Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857) was the only woman to edit a major British periodical in the first half of the nineteenth century, though she has rarely attracted the attention of scholars. She was also a novelist, educationalist, and prolific journalist, with a distinctively Scottish voice, which admirably illustrates the ambiguous legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her view of that Enlightenment was partly expressed in a reference to the ‘mazy and intricate, or hedged and primrose paths’ of the world of Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart. But she also wrote in the spirit of the Enlightenment of future social improvement and the continuing progress of civilisation, to be achieved partly through the extension of its educational hopes and practices to the working classes. She went beyond the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in that she was deeply committed to egalitarian values, drawn both from the political ideals of the French Revolution and from a rational, benevolent Presbyterianism indebted to the New Light wing of the Secession. She supported manhood suffrage, rejected racial prejudice and tentatively supported the rights of women. While she respected the language of Adam Smith and political economy where it promised greater prosperity, she also believed in interventionist poor law reform. Notwithstanding her strong opposition to complacent assumptions of Western superiority, Johnstone was also deeply versed in the stadial history of the Scottish Enlightenment, and her writing did not escape the hierarchical assumptions inherent in that developmental approach.

Christian Johnstone was born Christian Todd, the daughter of James Todd and Jean Campbell, in the parish of St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh. At her birth in June 1781, three weeks after her parents’ marriage, her father was listed as a medical student. In December 1796 she married Thomas McCliesh, a printer; on her second marriage, in June 1815, to John Johnstone, a schoolteacher from Dunfermline, James Todd's occupation was also recorded as that of a printer. Though we have no further details of her upbringing or education, Christian Todd seems to have been rooted in the world of the Edinburgh printing trades.

More, however, can be surmised about her background. In November 1814 she divorced her first husband under Scottish law for adultery: the divorce papers reveal that she was married to Thomas McCliesh ‘in his father's house Nicolson Street by the Rev.

IN 1829 WALTER SCOTT contributed his recollections of the eighteenthcentury Scottish songwriter and hostess Alison Cockburn to an anthology of Scottish songs. He suggested that ‘she maintained the rank in the society of Edinburgh which French women of talents usually do in that of Paris’, and that ‘the vieille cour of Edinburgh rather resembled that of Paris than that of St James's’, in laying aside expense and formality to entertain small circles of the Scottish literati at the heart of the Edinburgh Enlightenment. This representation of Cockburn draws upon the tensions experienced in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh around the participation of aspiring literary women in forms of mixed sociability. For those who observed and wrote from this world, both the French salonniere and the English bluestocking were constant points of reference. In 1817, Elizabeth Isabella Spence wrote of her visit to the autobiographer and hostess Eliza Fletcher as an encounter with ‘the Mrs Montague of Edinburgh, her house being the centre of all that is literary, amiable and distinguished’. But when, in October 1820, John Wilson, editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, suggested that in the years before his periodical was established in 1817, ‘bluestockingism was in its cerulean altitude’, he did so in the context of a reactive redefinition of the Edinburgh republic of letters as one to be led by masculine critical authority. That redefinition began with the foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, but continued to be asserted throughout this period. These reference points deserve to be understood against the growth of and shifts in polite urban sociability in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Located in the intermediate spaces between formal public and domestic worlds, and increasingly politicised and diverse, sociable practices need to be understood within their cultural and national contexts, and alongside changing patterns of association in a more clearly public setting.

The history of eighteenth-century salon culture, across France, Britain and Germany, has been the subject of much recent historical discussion, following, in particular, Dena Goodman's discussion of French salons as evolving from aristocratic institutions into sites of sociability, led by women, that embodied the principles of the Enlightenment, allowing women some share in the shaping of transformational ideas, even though they were excluded from other public institutions.

In March 1794, when she was about to leave France, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina: ‘I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded’ (MW Letters, p. 249). In the five years between the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 and her departure from France, the outlook and the politics of Mary Wollstonecraft, former governess, writer, reviewer and translator, were transformed by that ‘extraordinary event’. In her published responses to the French Revolution and to its British critics, she engaged with its philosophical context, underlying principles and, eventually, its social and political history. She is known above all as a feminist writer, yet her feminism was integrally connected to her emergence as a leading radical commentator on, and historian of, the French Revolution.

After a varied and unhappy early life, in 1784 at the age of twenty-five, Mary Wollstonecraft, with her sister Eliza, opened a school at Newington Green, just north of London, the home of one of the leading academies for English dissenters. There, although she herself remained formally within the Anglican church, she found a congenial circle of friends that included the dissenting minister, Richard Price, a campaigner for religious toleration and for the principles of the American Revolution. Influenced by Price and by Hannah Burgh, the widow of James Burgh, author of Political Disquisitions (1774, 1775), she learned something of the ‘commonwealth’ outlook on British politics.

In 1814 Maria Graham lamented the lack of ‘mutual understanding and mutual knowledge’ between the European residents and the indigenous inhabitants of India, and hoped to fill that gap with a popular introduction to Indian history, literature, science, religions and manners. She had sailed to India in 1809, and on her return published her Journal of a Residence in India (1812) and Letters on India (1814). In 1814 she looked back at the Journal as ‘liable to the reproach of European prejudice’. She had been shocked to find ‘Mussulman ladies … so totally void of cultivation’, and Hindus characterised by ‘passive submission … apathy and … degrading superstition’. But in the Letters, she used the language of eighteenth-century stadial theory, assuming a hierarchy of stages of development, and the tone was more informed, comparative and philosophical. She found in ancient Hindu civilisation ‘the maxims of that pure and sound morality which is founded on the nature of man as a rational and social being’. She expressed her greatest delight in the Mahabharata as ‘the pleasing light in which it places the early condition of the Hindu women, before the jealous Mahomedan maxims had shut them up in zenanas’.

Graham was only the third British woman to publish her observations on India, and her work had a mixed reception in Britain.