A Description of Millenium Hall

Sarah Scott

4 ideas

1. Estate founded by women escaping marriage

   Two gentlemen travellers, one of them a young sceptic named Lamont, are forced by a carriage accident to stop at a Cornish estate. There they find that Mrs. Mancel, Mrs. Morgan (who inherited her fortune on the death of an older husband she had been pressed to marry), and several other women with similar histories have combined their money to run a school for poor girls, an almshouse for elderly women, and paid work for local families. By the end of the visit the sceptic Lamont is converted by what he has seen practised rather than by argument.

2. Pooled wealth supports women's shared independence

   Individually, several of the women's fortunes had been shaped by fathers, suitors or husbands. Combined and managed together outside marriage, their money supports a shared household in which they direct their own time and purposes. The book presents this arrangement of property and residence as serving the Christian duties that govern how they use their wealth, not as a substitute for virtue.

3. Charity through employment, rules and direct aid

   Much of the women's charity takes the form of paid work for the poor, dowries so girls can set up households, and a shared house for impoverished gentlewomen who contribute labour under common rules. Alongside this they also give direct aid and fund lasting support for people who cannot support themselves.

4. Sheltering people displayed as curiosities

   The estate buys people with dwarfism and other unusual bodies away from the showmen who exhibited them for money. It then houses them in a walled enclosure where they can live without being stared at. Seeing spectacle as a harm, rather than harmless amusement, changes charity from giving money to removing people from the economy of the public gaze.

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