Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  She resumed some of her old habits, campaigning for the Foxite candidate Lord John Townshend in the Westminster election, mingling with the set that surrounded the dissipated royal princes, and sometimes appearing in public: ‘The Perdita, notwithstanding her long indisposition, still keeps her good looks: she sports an elegant vis-à-vis, and her dress and liveries are in corresponding style.’17 But physical and financial constrictions meant that she was a shadow of her former self. She also discovered on her return from the Continent that the mood of the times had changed. The public had, for the while, tired of the endless diet of gossip and scandal in the press. Commentators noted that the columns of the papers were no longer filled with the daily doings of the courtesans and fashion leaders:

  It was not without much indignation that I used to observe the paragraphs respecting our most elegant demi-reps with which the public prints abounded … Of late, however, I observe, that these articles are discontinued, and the publick are no more pestered with the names of Perdita and the Bird of Paradise, with the descriptions of their carriages, the colour of their liveries, and the names of their keepers.18

  Even the Rambler’s Magazine had taken a marked turn towards decency. The very absence of Perdita from the London scene may have been a contributory cause of this more general change. Shrewd as ever, Mary saw, perhaps with relief, that there would have been no point in trying to recapture past glories, even had it been physically possible to do so. Her own remaking of herself befitted the new world to which she had returned.

  For Jane Porter, the novelist who later befriended Mrs Robinson, the years of exile and wandering on the Continent were the turning point in Mary’s life. According to Porter’s unpublished ‘Character of the Late Mrs Robinson’, she made a conscious decision at this time to spurn the great and the good in favour of the secluded literary life: ‘She now dedicated all her time to the culture of her understanding.’19 Maria Elizabeth’s continuation of her mother’s Memoirs also dated the commencement of her full-time literary career to this period. And a satirical poem of 1788, The Promenade: or, Theatre of Beauty, singled her out as something very unusual for the time: a beauty with brains.

  Next R-b-ns-n majestic swims along,

  And adds new beauties to the enchanting throng,

  Engaging Manners with a polish’d Mind,

  Give her distinction mid the most refin’d.20

  It was the ‘polish’d Mind’ that would dominate her endeavours for the rest of her life.

  On 11 June 1788, the King was seized with a bilious fever; he suffered from violent stomach spasms and bowel movements. After a couple of months’ remission, his condition deteriorated rapidly in October and he began to exhibit alarming signs of mental derangement. We now know that he was suffering from a metabolic disorder, porphyria, but at the time it was believed that he had gone mad. His Majesty was locked up at Kew and a specialist doctor, Francis Willis, was called in. The King mouthed obscenities, behaved erratically, and often had to be secured with a straitjacket. A restraining chair, which the King called his ‘Coronation chair’, was installed at the palace. It was widely assumed that his indisposition would prove permanent, if not fatal, and that the Prince of Wales would have to take his place. On 15 December, Fox wrote to Elizabeth Armistead, ‘At any rate the Prince must be Regent and of consequence the ministry must be changed … The King himself (notwithstanding the reports you may possibly hear) is certainly worse and perfectly mad.’21 The Prime Minister, Pitt, tabled proposals for a restricted Regency, giving the Prince limited powers; after much debate, a Regency Bill was passed in February 1789. The Whigs were delighted that the Prince to whom they were so close was on the verge of becoming Regent, but their hopes were almost immediately dashed – with the Bill just days from becoming law, the King recovered.

  Mary’s thoughts on the prospect of her ex-lover becoming de facto monarch are not recorded. But in the public mind she remained a player in the Prince’s drama. A satirical pamphlet entitled The Death and Dissection, Funeral Procession and Will, of Mrs Regency (with ‘An Address to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’) celebrated the end of the crisis and the dashing of Whig aspirations. It included amongst the mourners of ‘Mrs Regency’ the ‘Cyprian Corps’, processing ‘two and two, dressed in weeds, and preceded by Mrs BENWELL and Mrs ARMISTEAD supporting poor PERDITA ROBINSON, in the last stage of an incontinent consumption’. ‘Perdita’ sings ‘with a melancholy voice’ the old song of ‘When I was a young one, what girl was like me, / So wanton, so airy – so brisk as a bee.’ This satire is truer than it knows: ‘Perdita’ may indeed be said to have expired contemporaneously with the first Regency crisis – her name was rarely seen again in the gossip columns of the newspapers. She would not, however, disappear from the public stage altogether, though she now planned a very different and difficult reinvention: Mrs Robinson would put the ‘impure sisterhood’ far behind her, restore her much-tarnished reputation, and remake herself as a woman of letters and of genius.

