Lady Travelers: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Remember my unalterable maxim, where we love we always have something to say; consequently my pen never tires.
-A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her daughter.
{Rotterdam, 1761.}
A weary and unusually dressed woman gives two large, leatherbound albums filled with handwritten pages to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden. I am dragging my ragged remnant of life back to England,1 she says, dispose of these however you see fit…}
The woman was returning to her homeland after receiving news of her husband’s death. She hadn’t seen him for 22 years - not since moving to the Continent in 1739 in pursuit of a dashing and much younger Italian man. But she had children in England, and things to take care of.
She was 72 years old, and dying of breast cancer.
Mary Pierrepont was 23 years old when she married the 34-year-old politician Edward Wortley Montagu. Eloped, actually, as her father was set on having Mary wed to the unfortunately-named Clotworthy Skeffington, 4th Viscount Massereene. The young Mary wasn’t sure that she was in love with Edward, but she did know that she didn’t want to marry Clotworthy. (Can you blame her?) And so, while negotiations between the viscount and Mary’s father dragged on, she agreed in secret to marry Edward Wortley Montagu, warning him in a letter, “I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don't know whether I can love…”
Mary had been born into nobility—her father was Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, and her mother was the daughter of the Earl of Denby—she was raised with every privilege the world had to offer.
Except education. Her encouraging mother and grandmother had both died by the time Mary was eight years old, leaving her in the care of her father. Evelyn Pierrepont didn’t believe that the education of his daughters was anything he really needed to be bothered with, and so Mary and her sisters were left to a series of governesses…and to their own devices.
Not a young girl to be discouraged, Mary took her education upon herself at the age of 12, devouring books from her father’s vast library and teaching herself to read Latin and later Greek. By 14, she was composing poems and working on a novel. By 23, she was an exceptionally well-read woman with an intellect to be reckoned with.
And so, when Mary Pierrepont eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, she did so with full knowledge that she would be disinherited from her family’s fortune. That was ok, she decided, anything not to marry Clotworthy.
I dare say you expect at least something very new in this letter, after I have gone on a journey not undertaken by any Christian for some hundred years.
-A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Alexander Pope
The newly-wed Wortley Montagues settled into London, where Mary struck up friendships with a who’s who of London society, including the poet Alexander Pope and the feminist writer Mary Astell. She gave birth to a son in 1713, but shortly thereafter contracted a serious case of smallpox. She survived, but, as was so often the case, the illness left her face scarred for the rest of her life.
In 1716, Edward Mortley Montagu was appointed English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and was sent to Constantinople to help negotiate the end of the Austro-Turkish War. Lady Mary wasn’t required to travel with him, but she chose to anyway, expressing a desire to see the world.
And let’s just stop for a moment to note that this is where things really get interesting. Because, in 1716, women didn’t travel the world because they wanted to. They accompanied their husbands for work, occasionally. They moved. But they didn’t travel for fun. Lady Mary was absolutely the exception to the rule. In fact, according to the Virago Book of Women Travellers, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was the first woman to travel abroad for curiosity’s sake”.2
Perhaps her auto-didactic youth sparked something in her soul, because in 1816, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled through Europe and on to Constantinople. And, lucky for us, she kept a record of her journey in the form of letters to her friends and family.
The Wortley Montagus didn’t travel lightly (“thirty covered waggons for our baggage, and five coaches for my women”), but made their way slowly through France, Holland, Germany and Vienna - where it seems they turned back again and made a circle around Germany before returning to Vienna and then moving on towards Turkey.
As much as I admire Lady Mary, her letters are not without problems for the modern reader. In Holland, she writes to her sister that she admires the cities there because “One is not shocked with those loathsome cripples, so common in London…”, and in Germany she praises the local sumptuary laws: laws that restricted extravagance, and maintained social order by regulating what individuals of certain classes could spend or wear. In England, she complained, anyone - man or woman - can fool a stranger into believing that they are someone, just by donning an expensive set of clothes. Oh, how much easier life would be if we were only required to dress according to our social status.
At last the Wortley Montagus reach Adrianople (modern day Edirne, not far from Istanbul). Lady Mary’s place in society is such that one of her correspondents is the Princess of Wales, and while she describes the beauty of the Turkish countryside, she can’t help buttering up the daughter of the king, just a little bit.
