Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  She later regretted her part in the Della Cruscan vogue: ‘dazzled by the false metaphors and rhapsodical extravagance of some contemporary writers, she suffered her judgment to be misled and her taste to be perverted: an error of which she became afterwards sensible’.15 So what drew her to the style in the first place? The answer seems to have been the poetic disguise, the possibility of experimenting with different voices. By clothing herself in a variety of new written dresses, she was able to put ‘Perdita’ behind her. At the same time, she was flattered to have male poets swooning at her feet in verse: literary love affairs became a substitute for the adoration of princes and politicians. She also liked the dash – the spontaneous, improvisatory quality – of the Della Cruscans. As she became a more experienced writer, she turned herself into one of the fastest pens in the business. This was a necessity if she was to make a living by means of her writing. Another factor was quite simply her desire to play for popularity: Della Cruscanism was flavour of the month, so she became a Della Cruscan.

  Interestingly, Maria Elizabeth’s continuation of the Memoirs tends to play down the importance of the Della Cruscan influence on Mary. It offers an account of the genesis of ‘Lines to him who will understand them’ and a number of other key poems that by-pass the story of Merry and Cowley. Here, the flowering of the poetic Muse is attributed not to participation in a literary vogue but to Mary’s emotional state in Brighton in the summer of 1788, when she was caring for her sick daughter:

  In the intervals of more active exertion, the silence of a sick chamber proving favourable to the muse, Mrs Robinson poured forth those poetic effusions, which have done so much honour to her genius, and decked her tomb with unfading laurels. Conversing one evening with Mr Richard Burke – son of the celebrated Edmund Burke – respecting the facility with which modern poetry was composed, Mrs Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those beautiful lines, which were afterwards given to the public, addressed – ‘To him who will understand them’.16

  Young Burke, says Maria Elizabeth, was astonished when Mary told him that the poem was an ‘improvisatore’ and that this was the first time of its being repeated. In Maria Elizabeth’s account, he asked her to commit the poem to writing and it was published in the Annual Register with a flattering encomium from the editor, the distinguished politician and man of letters Edmund Burke. The Annual Register did, indeed, print the poem, but not until 1791, three years after its first appearance in The World.

  According to Maria Elizabeth, the melancholy and depression of spirits from which her mother suffered around this time inspired some of her best verses: ‘Mrs Robinson continued to indulge in this solace for her dejected spirits, and in sonnets, elegies, and odes, displayed the powers and versatility of her mind.’17 The extent to which Tarleton was the cause of her dejection of spirits is not made clear: Maria Elizabeth plays down his importance in her mother’s life, confining his presence in the continuation of the Memoirs to a single footnote.

  Maria Elizabeth preferred to continue her mother’s story with some of the Gothic and romantic touches that had characterized the first part of the narrative, which Mary completed before her death. So it was that the continuation gave considerable space to a strange incident that happened during the summer in Brighton:

  On one of these nights of melancholy inspiration, she discovered from her window a small boat, struggling in the spray, which dashed against the wall of her garden. Presently two fishermen brought on shore in their arms a burthen, which, notwithstanding the distance, Mrs Robinson perceived to be a human body, which the fishermen, after covering with a sail from their boat, left on the land and disappeared. But a short time elapsed before the men returned, bringing with them fuel, with which they vainly endeavoured to reanimate their unfortunate charge. Struck with a circumstance so affecting, which the stillness of the night rendered yet more impressive, Mrs Robinson remained for some time at her window motionless with horror. At length, recovering her recollection, she alarmed the family; but before they could gain the beach, the men had again departed. The morning dawned, and day broke in upon the tragical scene. The bathers passed and repassed with little concern, while the corpse continued, extended on the shore, not twenty yards from the STEINE. During the course of the day, many persons came to look on the body, which still remained unclaimed and unknown.