  CHAPTER 18

  Laura Maria

  She then took up new life in London, became literary, brought up her daughter literary, and expressed without qualification her rage when her works were not urged forward beyond all others.

  Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs

  Tarleton resumed his old life of gambling and playing the man about town. The Prince of Wales was often seen at Tarleton’s faro club or attending prize fights with him. Mary, meanwhile, concentrated on her poetry. Though she appeared less frequently in public, she still moved in the best circles. Her daughter recounts how the Prince himself resumed his friendship with her: ‘Once more established in London, and surrounded by social and rational friends, Mrs Robinson began to experience comparative tranquillity. The Prince of Wales, with his brother the Duke of York, frequently honoured her residence with their presence.’1

  Mary’s work was interrupted when her beloved daughter fell ill with suspected consumption: ‘Maternal solicitude for a beloved and only child now wholly engaged her attention: her assiduities were incessant and exemplary, for the restoration of a being to whom she had given life, and to whom she was fondly devoted.’2 In the summer of 1788, Mary was recommended to go to the seaside resort of Brighton for the sake of her health. Sea-bathing was the latest vogue in healthcare. Tarleton had suffered a groin injury during a game of cricket, and Maria Elizabeth was still sick, so they all went to recuperate.

  Mary devoted herself to the care of her daughter, feeling detached from her past life. According to Maria Elizabeth’s continuation of the Memoirs, she ‘beguiled her anxiety by contemplating the ocean, whose successive waves, breaking upon the shore, beat against the wall of their little garden’. Often she would spend the whole night at the window, looking out to sea and ‘in deep meditation’ contrasting ‘the scenes of her former life’ with her present circumstances.3

  In this account, Mary is portrayed very much in the manner of the second Reynolds portrait: a woman of contemplation, gazing at the sea. There can be no doubt that she was a devoted mother, but it is questionable whether she spent all her days and nights at Brighton by her daughter’s sickbed. After all, her own mother Hester was there to help (though she is barely mentioned in the latter part of the Memoirs), and for that matter Brighton was not so very different from ‘the scenes of her former life’: most of the fashionable world, including the Prince’s secret wife Mrs Fitzherbert, had decamped there for the summer.

  Contrary to Maria Elizabeth’s image of her mother having been completely severed from her former life, Mary at this time is best described as semi-detached from the ton. The Prince was now her acquaintance rather than her lover and she did not wish to be considered solely as Tarleton’s partner. She began to create a new circle of friendship for herself. It was developed not at social gatherings in the assembly rooms but on paper through poetic correspondence. Crutches were no impediment to a written self-image.

  In 1785 a group of expatriate poets based in T
uscany had published an anthology called The Florence Miscellany. Their leader, Robert Merry, called himself ‘Della Crusca’. The names of Merry and his colleagues such as William Parsons and Bertie Greatheed are now known only to a handful of literary historians, but in the late 1780s the ‘Della Cruscan’ style – flowery, effusive, artificial – was quite the rage. These poets were unashamedly concerned with style more than substance: ‘Like theatrical dresses if tinsel’d enough, / The tinsel one stares at, nor thinks of the stuff’ say the dedicatory lines to The Florence Miscellany. The Della Cruscans were mocked by the critics for their ornamental excess – their taste for words such as ‘lawny’, ‘streamy’, ‘paly’ and ‘pearly’ – but they were admired by readers for their fertility of invention. The Della Cruscans became characterized by their spontaneous, improvisatory quality: they would dash off lines to each other, responding at great speed supposedly in the white heat of pure inspiration.

