Eliza Macauley

Early life

Eliza Wright was born into poverty in York, probably in 1785. Her father died when she was only two, leaving his family destitute. According to her sketchy autobiographical memoirs, Macauley's first career was as an actress. She began by performing in barns in Kent, but by 1805 she had moved to London, where for the next twenty years she went from one low-paid and badly-reviewed theatrical production to another. Eventually a long period of unemployment forced her to depart the stage, leaving in a flurry of tracts denouncing the selfishness of her more illustrious male colleagues and the philistinism of the metropolitan theatre owners. Nothing daunted, she immediately began to turn her performing talents in other directions. The late 1820s found her preaching from the pulpit of a little ‘Jacobinical’ chapel in Grub Street, and from there she moved to the platforms of Owenite co-operation, becoming, in her own words, a ‘good Co-operative woman’.

Involvement in Owenism

Owenism in the early 1830s was a vigorous working-class movement, promoting economic self-help through co-operative manufacture and trading, and encouraging the establishment of communities of mutual association. Its ethos was utopian–socialist and democratic, and the equality of the sexes was an important theme in its propaganda. All this appears to have been well suited to Macauley's insubordinate temperament, and by 1832 she was deeply involved in London Owenite activities. She served as manager of the largest labour exchange (an Owenite institution where workers exchanged goods and services on the basis of the number of labour hours invested in them), and became a well-known lecturer, delivering lectures on subjects as varied as financial reform, child development, the evils of Christian orthodoxy, and women's right to full social equality. ‘Women have too long been considered as playthings, or as slaves’, she told a London audience in July 1832, ‘but I hope the time is at hand, when we shall hold a more honourable rank in the scale of creation’. She also offered acting lessons to her fellow socialists, including to a group of French Saint-Simonians visiting London in the early 1830s.

Writing career

All these activities were undoubtedly motivated as much by economic necessity as by Owenite socialist conviction. Employment opportunities for single women such as Macauley were few and far between, and the small sums paid by the Owenites to their publicists would have been very welcome. Writing for publication was a more typical resource for such women—and Macauley also turned her hand to this, penning small volumes of essays on edifying topics, ‘poetic effusions’, and other such ladylike potboilers, while at the same time also producing a steady stream of pamphlets denouncing her enemies in the theatre, attacking the magistracy, and defending various patrons against scurrilous detractors—the traditional stuff of Grub Street hacks. But ‘literary pursuits are the most arduous of any … and subject to the most mortifications—particularly for females’, as she complained.

Debtors' prison

By 1835 she was to be found publishing her memoirs (funded by subscription) from a cell in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. She died in York, while on a lecture tour, on 22 February 1837.