SOURCE: "Utopia Limited: Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison," in Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, Vol. 5, 1992, pp. 303-25.

In the essay below, Carretta discusses Scott's use of male narrators in her texts. She maintains that this practice underscores Scott's essential conservatism and her belief that preserving the existing social hierarchy was a requisite of orderly reform.

In her introduction to the Penguin edition of Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, Jane Spencer suggests that the novel "aims to educate men. The first indication of this is on the title page." Without disputing her identification of the book's primary audience, I would like here to investigate the implications of authority found in the title-page phrase that attributes the work to "A Gentleman on His Travels." The masculine perspective is essential to the conservative ideological message and method of representation introduced in 1762 in Millenium Hall and...