes and Queries (7th Series, vol. VII, pp. 104-256) calls attention to the fact that as late as 1889 "Mrs." was in many places considered the correct title for upper-class unmarried female servants.
[134] Evelyn, John: Life of Mrs. Godolphin (ed. Edward William Harcourt of Nuneham Park), p. 10.
[135] Ibid., p. 24.
[136] Evelyn, John: Life of Mrs. Godolphin, p. 8.
[137] Ibid., p. 184.
[138] Evelyn, John: Life of Mrs. Godolphin, p. 215.
[139] Fitzgerald: History of the English Stage, vol. I, pp. 60-62.