The country from hence to Adrianople is the finest in the world. Vines grow wild on all the hills; and the perpetual spring they enjoy makes everything look gay and flourishing. But this climate, as happy as it seems, can never be preferred to England, with all its snows and frosts, while we are blessed with an easy government, under a king who makes his own happiness consist in the liberty of his people, and chooses rather to be looked upon as their father than their master.
- A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales
Lady Mary’s delight with Turkey is genuine. She writes to a friend, “This country is certainly one of the finest in the world; hitherto all I see is so new to me, it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day…” 3
In Adrianople she is taken with the beauty of Turkish women, and of their garments. She writes page after page describing their costume in exacting detail to her sister, and admires the fact that the veils that the women wear provide them a sense of anonymity. They can practically go about the streets doing anything they want! In a perhaps slightly short-sighted observation, she writes to her sister, “Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire…”
It is obvious to us as readers, of course, that Lady Mary’s interactions with the ladies of Adrianople are limited to certain classes and stratospheres of wealth.
Interestingly, however, when Lady Mary visits a hot bath in Adrianople, the local Turkish women are shocked that she is unable to undress herself because of her corsets and stays. They thought her corset was a shackle on her personal freedom: “I saw they believed that I was so locked up in that machine (the corset), that it was not in my own power to open it…which contrivance they attributed to my husband.”
Lady Mary was so taken with the costume of Turkish women that while in Adrianople, she adopted their manner of dress. She found that she so preferred the Eastern costume that even upon her return to England she dressed in the “Oriental” style, donning the loose robes and headdresses she had grown fond of on her voyages.
I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it.
-A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Miss Sarah Chiswell
During the Wortley Montagus’ first year in Constantinople, Lady Mary gives birth to a daughter—her second child. She assures friends in England that the rumors that they have heard about disease and plague in the Middle East are largely untrue…at least, the illnesses are mild enough not to be troubled about. In fact, she writes, smallpox, the disease that had affected Lady Mary so terribly and that killed countless Brits and Europeans every year, was barely a nuisance in Constantinople.
She writes that she had seen old women take the fluid from smallpox pustules and apply it in small amounts to cuts that they opened on the hands or feet of Turkish children. The children would contract smallpox, but the illness would invariably be very mild and rarely result in death.
Lady Mary had been introduced to inoculation.
Practiced for centuries in the Middle East and Asia, inoculation, which they termed engraftment, was at that time completely unknown in Europe and Britain.
Lady Mary was so impressed by the procedure that she, with the assistance of the English embassy’s surgeon Dr. Charles Maitland, had her son engrafted. He became the first British citizen to receive a smallpox inoculation. (For the record, she didn’t have her daughter inoculated because her wet nurse was not immune to the disease. She did, however, have the procedure done as soon as she returned to England.)
Lady Mary wrote to her friend, Sarah Chiswell, “I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind.” Oh, ye of little faith, Mary.
Despite Lady Mary’s cynicism, Dr. Maitland became the first doctor to perform smallpox inoculations on British soil upon his return to England—and when Lady Mary returned as well, she became a strong and vocal advocate for the operation’s use. It is, in truth, the reason most of us know Lady Mary Wortley Montagu today: she introduced smallpox inoculation to Great Britain, which paved the way for the smallpox vaccine, and then to vaccines of all kinds. It is at least in part due to Lady Mary’s efforts that millions of people’s lives have been saved in the centuries since her death.
And so, after two years, Lady Mary returns to England. She has kept at least one and possibly two copies of the letters that she sent from her voyage, and she spends the next several years reworking and editing them. She would never publish them, you see, it would be unseemly for a lady of her position. Or any lady, really. But she did circulate them among friends and acquaintances, including the writer Mary Astell.
In 1739, Lady Mary falls in love with an Italian count named Francesco Algarotti. Algarotti, who, it must be said, had a reputation that preceded him, engages in an affair with Lady Mary, while scandalously and simultaneously carrying on an affair with her friend, the politician John Hervey.
