Evidence
For all the attributions I've made to Wedgwood, (where I haven't found any relevant correspondence) I've got multiple cases where they overlap with, duplicate, and occasionally cross-refer to her own writings. Here I've provided one or two indicative pieces of evidence here for each piece.
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Since I compiled this body of evidence, some of these attributions have been confirmed by the note made by Robert Tener in 1960. He notes that she contributed over 70 articles to the Spectator, but frustratingly he only preserved the names of a few. I've retained the textual evidence here since it suggests that textual analysis and archival evidence can work in harmony!
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'Utilitarianism'. The Reader (1864)
‘We cannot include among our numerous obligations to Mr. John Stuart Mill the lumbering polysyllable which stands at the head of this article’. Compare: ‘we can never use the word Utilitarianism without a mental protest against … that cumbrous polysyllable’ (from her later essay on Sidgwick).
‘In opposition to [utilitarians on law and morality], we assert that they are not only not conterminous, but not concentric regions'. Compare: ‘The sphere of morals and politics are not conterminous, nor even concentric’ (from her later essay 'Gratitude')
‘Büchner’s Matter and Force’. The Reader (1864)
Describes Grove’s ‘Correlation of Forces’ as ‘one of the most pregnant treatises of our day’.
Compare: ‘one of the most pregnant books of our time (Grove on the Correlation of Force)’, in ‘Hume and the Positive Philosophy’.
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Spectator essays.
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‘The Constitution and Course of Nature’ (1872)
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Butler ‘meant something different from what we do when we use the word ‘‘Nature.” He used the word in a sense familiar to all who know the writings of the Stoics (evidently well known to Butler), the sense which we only retain in the adjective when we speak of its being natural to do so and so. He did not in using it intend to exclude the world of inanimate being, but he was thinking of man’.
Compare her signed article on (Butler’s contemporary) William Law: ‘we must remember the different associations which clustered round the word Nature a hundred or two hundred years ago, and those which belong to it now. To our mind it suggests mainly the sequences and appearances of the material world. To the mind of our fathers it had rather the associations which were impressed on it by the writings of the Stoics, it suggested the tendencies of men and women, it meant, in short, human nature’.
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‘The Development of Christianity’ (1873)
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‘A penal code by which the shrewd intelligence of a man like Paley was so far blunted that he extolled as the result of an almost inspired wisdom the mixture of barbarity and capricious lenity in which it resulted, prepared men’s minds for an everlasting hell, to which nobody worth considering was actually to be condemned’.
Compare: ‘Paley … fixed upon this capricious execution of the laws as a subject of eulogy… “By this expedient, few actually suffer death, while the dread and the danger of it hang over the crimes of many”. … In other words, it is adduced as the crowning merit of the English penal law that it consists, in a large measure, of empty menace!’ (from initialled ‘Eternal Punishment and Eternal Hope’)
‘Hume and the Positive Philosophy’ (1874)
‘Hume and the Utilitarian Ethics’ (1874) (two-part set)
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Quotes Thomas Henry Huxley on ‘sweeping the cobwebs off the sky’ – also quoted in Teachers.
‘The word “pleasure” recalls the vaguest of all our emotions, as the word “pain” recalls the most definite, and the antithesis between two things so different in vividness has always seemed to us a source of large error' – as in ‘Pleasure and Pain’.
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‘Supernatural Religion’, first and second notices (1874)
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‘Nature, as Coleridge has said, is no more than that which is in process of becoming – that which has its roots in the past, – that which is “about to be born”’.
Compare: ‘Nature, he [Coleridge] says in effect, is literally Natura, that which is always about to be born”’ (from 'The Natural and the Supernatural')
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‘Mr Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics’, parts I and II (1875)
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Uses the key image of the stereoscope: ‘… according as the agent concerned is the first person or the third. Whether any stereoscope can combine these views …’.
Compare her Aristotle essay: ‘We will put the double point of view, as far as we have grasped it, before the reader, without attempting to supply any stereoscope which shall convert it to the solid unity’.
