The Establishment Wears a Red Dress

 

To be an independent woman in Georgian England one needed a solid layer of money between oneself and the world. In this regard, Mary Edwards (1705-43) enjoyed the equivalent of steel armor plate. From her Anglo-Dutch parents she inherited realty investments worth 60,000 pounds per annum (eight million pounds sterling today). She held her property free and clear until her marriage, then shared her income with her spendthrift partner until she repudiated him in her thirties. Like many wealthy Georgians, Mary became a patron of the arts, and one of her beneficiaries, William Hogarth, immortalized her and her self-image in a 1742 portrait.  

 

Edwards chose to emphasize her independence and the wealth that supported it. She and Hogarth thus de-emphasized or left out images and themes that suggested traditional femininity. Mary gazes directly at the viewer, her hair pulled back tightly from a high forehead, suggesting a cerebral nature. She wears not subdued pastels or virginal blue, but an eye-catching red damask gown trimmed with copious white lace, accessorized with enough diamonds to make Liz Taylor die of jealousy. A hunting dog, symbolizing the gentry's hunting privileges, sits at her feet in place of the submissive gentlewoman's lapdog. Her surroundings are those of a successful landowner or rentier (she was both): a dark-paneled office adorned with busts of King Alfred and Elizabeth I. Both monarchs the Georgian aristocracy considered defenders of English liberty, which is to say, their own privileges. The open page on the desk, containing a quote on liberty (again, patrician liberty) from Addison’s Cato, strengthens this symbolic point. Mary sees herself not merely as an independent woman, but as a pillar of the political establishment, a steward of the landed wealth that helped England’s aristocracy defend themselves and their institutions against monarchical tyranny.

 

I don’t know if Edwards ever became actively engaged in electioneering, as some eighteenth-century noblewomen did. Likely she did not have time for it. She died only a year after Hogarth, more famous for his acerbic political cartoons, helped her define herself for posterity as a full member of the establishment.