Elizabeth Hamilton

Elizabeth Hamilton (1756 or 1758 – 23 July 1816) was a Scottish essayist, poet, satirist and novelist, who in both her prose and fiction entered into the French-revolutionary era controversy in Britain over the education and rights of women.

Early life Hamilton was most likely born on 25 July 1756, though the date is often given as 1758. She was born in Belfast, the third and youngest child of Charles Hamilton (d.1759), a Scottish merchant, and his wife Katherine Mackay (d.1767).

In Belfast, Hamilton's parents were on familiar terms with the town's prominent "New Light" Presbyterian families and with their Scottish Enlightenment social and political ideas. Her later thoughts on child education were greatly influenced by David Manson's co-educational English Grammar School, which her older sister Katherine attended with other children from this progressive milieu. Manson advertised the school's capacity to teach children to read and understand the English language "without the discipline of the rod by intermingling pleasurable and healthful exercise with their instruction".

In 1762, after the death of her father, her mother sent Hamilton to live with her paternal aunt, Mrs Marshall who lived near Stirling. In 1793 she visited McTier in Belfast approving of her pedagogic efforts. "My little girls", boasted McTier, "do not gabble over the testament only, nor read with that difficulty which prevents pleasure in it... I keep up my number and four of them can read Fox and Pitt".

In 1796 she published Translation of the Letters of the Hindoo Rajah. The two volume work in the tradition of Montesquieu and Goldsmith, follows the adventures in England of an Indian prince. His encounters with slave owners, capricious aristocrats, sceptical philosophers and belligerent women leads to his progressive disillusionment with English culture. The novel was a response to the Revolution Controversy of the 1790s, a discussion of "revolutionary ideas about a broader franchise, primogeniture, meritocracy, marriage and divorce".

Hamilton's most important pedagogical works followed: Letters on Education (1801), Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801), Letters addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman, on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle (1806), and Hints addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (1815).

In 1808, Hamilton wrote The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), a celebrated tale of Scottish manners and mores which cast a critical eye on hardships and inequities endured by women in domestic life. It also occasioned a lengthy discourse on child education.

Hamilton spent much of her later life in Edinburgh. She died in Harrogate, England after a short illness. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) Letters on Education (1801) Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801) Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus (1804)

after 1805 Letters addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman (1806) The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) Exercises in Religious Knowledge (1809) A Series of Popular Essays (1813) Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (1815)