And her letter to Browning: ‘You give a stereoscopic view …’ (15 November 1868).
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‘“The Unseen Universe”‘ (1875)
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Mentions the art of measurement in Protagoras: ’”The art of measurement,” Socrates is made to say, in the Protagoras, “will teach us to … find rest in the truth”’. Compare ‘There is a knowledge of the truth says Plato, in the Protagoras, which gives rest to the soul, “and thus saves our life”’; ‘“The art of measurement,” Socrates is made to say, in the Protagoras, “is that which would save the soul”’; ‘“The art of measurement,” says Plato, “is that which would save the soul”’ (from her essay on female suffrage of 1869, The Moral Ideal, and the 'First Opponent of Christianity')
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‘Lord Amberley’s “Analysis of Religious Belief”‘, two parts (1876)
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'Profoundly true are the words of Lessing, that “superstition does not lessen her influence when she is recognised”‘.
Compare: ‘it is another instance of the wisdom of that profound saying of Lessing’s, which we have had occasion to quote before, that superstition does not lose its influence when we cease to believe in it’ (from ‘Life of Charles Kingsley’, published five months later, so actually a cross-reference
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‘What is Christianity?’ (1876)
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This uses a quotation about Burke, taken from a biography of Sheridan, which reappears word-for-word in Nineteenth-Century Teachers: ‘his mind lay parted like a continent separated by some vast convulsion of nature, each portion peopled by its own giant race, differing altogether in feature and language, and committed in eternal hostility to one another’
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'The Gnostics of the First Two Centuries' (1876)
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‘It has been called “la dernière apparition du monde ancien, venant combattre son successeur, avant de lui ceder le monde humain"...'
This exact quotation (from Jacques Matter) reappears unchanged in The Moral Ideal.
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'John M'Leod Campbell' (two parts) (1877)
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‘Moral progress has been subject to the natural law according to which what is gained in expansion is lost in intensity’.
Compare: ‘Here, as elsewhere, we may discover an illustration of the law that what is gained in intensity is lost in extension’ (Moral Ideal, second edn).
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‘The world, said Dr. Johnson, had proved more kind and less just than he expected it to be'; justice is 'the most rare of virtues' - see 'Justice' below. ​​
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'Altruism and Selfishness' (1878)
and 'Self and Unself' (1878) - two-part set
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‘Insufficient sympathy is given to the difficulties of the intellectual life’.
Compare her known essay the 'Drawbacks of the Intellectual Life': 'While the advantages of intellectual pursuits have been set forth so often that any attempt to enumerate them must pass over trite ground, … the drawbacks of these pursuits seem to us inadequately recognised
Also: 'It is the breaking of the ray of light which creates colour. It is the breaking of one interest against another in life, which gives the moral colour to true service and the affections which that service fosters'.
Compare her letter to Victoria Welby: 'The experience of the individual or of the race seems . . . a prism breaking the white ray of light and showing it as colour, . . . so that, according to his position, each man sees a different portion of that which in its own nature is truly one.'
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‘The Negative Stage in the Life of Thought’ (1878)
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Alludes to Hegel being like Heraclitus, the ‘dark philosopher’, - a reference to Ferdinand Lasalle’s book on Heraclitus – duplicated in The Moral Ideal.
On the dialectic: 'There is a much greater resemblance between the first and third stages than between the first and second’. Likewise in her Hegel essay she says: ‘invariably in this process … we end nearer our first than our second standpoint’.
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‘A German Hypatia’ (1878)
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Makes a comparison to Kingsley’s Hypatia and mentions Julian’s defence of the non-celibate life against Augustine - where in The Moral Ideal, Wedgwood says Julian was a pre-modern Charles Kingsley.