  The local Justice of the Peace and ‘Lord of the Manor’ refused to bury the body as the dead man ‘did not belong to that parish’. Mary was outraged by this injustice and tried to set up a subscription to bury the body, but without success. She gave her own contribution to the local fishermen without revealing her identity, sensitive as ever to the power of her name. The subscription scheme came to nothing and ‘the body of the stranger, being dragged to the cliff, was covered by a heap of stone, without the tribute of a sigh or the ceremony of a prayer’.18

  The incident of the abandoned corpse, never claimed by family or friend and left to rot on the beach, made a lasting impression on Mary. For many years after the event she could not repeat the tale without ‘horror and indignation’. Just a few months before her death, she reworked the incident into one of her best poems, greatly admired by Coleridge, ‘The Haunted Beach’. The incident also seems to have been one of the forces that conspired to take her in the direction of the Gothic novel, a form in which she started writing soon after this and with which she continued for the rest of her life – when she died, she left an unfinished novel called Jasper, which begins with a beach and a shipwreck. A drowned sailor, an exile whose identity is lost, an isolated death far from friends and family: the fate of her own father and fears for her own end undoubtedly played their part in the genesis of ‘The Haunted Beach’ and related works.

  There was a period of estrangement from Tarleton, but in the summer of 1789 they were together again in Brighton. Mary’s health continued to be erratic, but she seems to have found contentment by putting her energies into her literary career. The long hot summer by the sea passed with the ton oblivious to the consequences of events across the English Channel, where the Bastille was stormed on 14 July, heralding the French Revolution. Cricket – with heavy betting on the results – was the latest fashionable pursuit:

  Last Friday a match at Cricket was played, on the Flat near Brighton; the DUKE of YORK [the Prince of Wales’s brother] on one side, and Colonel TARLETON on the other; who chose eleven each, one innings, which was not played out for want of time. The DUKE’S side fetched in their innings 292; Colonel TARLETON’S 70, having five wickets to go down. The same Gentlemen play again on Wednesday for 100 guineas; Colonel TARLETON to have Streeter the Miller.19

  One day Tarleton and some other young blades were taking a turn on the cricket ground when they encountered ‘Jew’ King the moneylender. They hatched a plan to keelhaul him on a yacht, with Mary sitting on the deck watching, as if in revenge for his publication of the Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite so many years before. But King got wind of the plot and skipped town just in time.20 Mary, meanwhile, was almost becoming her old self again: ‘Mrs Robinson on Friday launched an elegant Phaeton, and four beautiful Grey Ponies. – She was attended by Colonel Tarleton, her constant and cher ami. Mrs Robinson is daily recovering from her long indisposition.’21

  The following summer, Tarleton went to his home city of Liverpool to fight for a seat in Parliament. He set up headquarters in Bold Street and launched himself into a bitterly fought, violent campaign. The question of the slave trade was of pressing concern in the seaport that was the hub of traffic in human flesh. Nationally, the abolition movement was gaining ground, but for Tarleton’s family and many of the Liverpool voters the slave trade was the basis of prosperity. Tarleton’s association with Mary was used in the campaign against him: a procession, led by five local clergymen, marched through the streets in protest. Tarleton responded with some theatrical tricks that sound as if they were learnt from his partner’s Shakespearean past: like Coriolanus (though without the reluctance)
he held up his hand to show that he had given his fingers for king and country, rolled up his sleeve to show the scars where the enemy’s sword had ripped his arm; then he transformed himself into Henry V and recited the Crispin’s Day speech. He was victorious, and returned to London in triumph. It was widely assumed that Mary had written his speeches for him.

  Mary’s elder brother John died in Italy that year. Her thoughts, meanwhile, were turning to another kind of brotherhood: the universal fraternité, which, together with liberté and égalité, had been proclaimed by the revolutionaries in Paris. The Della Cruscans were liberal, cosmopolitan Europhiles, so they welcomed the French Revolution in its early days. Merry wrote a long poem called ‘Laurel of Liberty’, dedicated ‘with every sentiment of admiration and respect’ to the ‘National Assembly of France, the true and Zealous representatives of a Free People’. He vowed to leave Cupid behind and instead devote his poetry to Freedom and Humanity, Reason and Truth.

  On reading ‘The Laurel of Liberty’, Mary wrote an immediate response. It took her less than twelve hours to produce some 350 lines entitled Ainsi va le Monde (‘thus goes the world’). Dedicated to Merry, it is an open avowal of revolutionary sympathies, complete with an attack on the ancien régime and an account of the storming of the Bastille. It ends with a rousing apostrophe to freedom:

  Freedom – blithe goddess of the rainbow vest,

  In dimpled smiles and radiant beauties drest,

  I court thee from thy azure-spangled bed …

  Hark! ‘Freedom’ echoes thro’ the vaulted skies.

