The Moral Economy of English Country Houses in Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

Year 2024, Volume: 34 Issue: 1, 21 - 38, 21.06.2024

Şebnem Düzgün

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2023-1397511

Abstract

Country estates in early modern England served as significant economic centres for the gentry and nobility, whose wealth was based on agriculture and landownership. However, the country house was idealised in country house poems, which were popular in the early seventeenth century, as a symbol of moral economy based on the paternalistic ethos of feudal society, lauding hospitality, modesty, and simplicity. Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616) praises the moral economy of old English country houses epitomising feudal values to criticize brutal, dehumanising capitalist enterprises embodied by modern prodigy houses. Although Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) is aligned to the principles of early country house poems, it differs from Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” which has a paternalist discourse, by offering a maternal model of moral economy that is more inclusive and heterogeneous as it includes the disadvantaged groups, like the old and the disabled. Moreover, the feminised moral economy proposed in Millenium Hall is more progressive, enabling socio-economic and territorial changes in accordance with high capitalism associated with industrialisation. This study examines Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Scott’s Millenium Hall to show that although the two works praise the moral economy of country estates, they provide respectively patriarchal and matriarchal versions of moral economy.

Keywords

“To Penshurst”, Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, moral economy, English country houses

Supporting Institution

The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK)

Project Number

1059B192000333

Thanks

I would like to thank the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) for supporting my study with the scholarship they provided during my postdoctoral research.

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