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‘Character and Position’ (1878)
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'A man educated under such a régime as that of J. S. Mill’s childhood and youth … who remembers a cowed and anxious youth…’
Compare ‘the account given by John Stuart Mill in his autobiography, of his own education. He speaks of a … cowed and anxious childhood’. (in her later signed essay on 'Maternal Self-Sacrifice')
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‘Friends Old and New’ (1879)
‘The habit of surveying all moral ideas from the watershed of right and wrong, while it is a great foe to any just and delicate appreciation of character, is by no means favourable to the sense of right and wrong itself. That faculty needs much repose. … A delicate gradation of colour is not more surely lost under a dazzling effect of light and shade, than the true hearing of moral characteristics under the spirit that stamps every epithet with approval or with blame’.[1]
Compare ‘Moral Purpose in Fiction’: ‘Whatever gives our faculties repose, gives them strength. There is a tendency in human nature, to which the very meaning of words bears witness, to judge too much, – to stamp neutral qualities with praise or blame’.
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‘Justice’ (1879)
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Justice ‘we believe to be the rarest of virtues … “I have found men more kind than I expected, and less just,” said Johnson’.
Compare ‘it was said by Dr. Johnson in summing up [his] experience, that he had found mankind more kind than he expected, and less just. … No doubt justice is the most difficult duty there is’ (from 'Maternal Self-Sacrifice'); also quoted in 'Democracy and Justice'.
The Johnson quote occurs just four times in the Spectator's entire history: once in 1850, then in 'John M'Leod Campbell', 'Justice', and 'Democracy and Justice'.
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'Aristotle on Free-Will', two parts (1880)
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‘Plato knows only two pair of spiritual antithesis,—the pleasant and the painful, appealing to the sensuous, animal nature; and the true and the false'...
Compare The Moral Ideal: ‘Plato … knows only two antitheses—the pleasant in contrast to the painful, the true in contrast to the false’
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‘“Grievances of Women”‘ (1880)
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‘There is a tendency in human nature to which, we think, sufficient attention has not been paid, and to which indeed it is not easy to call attention without seeming to advocate a paradox. We would call it the law of inversion. We would now call the reader’s attention to another illustration of the law that “extremes meet.”'
Compare: ‘This is one of the innumerable cases where extremes meet’; ‘… the truth of a saying of Plato’s, that the least change of movement is that of inversion’; ‘Inversion, says Plato, is the least change of movement possible’ (from 'Gratitude', 'Ethics and Literature', and The Moral Ideal)​
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‘Political Characteristics of Woman’ (1880)
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‘It is a curious illustration of the law that extremes meet…’
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'Reserve' (1880)
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‘The saying of Schiller, “By what he omits, show me the master in style,” is illustrated in almost everything that is worthy to be called literature’.
Compare: ‘Always remember that lesson of Schiller’s, “By what he omits, show me the master in style”’. (from one of her signed fiction reviews. This is her own translation).
'“The most interesting biographies” … “are those which should not have been written”’. Compare: ‘We should go so far as to allow that there are some biographies ... which ought not to have been written’ (in 'Biography')
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‘The Duke of Argyll on the Unity of Nature’ (1880)
and ‘The Duke of Argyll on Nature and the Supernatural’ (1881)
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'Our notion of force, Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, is “a generalisation of those muscular sensations which we have when we are ourselves the producers of change in outward things”’.
Compare Moral Ideal: ‘Force, the elemental material of science, has no meaning to us except in so far as we construe it by our own experience of muscular exertion; that is to say, of something associated with all the attempts of the self to impress the world around’, again referencing Spencer.
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'The Relation of History of Politics' (1882)
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‘We have heard that Lord Macaulay refused to look at the evidence offered him of William III’s complicity in the massacre of Glencoe’.
Compare: ‘We have heard that Macaulay refused to look at papers which proved William iii to have been responsible for the Massacre of Glencoe’, from her signed essay on Carlyle.
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'Selfishness' (1882)
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‘…The awful command, “Depart from me”, is addressed to those who, for all that appears, were guilty of no sin but selfishness’.
