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

Authors : Şebnem Düzgün

Pages : 21-38

Doi:10.26650/LITERA2023-1397511

View : 63 | Download : 31

Publication Date : 2024-06-21

Article Type : Research

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