  William Wordsworth heartily disliked what he perceived as the strained artificiality of the Della Cruscans. Their flowery and ornate style could not have been further from his project to reinvigorate poetry by means of communion with sublime mountains and the sincere feelings of Lakeland shepherds. Della Cruscan verse had the same self-consciously theatrical quality that made Wordsworth uncomfortable in the streets of London. The language of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by contrast, was strongly influenced by the Della Cruscans: when he writes in his early poems of ‘dewy light’, ‘tear’s ambrosial dew’ and ‘temples with Hymettian flow’rets wreathed’, he could be a Della Cruscan himself.4

  Robert Merry returned to England and published a poem under the pseudonym ‘Della Crusca’ in the newly launched newspaper, The World. Entitled ‘Adieu and Recall to Love’, it expressed his disillusionment with love and invited the public to assist him in finding Cupid again. A reply was soon published under the name ‘Anna Matilda’: ‘O! seize again thy golden quill, / And with its point my bosom thrill.’5 The poetry-reading public was captivated and the press began to speculate on the identity of the couple. Week by week, their poems to each other appeared, first mildly flirtatious, then notably erotic. It was over a year before they met. Some of Merry’s poetic friends knew who ‘Anna Matilda’ really was: Hannah Cowley, successful comic dramatist, 45, married, respectable, with several children, overweight and showing her age. They kept this information from Merry, fearing that his Muse would dry up on the discovery that she was not in the first flush of youth and beauty. Only with the intervention of a third poetic lover, Mary Robinson, did the long-anticipated meeting between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda take place.

  In the autumn of 1788, Mary, writing under the name Laura – the name, that is, of the love-object of Petrarch, father of the sonnet form – published in The World a lyric called ‘To him who will understand it’.* The poem begins

  Thou art no more my bosom’s Friend;

  Here must the sweet delusion end,

  That charm’d my senses many a year,

  Thro’ smiling summers, winters drear. –

  ‘Laura’ then threatens to leave England and take comfort in Italy, where she will find solace through poetry and philosophy:

  Britain, Farewell! I quit thy shore,

  My native Country charms no more;

  No guide to mark the toilsome road;

  No destin’d clime; no fix’d abode;

  Alone and sad, ordain’d to trace

  The vast expanse of endless space …

  Sweet Poetry shall soothe my soul;

  Philosophy each pang controul:

  The Muse I’ll seek, her lambent fire

  My soul’s quick senses shall inspire.

  The poem appeared with a strong puff from John Bell, editor of The World: ‘more fanciful and pathetic lines are scarcely to be understood in the whole body of English Literature’.6

  The ‘him who will understand it’ was, of course, Tarleton. Mary had convinced herself that he was being unfaithful to her and that their relationship was near its end. But this was not information available to readers of the text published in the newspaper; they had no idea that ‘Laura’ was actually ‘Perdita’. Robert Merry read the poem and assumed that it was a contribution to the ongoing poetic dialogue between ‘Della Crusca’ and ‘Anna Matilda’. The ‘him who will understand it’ was surely himself! Now he had a second female poet swooning at his feet. He penned a reply ‘To Laura’, assuring her that all his ‘soul was sympathy’.

  ‘Anna Matilda’ was not pleased. She was jealous and angry with this new flirtation in print: ‘False Lover!’ she wrote. ‘Truest Poet! now farewell!’ Mary as ‘Laura’ responded with a conciliatory poem in praise of ‘Anna Matilda’, and ‘Della Crusca’ proclaimed ‘Heaven of my Heart! Again I hear / Thy long-lost voice.’ ‘Anna Matilda’ was pacified. She published a tantalizing new poem – ‘Ambiguous Nature form’d the female heart’ – that inspired Merry to go to his friends and demand the real name of his longstanding poetic correspondent.7 As if walking on air, he hurried to Mrs Cowley’s house in Cateaton Street – or Cateaton Bowers as he poetically insisted on calling it – only to be deflated by the middle-aged, distinctly unsylphlike figure of the distinguished female dramatist. He had obviously not paid enough attention to the references in her poems to her ‘diminished beauty’.8

