A Description of Millenium Hall

Two travellers in Cornwall are stranded when their chaise breaks down, and the walk for help brings them to an estate governed by a society of women. The narrator, a merchant home from Jamaica with his health spent, and his young companion Lamont are given rooms, a tour, and by degrees the residents’ histories: fortunes lost, families that failed them, suitors who wanted money rather than character. Around the hall these same women have built schools, a carpet and rug manufacture that supports the whole parish, cottages for the old and infirm, and a six acre enclosure sheltering people once exhibited by showmen for being unusually short or tall. Sarah Scott published the book anonymously in 1762 as the work of “A Gentleman on his Travels.” It gives fictional shape to the social ideals of the Bluestocking circle, and reached four editions by 1778.