Clery supplies ample reasons for taking the underappreciated project of the Athenian Mercury seriously.

In 1757, it was still possible for the Reverend John Brown to splutter about the country's descent into "vain, luxurious and selfish EFFEMINACY", in An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of Our Times. Clery dismisses this as the "comic flourish" that, after Clarissa, concludes the purely English episode of the debate. Nonetheless, anxiety about luxury, sex and business did not simply go away. Henry Mackenzie has a gleeful sketch in The Man of Feeling

(1771) of a Brown-like misanthrope bemoaning the "effects of luxury" that are "perhaps inseparable from a certain degree of power and grandeur in a nation":

"(p)ublic enterprize shall sleep till he who should guide its operation has decided his bets at Newmarket, or fulfilled his engagement with a favourite- mistress in the country". Others who sniped at the extravagant lifestyle or literary pretensions of the Blue Stocking Elizabeth Montagu, her big houses or salons, tended to forget that she was also the efficient manager of coal mines in Newcastle. Writing to a friend, in 1767, she could describe herself as "a Critick, a Coal Owner, a Land Steward, a sociable creature", uniting culture and commerce -but, as E. J. Clery remarks of the feminization debate after Richardson, that is a subject for another book.