Perdita
Page 3
In this version of Mary’s first encounter with male desire, she is the innocent: a child, albeit with the body of a woman. The first ‘biography’ of her, published at the height of her public fame in 1784, tells a very different story. The Memoirs of Perdita is a source that must be treated with great caution, since – as will be seen – it was written with both a political and a pornographic agenda. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the book’s anonymous author had a very well-informed source. The ‘editor’ claimed in his introduction that ‘the circumstances of her life were communicated by one who has for several years been her confidant, and to whose pen she has been indebted for much news paper panegyric’ – a description that very much suggests Henry Bate of the Morning Herald, a key figure in Mary’s story. According to the ‘editor’ of The Memoirs of Perdita, ‘the following history may with propriety be said to be dictated by herself: many of the mere private transactions were indisputably furnished by her; nor could they possibly originate from any other source’.24 In some instances this is true: The Memoirs of Perdita published personal information about Mary’s life that was not previously in the public domain. In other instances, however, these supposed memoirs can safely be assumed to offer nothing more than malicious fantasy.
According to The Memoirs of Perdita, Mary’s first love affair occurred soon after the Darbys moved to London. Her father supposedly brought home a handsome young midshipman called Henry, who was allowed ‘private interviews’ and ‘little rambles’ with Mary. They went boating together on the Thames. On one occasion, they stopped for refreshments at Richmond. The only room the landlord had available in which to serve them with a glass of wine and a biscuit happened to be a bedchamber – which had crimson curtains that matched the ‘natural blush’ to which Mary was excited by the sight of the bed. The young midshipman duly took her hand and sat her with him on the white counterpane. ‘Perdita’s blushes returned – and Henry kissed them away – She fell into his arms – then sunk down together on the bed. – The irresistible impulse of nature, in a moment carried them into those regions of ecstatic bliss, where sense and thought lie dissolved in the rapture of mutual enjoyment.’25
The affair supposedly lasted for some time, until the ‘jovial tar’ was summoned back to his ship, never to be seen again. In all probability, ‘Henry’ is pure invention, perhaps spun at second hand from some passing remark about the sailor’s proposal. After all, given that Nicholas Darby was estranged from his family, he was not there to introduce a midshipman into the household. But it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the young Mary – steeped as she was in poetry and romance – might have had some kind of sexual awakening in her early teens.
Mary was moved to a more orthodox boarding school in Battersea, run by a less colourful but nevertheless ‘lively, sensible and accomplished woman’ named Mrs Leigh.26 Nicholas Darby then stopped sending money for his children’s education. The resolute Hester took matters into her own hands and set up her own dame school in Little Chelsea. The teenage Mary became a teacher of English language, responsible for prose and verse compositions during the week and the reading of ‘sacred and moral lessons, on saints’-days and Sunday evenings’.27 Readers of her Memoirs would have been at best amused at the idea of one of the most notorious women of the age presenting herself as a teacher of morals and religion. Mary also had responsibility for supervising the pupils’ wardrobes, and making sure that they were properly dressed and undressed by the servants.
In 1770, Nicholas Darby ran into more problems. Just as he had a thousand pounds’ worth of seal skins ready for market, a British military officer arrived at his Labrador fishery and confiscated all his produce and tackle on the grounds that he was illegally employing Frenchmen and using French rather than British equipment. He was left marooned. He eventually made it back to London and asked the Board of Trade for compensation, claiming that he did not know that his Canadian crew were actually French subjects. The Board of Trade passed the buck, saying it had no jurisdiction in the case. Nicholas had a moral victory when the Court of King’s Bench awarded him £650 damages against the Lieutenant who had seized the goods, but the money was uncollectible. In the circumstances, one might have expected him to be grateful for his estranged wife’s initiative in establishing a school. But he was a proud man: ‘he considered his name as disgraced, his conjugal reputation tarnished, by the public mode which his wife had adopted for revealing to the world her unprotected situation’.28 He lived openly with his mistress, but could not abide seeing his wife publicly revealed as someone akin to an impoverished widow or spinster. He demanded that the school be closed immediately. It had lasted for less than a year.
Hester and her children moved to Marylebone. Like Chelsea, this was an expanding village on the edge of London, but it had a less rural feel and was fast being recognized as an integral part of the metropolis. Mary reverted from teacher to pupil, finishing her education at Oxford House, situated near the top of Marylebone High Street, bordering on Marylebone Gardens. Nicholas Darby and his mistress Elenor settled in the more fashionable and gentrified Green Street, off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, a district that was becoming increasingly popular with merchants and rich shopkeepers as well as the gentry.
Mary must have been acutely conscious of the differences in lifestyle between her mother and her father. She sometimes accompanied her father on walks in the fields nearby, where he confessed that he rather regretted his ‘fatal attachment’ to his mistress – they had now been together so long and been through so much that it was impossible to dissolve the relationship. On one of their walks, they called on the Earl of Northington, a handsome young rake and politician, whose father had been one of the sponsors of Darby’s Labrador schemes. They were very well received, with Mary being presented as the goddaughter of the older Northington (now deceased). In later years, she did not deny rumours that she might have been the old Lord’s illegitimate daughter. The young Lord, meanwhile, treated her with ‘the most flattering and gratifying civility’.29
When Nicholas returned to America, Hester moved her children to Southampton Buildings in Chancery Lane. This was lawyers’ territory, backing onto Lincoln’s Inn. She had placed herself under the protection of Samuel Cox, a lawyer. Perhaps she had applied to him for legal help after the separation from Nicholas became final. Being ‘under the protection’ of a man was usually code for sexual involvement, so it may have been more than a professional relationship.