  It quickly became public knowledge that Della Crusca was Merry and Anna Matilda Cowley. ‘Laura’ continued to publish widely admired lyrics in The World. They were quoted at fashionable gatherings, reprinted in provincial newspapers, in magazines, and in anthologies with titles such as The Poetry of The World (1788) and The British Album (1790). But it was some time before she revealed her identity. The Morning Post stirred up interest: ‘Of all the Della Crusca school, of the World, the public is well acquainted with all the writers except the plaintive Laura … Mr Merry and Mrs Cowley exult in their poetic fame, while the elegant Laura continues to charm the town under a fictitious signature.’9 Tribute poems were addressed to ‘Laura’, and even the Bluestocking Society of learned ladies, under the leadership of the formidable Elizabeth Montagu, ‘ventured to admire, nay more, to recite her productions in their learned and critical coterie’.10 They might not have done so had they known who ‘Laura’ really was.

  After some months of such gratifying praise, Mary decided to test public reaction to the true identity of ‘Laura’ by sending her next poem to The World under her own name. She also claimed authorship of all the lines signed ‘Laura’. John Bell, the publisher, replied that the poem was ‘vastly pretty’, and that he was an admirer of the genius of Mrs Robinson, but that she could not have been the author of the ‘Laura’ poems because ‘he was well acquainted with the author of the productions alluded to’. A ‘little disgusted at this incredulity’, Mary immediately sent for Bell, ‘whom she found means to convince of her veracity, and of his own injustice’.11

  Around this time, the two poetry editors who worked for Bell at The World, Captain Edward Topham and the Reverend Charles Este, had a quarrel as a result of which Este moved to a new paper, the Oracle, established by means of a takeover of the Public Advertiser and also published by Bell. Este, a Reader of the Chapel Royal in Whitehall, was the better connected of the two. He persuaded Mary to move with him to the Oracle. ‘We are happy to introduce to Public View any Specimen of Classic Elegance, however short,’ that paper announced. ‘The following little Sonnet, RELISHES of the true Attic Taste; it breathes the tender Strain of SAPPHO with the soft pathetic Melancholy of COLLINS.’12 ‘Laura’ – or rather ‘Laura Maria’ as she now signed herself, combining her own name with that of Petrarch’s beloved – was thus praised for combining the qualities of Sappho, the most famous female poet of antiquity, with those of one of the most admired lyric poets of the later eighteenth century, William Collins. Later, Mary would earn the title ‘the English Sappho’. The Oracle trumpeted its exclusive hold on her effusions: ‘LAURA MARIA is received. It shall be our pride to pay the most respectful attention
to her truly elegant Poetical Effusions. To the preference given us, we are by no means insensible; and we anxiously hope for the future communication of this Favourite of the Muses.’ And again, a few days later: ‘LAURA MARIA has already acquired Fame, sufficient to excite curiosity and impatience whenever her Productions are announced – that Fame sprang from The ORACLE – To the ORACLE let her Productions, and the CONSEQUENT FAME, be confined.’13

  Mary effectively became the house poet of the Oracle. The Della Cruscan triangle followed her there: Hannah Cowley, still smarting from the way in which ‘Laura Maria’ had replaced ‘Anna Matilda’ in the affections of ‘Della Crusca’, published ‘a most malignant unwomanly attack on the authenticity of Mrs Robinson’s productions’, which inspired James Boaden, another poet in the Oracle group (and subsequently the paper’s editor), to write verses in her defence under his signature ‘Arno’. Mary herself responded with a somewhat inflated ode ‘To the Muse of Poetry’.14 Though her first loyalty was to the Oracle, Mary also published elsewhere. She cleverly used a variety of pen names, keeping Laura Maria for the Oracle. As ‘Julia’ she carried on a poetic correspondence with ‘Arno’ (James Boaden) in a number of papers; as ‘Oberon’ she wrote ‘Fairy Rhymes’. On other occasions she was Daphne, Echo, and Louisa.