One Man Giveth, Another Taketh Away: Pet Ownership, Romantic Courtship, and Financial Hardship in Haywood’s Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Burney’s Camilla (1796)

“All commerce of this kind between men and women is like that of the Boys and Frogs in L’Estrange’s Fable.—‘Tis play to you, but ‘tis death to us—and if we had the wit of the frogs, we should allwaies make that answer,” writes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, drawing the parallel of human-animal relations to the “commerce” between men and women (as quoted in Christine Blouch’s introduction to Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, p. 15). Here, as in many, many prose writings from the eighteenth century to present, men occupy the place of the human, women of the animal, in these metaphors. The men have the power to give, and the women, like the animals, are in the position to receive. What that man chooses to give, be it care or abuse, is, for Montagu, “play” to them and “death” to women, who “should allwaies make that answer.” Haywood’s Miss Betsy Thoughtless/Mrs. Munden makes that answer when she tells her husband after “the lamentable and deplorable death” of her “favorite squirrel” at his hands: “’When a husband,’ answered she, ‘is ignorant of the regard he ought to have for his wife, or forgets to put it in practice, he can expect neither affection nor obedience, unless the woman he has married happens to be an idiot’” (Haywood ch. VII). She, Betsy, asserts she is no “idiot,” and the death of her squirrel becomes the death of her marriage, the end of her “affection” and “obedience,” and she stops sleeping and eating with him; ceases the most basic live-in aspects of the wife/husband relationship, and shortly thereafter they separate. While Betsy eventually returns to her husband and promises to “never” leave him—even to Mr. Munden’s own shock after his repentance of his abusive treatment—this return happens to be when he is on his deathbed, with little chance for survival. 

Betsy’s return to Mr. Munden on his deathbed echoes the deathbed proposal and marriage entrapment by the fake French fop “Sir Frederick Fineer” earlier in Betsy’s courtship/marriage/widow/remarriage plot. From the faux marriage and real rape, Mr. Trueworth delivers Betsy but the “concurrence of odd circumstances” (as Haywood often refers to her mechanizations of plot, in Betsy Thoughtless and other of her works such as occurs in the title of chapter VIII) require her to deliver her self from her unhappy marriage to Mr. Munden to her glorious reunion with Charles Trueworth in which “the virtues of our heroine (those follies that had defaced them being fully corrected) at length rewarded with a happiness, retarded only till she had render’d herself wholly worthy of receiving it” (Haywood 634). In these last words of this (perhaps) first female bildungsroman in English, Haywood’s heroine’s virtue is rewarded not for its perfect purity but for her “follies” that covered up that virtue “being fully corrected.” In this way, Betsy’s actions do not constitute who she is; they do not erase her virtue, they cover it up until such time that she can “correct” them. Rather than being passively rewarded by a Mr. B. type figure, a man who has the positionality to give rape or marriage to Pamela-the-frog, Betsy experiences “follies” and “renders” herself “worthy.” She takes action, reflects, and changes; she is “suffered” to make mistakes and clear them up—only in the extremely unlikely events in which both her and her “True worth/love” become widow and widower at the same time. 

The reader may remember that this essay began by discussing men and women, Miss Betsy and her squirrel. Just as awkwardly as I have just done, Haywood returns to the squirrel after several hundred pages by writing, “The reader may remember, that Mr. Trueworth, in the beginning of his courtship to Miss Betsy, had made her a present of a squirrel” (ch. VI). (See Cynthia Wall’s Prose of Things for eighteenth-century typical usage of “things” in novel plots and when and how they conveniently appear and disapper.) Now we will return to that passage. What Mr. Munden does to the squirrel he clearly means to do to its caretaker; he takes the “token of love” and, reducing it from a living being into a “domestick” cost, “dashes” its “tender frame” “to pieces” (Haywood ch. VI). It is here that Haywood renders the conduct-book way-of-living perilous for Betsy to follow; it is a life-or-death matter for her love, which becomes tied-up in the squirrel as it is tied-up in the picture she keeps of Trueworth, for her pet, rendered by Haywood as a living being deserving of the reader’s sympathy (this is the most jarring and realistic scene in the book), her marriage and her own physical wellbeing. What Trueworth calls “so trifling an offering” (Haywood ch. XVII) is no trifling matter indeed. 

While Lady Trusty is called “This worthy lady,” and “was astonished beyond measure at the recital” of “his killing of the squirrel,” Haywood points out that her compassion is not as deep in comparison to Betsy’s. Again, the squirrel is referred to as a “trifle” as Trueworth did himself, in jest; however, this occurs not in an example of the gift-giver’s humility but upon the friend’s internalizing of the story told to her: the squirrel to Lady Trusty is “also, though a trifle in itself,” and her concern is not for the squirrel itself but for the fact that its treatment “she could not help thinking denoted a most cruel, revengeful, and mean mind” (Haywood ch. VII). Betsy and Trueworth are “worthy” of each other because of the care they mutually devote to this “trifling” squirrel. In his courtship of Betsy, the care Trueworth takes in adorning the squirrel encapsulates the care he would take to court her and relate to her in marriage: “The chain, which fastened it to it’s habitation, was gold, the links very thick, and curiously wrought. Every one admired the elegance of the donor’s taste” (Haywood ch. XVII). The “links” between Betsy and Trueworth would be “gold” and “curiously wrought,” like the plot of Miss Betsy’s education herself. 

Note

The reader might remember that I was going to talk about pet ownership in Camilla. That later novel, published after Haywood’s death, shows what happens when a fop purchases a pet for a prospective lover: he has neither the time to care for him, nor she the money. The unpacking of that metaphor of the bird, its ties to finances and courtship as in Camilla, is “worthy” of another essay. 

Works Cited

Blouch, Christine. “Introduction.” The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Christine Bouch. Broadview, 1998. 

Burney, Frances. “Chapter XIII: Traits of Instruction.” Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth, eds. Edward Bloom and Lillian Bloom. Oxford University Press, 2009. 

Haywood, Eliza. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Christine Blouch. Broadview, 1998.

Queen, Christopher. “‘One domestic, at least, that may be spared’: Male Violence and Female Pet Keeping in Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless.” The 18th-Century Common: A Public Humanities Website of Enthusiasts of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017. Link

Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2006.