Compare: ‘A great preacher of our own day tells us that the invitation, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” would, if it could fall on the ear of the sinner, give him no … joy, but certainly he did not mean that if, by a supposition of equal difficulty, we imagined the command, “Depart from me,” to fall on the ear of a saint, it would not inspire terror’; ‘The command, “Depart from me, ye cursed,” is addressed to those who have led the life of the average member of society, doing little harm, but less good’. (from 'Pleasure and Pain' and 'Eternal Punishment and Eternal Hope'.
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‘Gratitude’ (1883)
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Opening paragraph: ‘We have before this remarked on the tendency in the English language, and to some extent in all language, to stamp moral epithets with too distinct an implication of praise or blame, or perhaps we should say rather of blame alone, for the impulse that approves is a much fainter one, and gives its verdict with less emphasis. We want the power of disinterested moral description’.
This is a cross-reference back to ‘Moral Purpose in Fiction’ (1882): ‘There is a tendency in human nature, to which the very meaning of words bears witness, to judge too much,—to stamp neutral qualities with praise or blame, and leave hardly an epithet which can be used to describe a mere quality, without connoting an opinion as to its merit. … Or even when the words we use have remained mere epithets, why does this habit of judging infuse condemnation into a mere attempt to give a true description of character?’
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'Men and Women' (1886)
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‘Only turn back to the civil sentences at the beginning of Macaulay’s review of a book of Miss Aikin’s, and you will feel what a different thing the relation between men and women was half a century ago. … Macaulay evidently felt that he owed Miss Aikin a kind of consideration which to him and her alike it would seem absurd to expect from her, … because she was a woman and he was a man.’
Compare '"Grievances of Woman"': ‘looking back no further, for instance, than Macaulay’s criticisms on Miss Aikin, note the change of tone, as contrasted with anybody’s criticism of a lady’s book now-a-days. Every one would feel it absurd for a reviewer to take the sex of his author into account in his criticisms …'
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'"Man and woman,” says a mystic writer, “are each to each the image of God”’.
Compare 'Woman and Democracy': '“Man and woman,” says a religious mystic, “are each to each the image of God"'.
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'The Age of Woman' (1887)
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'If there be a law that is common to the physical and mental universe throughout their whole extent, it would seem to be that of balanced movement. The swing that creates light for the outward eye is no less needed for the eye of the soul; truth for human vision consists in alternate movements of expansion and contraction, just as light does’.
Compare The Moral Ideal: ‘The science of our day has taught us to regard the fact of balanced movement as a clue to the most important laws of the visible world. … If there be a law common to the world without and the world within … it is this which [has] shown us … the rush hither and thither of invisible atoms, swaying in rhythmic balance. The scientific interpretation of Light gives a clue to the meaning of Truth, as it is mirrored in human minds. The balanced swing, which gives us the vision of the outward world, represents to us that mental attitude by which we discern the world within’.
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'Fellow-Travellers' (1887)
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'Uncongenial fellow-travellers do always seem to be telling one all one’s faults ... The first day of a common journey reveals defects that have been hidden from even intimate acquaintance for years.'
Compare 'Men and Women' on '.... the proverbial difficulties that attend fellow-travellers. Why are those who take a journey together so certain to discover each other’s faults?'
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NB. I was doubtful she authored 'Fellow-Travellers' because it seemed so trivial. But 'Men and Women' explains that travelling with other people is paradigmatic of what happens when social distinctions are levelled.
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‘Women and Politics’ (1890)
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‘Goethe put into the mouth of a woman the sentence, “Nach Freiheit strebt der Mann, die Frau nach Sitte” … Sitte, however we translate it – “order”, we suppose, would be the best rendering here – ‘
Compare ‘Political Characteristics of Woman’: ‘“Nach Freiheit strebt der Mann, die Frau nach Sitte,” says Goethe, through the mouth of one of his most amiable heroines. Sitte is a word very difficult to translate; it is, as far as we can remember, generally rendered “order”'.
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