Print Hoaxes, Satire, and Representation: Reading A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Free-Masons to Mr Harding the Printer (Dublin, 1724)

Among the many ephemeral publications printed in Dublin at the height of the Wood’s halfpence affair is the anonymously authored A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Free-Masons to Mr Harding the Printer (Dublin: John Harding, 1724). This was one of many satires of the Freemasons published in the early 1720s. Its framing references to Wood’s halfpence locate it in relation to that affair, and its imaginative, if satirical, representation of a female society can be situated in relation to other accounts of fictional female clubs of the early century and to discussions of women’s exclusion from Freemasonry in particular and from club culture more generally. The pamphlet is known to survive in only one copy but despite this ephemerality, its participation in the dynamic world of relatively popular, cheap print in Dublin in the 1720s reveals much about the nature of print culture and ideas of gender in this period. The essay uses its readings and contextualizations of the pamphlet to argue that print hoaxes and gender play – common comic modes in early eighteenth-century print culture, and particularly in ephemeral pamphlets and broadsheets – permitted ideas about women’s roles and possibilities to be imaginatively explored. A transcription of the Dublin 1724 printing, with a brief discussion of the question of its authorship, follows as an appendix. *