When Count Algarotti returns to Italy, Lady Mary makes an excuse to follow him. Her health, she says. She needs Italian air.
It becomes obvious fairly quickly (after a couple of years of chasing, anyway) that Count Algarotti has no intention of devoting himself to Lady Mary. Lady Mary, instead of returning to England, spends the next twenty-three years in residence in various cities around Europe, mostly in France and Italy. She carries her Turkish Embassy letters with her wherever she goes.
In 1761, she receives a letter that informs her that her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, whom she hasn’t seen in 22 years, has died.
She leaves Italy to return to England, knowing that she has a large lump in her breast - a lump of the same kind that had killed her friend Mary Astell several decades before.
She makes her way to Rotterdam on the Dutch coast, where she will board a boat to return to England for the final time. While in Rotterdam, she gives the heavy leather albums containing her Turkish Embassy letters to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden, and instructs him to dispose of them how he sees fit.
Is this an effort to keep them from her daughter, who is now the Countess of Bute, wife of the John Stuart, Count of Bute and prime minister of Great Britain? Probably. The Countess of Bute was somewhat scandalized by the manner in which her mother had lived the latter part of her life, and may have been afraid that the letters would have humiliated the family.
The Reverend Sowden kept the albums until Lady Mary’s death the following year…and then decided that the proper thing to do would be to return them to her family. He sent them - for a price, of course - to the Countess of Bute for safekeeping.
The Countess must have been shocked when, shortly after receiving her mother’s portfolios, a book was published: Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e: Written during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa. Published by T. Becket and P.A. DeHondt, The Strand, London.
The Countess of Bute wrote to the Reverend Sowden, demanding an explanation. He couldn’t understand it, he said, he had never let the letters out of his sight. Except…that one time he had lent them to a pair of English visitors, who were interested in Lady Mary’s journey. They kept them overnight, but brought them right back the next day. I remember one of them was named Becket…
Thomas Becket and his guest had spent the night furiously writing out a copy of Lady Mary’s letters, with the intent of publishing them upon their return to England.
A miracle, as it turns out, because Lady Mary’s suspicions about her daughter proved to be true. Before the end of her life, the Countess of Bute burned the entirety of Lady Mary’s journals - journals that she had kept for over 50 years.
The first edition of what we know now as The Turkish Embassy Letters was published in 1763 with a preface written by Mary Astell in 1624, in the hopes that Lady Mary’s letters would be published one day.
But, alas! the most ingenious author has condemned it to obscurity during her life; and conviction, as well as deference, obliges me to yield to her reasons. However, if these Letters appear hereafter, when I am in my grave, let this attend them, in testimony to posterity, that among her contemporaries, one woman, at least, was just to her merit…
I confess, I am malicious enough to desire, that the world should see to how much better purpose the LADIES travel than their LORDS… a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject with a variety of fresh and elegant entertainment.
Let us be better natured, than to give way to any unkind or disrespectful thought of so bright an ornament of our sex, merely because she has better sense; for I doubt not but our hearts will tell us, that this is the real and unpardonable offence, whatever may be pretended. Let us be better Christians, than to look upon her with an evil eye, only because the giver of all good gifts has entrusted and adorned her with the most excellent talents. Rather let us freely own the superiority, of this sublime genius, as I do, in the sincerity of my soul; pleased that a woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train. Let us offer her the palm which is so justly her due; and if we pretend to any laurels, lay them willingly at her feet.
-Mary Astell’s preface to the Turkish Embassy Letters
PS - Thank you, friends, for reading the first installment of Lady Travelers, my series about the rich history of lady travel writers. Next month, I’ll be jumping to the 20th century to write about the American food and travel writer M.F.K. Fisher. In the meantime, I have another travel diary on the schedule - I will see you soon! XO
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu actually wrote to her friend Sir James Stuart “I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to England.” from Rotterdam on May 20, 1761.
M. Morris & L. O’Connor, eds. The Virago Book of Women Travellers. Virago Press, 1996.
All of Lady Mary’s quotes are taken from The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
I love this quote "“I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to England.” I plan to use it frequently!
https://www.istitutoalgarotti.edu.it/pagine/curiosit-ed-eventi He was a handsome, intelligent rascal.