It was during her time at Oxford House that Mary was drawn towards the stage. The governess, Mrs Hervey, spotted her talent for ‘dramatic exhibitions’, and persuaded Hester to let her daughter try for the stage, despite the fact that it was not considered to be a respectable career. Hester was persuaded that there were actresses who ‘preserved an unspotted fame’. Nicholas obviously had his doubts. Upon setting off on his new overseas adventure, he left his wife with a chilling injunction to ‘Take care that no dishonour falls upon my daughter. If she is not safe at my return I will annihilate you.’30
The school’s dancing master was also ballet master at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. Through him, Mary was introduced to an actor called Thomas Hull, who was impressed by her recitation of lines from Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore of 1714. But nothing came of the audition. Mary did not despair and she was rewarded with a much greater opportunity. Her mother’s protector Samuel Cox knew Dr Samuel Johnson and that was enough to open the door of Johnson’s old pupil and friend, David Garrick.
What was Mary Darby like at the time that she met Garrick? Though she may have been a plain child with dark swarthy looks, she had become a very beautiful teenager. She had curly, dark auburn hair and soft blue eyes that were to enchant men from the Prince of Wales to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She had dimples in her cheeks. But there was always an elusive quality to her beauty. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pupil, James Northcote, remarked that even his master’s portraits of her were failures because ‘the extreme bea
uty’ of her was ‘quite beyond his power’.31
*See Appendix for the uncertainty over the year of Mary’s birth.
CHAPTER 2
A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World
As London is the great emporium of commerce, it is also the centre of attraction for the full exercise of talents, and the liberal display of all that can embellish the arts and sciences.
Mary Robinson, ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc.
etc. of the Metropolis of England’
London was like nowhere else in the world. Bigger than any other city in Europe, with a population more than ten times that of Bristol, it was a place of extremes. Riches and squalor, grandeur and wretchedness, appeared cheek-by-jowl. This was an era of unprecedented consumerism: for companionship and entertainment there were coffee houses, taverns, brothels, parks, pleasure gardens, and theatres. Above all there were shops. Napoleon had good reason to dismiss the English as a nation of shopkeepers. By the time of Mary’s arrival in the metropolis, London had one for every thirty residents. Oxford Street alone boasted over a hundred and fifty. Everything was on display, from plate laden in silversmiths’ shops to fruits and spices piled high on street-barrows. Tea, coffee, sugar, pepper, tobacco, chocolate, and textiles – the ‘fruits of empire’ – were sold in vast quantities.1 There were print shops, book shops, milliners, linen drapers, silk mercers, jewellery shops, shoe shops, toy shops, confectioners. London was the epicentre of fashion, a place to gaze and be gazed at. It was an urban stage, and few understood this as well as Mary.
For the young poet William Wordsworth, London’s inherent theatricality was disturbing. His section on ‘Residence in London’ in his autobiographical poem The Prelude describes with unease ‘the moving pageant’, the ‘shifting pantomimic scenes’, the ‘great stage’, and the ‘public shows’. For Wordsworth, the gaudy display and excessive showiness of the city signalled a lack of inner authenticity; ‘the quick dance of colours, lights and forms’ was an alarming ‘Babel din’.2 Mary Robinson also captured the cacophony of urban life in her poem ‘London’s Summer Morning’, but she relished what Wordsworth abhorred:
Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds
Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London? On the pavement hot
The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face
And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade,
Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door
The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell
Proclaims the dustman’s office, while the street
Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins
The din of hackney-coaches, wagons, carts;
While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers,
Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,
Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries
Of vegetable vendors, fill the air.
Now ev’ry shop displays its varied trade,
And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet
Of early walkers.3
She finds poetry in everything from the dustman to the ‘neat girl, / Tripping with bandbox lightly’ to the street vendor of second-hand clothes.
Mary was to experience London in its entirety, from debtors’ prison to parties given in her honour as the Prince’s consort at St James’s Palace. She became notorious for her self-promotion and her skill in anticipating the next new thing, be that in fashion or poetry. But she also grasped the very essence of urban culture in the late eighteenth century in a way that eluded Wordsworth. She knew that in order to survive and thrive in the new consumer society, she had to work to sell her wares. The literary marketplace was as crowded as the London streets and it took guts, brashness, and ostentation to make your voice heard – especially if you were a woman.
She must have felt some trepidation at meeting Garrick: ‘King’ David, the man who had single-handedly transformed the theatre world, acting on stage with unprecedented naturalism, producing behind the scenes with prodigious energy, and above all conferring on his profession a respectability it had never had before.
