Sarah Scott

Sarah (Robinson) Scott's social formation as a Bluestocking feminist resembled that of her sister Elizabeth, with significant differences. Born into the landed gentry, her education and prospects in life would be significantly poorer than those of her brothers. Because there were several brothers, all of whom had to be provided with property (for the oldest) or professions (for the youngest), there would be fewer resources still for her and her one, older, sister, Elizabeth, later of course to be Elizabeth Montagu, 'queen of the Bluestockings'. As a second daughter, Sarah would have poorer prospects, although both she and Elizabeth seem to have been allotted the same amount by way of dowry. That sum would be considered the most significant factor in determining her opportunities for marriage, followed by the status and connections of her family (what they could offer her husband through the patronage system) and her personal appearance, qualities, and education. Her parents seem to have had a difficult marriage, partly or largely for reasons rooted in historic gender differences within their social class. Her father, Matthew Robinson (1698–1778), was a landed gentleman, with property in Yorkshire, who seems to have had few interests beyond enjoying his gentleman's life and who seems to have acquired elements of the libertine and freethinking masculine culture of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. His wife, Elizabeth Drake (c. 1693–1746), was daughter of a town councilor of Cambridge and an heiress who brought her husband an estate in Kent. More important to her daughters would have been that she apparently received a good education in the tradition of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century 'learned lady'. Another important intellectual influence on the Robinson children through family connections may have come from Conyers Middleton of Cambridge University, second husband of their maternal grandmother, and whom they seem to have visited at Cambridge. Middleton was not only an eminent classical scholar but one of the leading 'commonwealthmen' or 'classical republicans' of the early eighteenth century. There may have been similar connections: at some point later on, Elizabeth and Sarah knew Catharine Sawbridge, later Macaulay, from the notoriously republican family of Sawbridge.