The 14-year-old girl was summoned to the actor’s elegant and grand new house in Adelphi Terrace, designed by the fashionable Adam brothers and overlooking the Thames. The Garricks had recently moved there and had furnished it lavishly. Mary would have entered through the large hall, with its imposing pillars, and then been shown into the magnificent first-floor drawing room, with its elaborate plaster ceiling crowned by a central circular panel of Venus surrounded by nine medallion paintings of the Graces. Garrick would have soon put her at ease with his good humour and liveliness. His wife, Eva Maria Veigel, a former dancer, was usually at his side and was especially considerate to young girls, as the future dramatist and novelist Fanny Burney testified when she visited the Garricks at their new house the same year: ‘Mrs Garrick received us with a politeness and sweetness of manners, inseparable from her.’4
Garrick, always susceptible to beauty, was captivated by Mary’s loveliness. Her voice reminded him of Susannah Cibber, an actress and singer he had favoured in his youth. An added attraction came in the form of Mary’s long, shapely legs, ideal for the highly popular ‘breeches roles’ that were required of actresses on the Georgian stage. In an age when women wore full-length dresses all the time, the actress who cross-dressed in boys’ clothing – as Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola, and in dozens of similar roles in eighteenth-century comedies – provided a unique spectacle: the public exhibition of the shape of a female leg.
Garrick’s personal interest was in no sense salacious. His faith in this young unknown was typical of his unfailing support for women in the theatre. His patronage of female actresses and female playwrights was highly unusual in a society that discouraged women from the stage and still regarded actresses as little better than prostitutes. Garrick ‘discovered’ many a young actress and gave playwrights such as Hannah More and Hannah Cowley their first break. In return these young women adored him and his wife.
He offered to train Mary for the part of Cordelia to his own King Lear in the version of Shakespeare’s tragedy that he had reworked from Nahum Tate’s Restoration era adaptation, in which Cordelia is happily married off to Edgar instead of being hanged. Garrick was now in his fifties, beginning to suffer from gout and gallstones. He was conserving his energy, limiting the number of his appearances on stage. Lear, which he had been playing since he was 25, was not only one of his most celebrated but also one of his most demanding roles. This late in his career, it was an extraordinary gamble to entrust Cordelia to a complete unknown. He and Mary spent hours preparing for her debut in the role.
But it was not all work: in the Memoirs, she draws a charming picture of them dancing minuets (Garrick was an excellent dancer) and singing the favourite ballads of the day. Her memory remained vivid: ‘Never shall I forget the enchanting hours which I passed in Mr Garrick’s society: he appeared to me as one who possessed more power, both to awe and to attract, than any man I ever met with.’5 She also noticed his dark side: ‘His smile was fascinating; but he had at times a restless peevishness of tone which excessively affected his hearer; at least it affected me so that I never shall forget it.’ His temper was renowned. Fanny Burney reported in her diary that Dr Johnson attributed Garrick’s faults to ‘the fire and hastiness of his temper’. Burney loved Garrick and was mesmerized by the lustre of his ‘brilliant, piercing eyes’, but she also noted that ‘he is almost perpetually giving offence to some of his friends’.6 Others could feel irritated by his attention-seeking behaviour. As his friend Oliver Goldsmith put it, he was always natural, simple and unaffected on stage – ‘’Twas only when he was off, he was acting.’7
Garrick had a genius for self-publicity and was astonishingly energetic: in the light of Mary’s subsequent career, one might say that he was her perfect role model. Mary adored him and took his advice seriously. He advised her to frequent Drury Lane and f
amiliarize herself with its practices before she made her debut. She quickly became known as Garrick’s new protégée and drew a swarm of admirers. This was Mary’s first taste of celebrity and she loved the ‘buzz’ (her term). While Hester fretted about her daughter’s reputation, Mary was confident that she could tread the thin line between fame and infamy: ‘my ardent fancy was busied in contemplating a thousand triumphs, in which my vanity would be publicly gratified, without the smallest sacrifice of my private character’.8
Hester worried that her daughter was making too much of a stir amongst the young rakes who frequented the theatre just to flirt with the latest ingénue. She kept her eye on one man in particular. In her Memoirs Mary described him as a graceful and handsome officer – a Captain – who was very well connected, though she declined to name him. After a brief courtship, and offers of marriage, Hester discovered that he was already married. Mary was informed of the deception, but brushed it off: ‘I felt little regret in the loss of a husband, when I reflected that a matrimonial alliance would have compelled me to relinquish my theatrical profession.’ Another rich suitor came forward at this time, but, to Mary’s horror, he was old enough to be her grandfather. She had set her heart on being an actress: ‘the drama, the delightful drama, seemed the very criterion of all human happiness’.9
She was naturally flirtatious and her beauty attracted a stream of admirers. One of her most persistent suitors was a young solicitor’s clerk, who lived across the way from her lodgings. He would sit in the window staring at the fresh-faced Mary. He was languorous and sickly looking, which would have appealed to a girl of strong ‘sensibility’. Mrs Darby’s response to the flirtation was to keep the lower shutters of the windows permanently closed. Fancying ‘every man a seducer, and every hour an hour of accumulating peril’, she sighed for the day when her daughter would be ‘well married’.10