  The Goddess speaks! O mark the blest decree, –

  TYRANTS SHALL FALL – TRIUMPHANT MAN BE FREE!22

  John Bell published the poem as a sixteen-page pamphlet in June 1790, at exactly the time that Tarleton was campaigning against the freedom of slaves up in Liverpool – but political differences do not seem to have made Mary and Tarleton love each other any the less. Ainsi va le Monde went into a second edition and was translated into French – understandably, the English original ‘acquired great popularity in Paris’.23 In London, it was very well received by the critics: ‘This poetic address to Mr Merry gives us a favourable opinion, in a general view, of the literary abilities of the fair writer, Mrs Robinson’; ‘we think she is entitled to, and will obtain praise from a much more honourable cause [than praising Merry], her own merit. That her political talents are no way inferior to his; and her patriotism, or rather political sentiments, more just and rational, will appear from the lines quoted’; ‘These verses, which the world owes to the pen of the celebrated Perdita, though the flash of a moment, are not a flash without fire. They discover a very refined sensibility, connected with considerable riches of fancy, and correctness of taste.’24 Partly because of her skill in testing public opinion via the pen name Laura Maria, Mary had now succeeded in publishing a highly successful poem in her own name. The reviews were so good that it did not matter to her that one of them still referred to her as ‘the celebrated Perdita’.

  In the summer of 1790, when Ainsi va le Monde was written and published, opinion in Britain was still broadly supportive of the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille seemed to have brought down a tyrannical regime and introduced into France the liberal and democratic principles on which the British had prided themselves for a hundred years. But the tide turned as blood was spilt in the prisons and streets of Paris. With the establishment of the Jacobin ‘terror’ one tyranny had replaced another. Inevitably, there was a political backlash against the Della Cruscan poets who had welcomed the revolution so warmly. William Gifford, subsequently editor of the influential right-wing Quarterly Review, attacked the movement in satirical poems called The Baviad (1794) and The Maeviad (1795). He lashed out at the female Della Cruscans, making a particularly cruel jibe about Mary’s disability:

  See Cowley frisk it to one ding-dong chime,

  And weakly cuckold her poor spouse in rhyme …

  See Thrale’s grey widow with a satchel roam,

  And bring, in pomp, her labour’d nothings home;

  See Robinson forget her state, and move,

  On crutches tow’rds the grave, to ‘Light o’ Love’ …

  Some love the verse that like Maria’s flows,

  No rubs to stagger, and no sense to pose;

  Which read, and read, you raise your eyes in doubt,

  And gravely wonder – what it is about.25

  The ‘Thrale’ mentioned here was Dr Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale, who was also a Della Cruscan poet. In sharp contrast to Gifford, she made a point of defending Mary, going out of her way to deny malicious rumours that Mrs Robinson’s illness was caused by a sexually transmitted disease or somehow the result of her sexual promiscuity.26 Gifford himself could not resist another twist of the knife even after Mary’s death. He added a new footnote to his poem: ‘This wretched woman, indeed, in the wane of her beauty fell into merited poverty, exchanged poetry for politics, and wrote abusive trash against the government at the rate of two guineas a week for the Morning Post.’27 As Gifford’s great enemy William Hazlitt said, such ‘attacks on Mrs Robinson were unmanly’.28

  Mary came to regret her involvement with the Della Cruscan movement for aesthetic reasons, not political ones. Her poetic style moved forward, but her politics of freedom remained consistent. Her rejection of Della Cruscan tinsel is apparent from her novel Walsingham (1797), where she parodies Robert Merry as the melancholy poet Doleful, who writes:

  The silver moon shall light the hills to dance,

  The golden sun shall drink old ocean dry,

  The sapphire mountains shrink to vallies low,

  The day be black, the midnight welkin glow,

  Ere truth and reason shall be hurl’d from France,

  And Liberty in chains a captive lie.

  This provokes an ecstatic literary critical commentary from ‘Mr Optic’ (an affectionate burlesque of another poetic friend, John Taylor, the royal oculist),

  ‘There’s fancy, variety, epithet, pathos, metaphor, allegory, and climax! Never talk of the old school mistress, the turner of couplets, or the inspired milk-woman – or Laura, or your Annas and Matildas, your Sapphos and Petrarchs – or your Maeviads and your Baeviads! – Doleful is the very cream of poetry – rich, pure, flowing, sweet! – the fountain of Helicon – the flowery top of the Parnassus!’29

  Doleful is mocked for his mechanical adjectives and his florid metaphors. Looking back on the Della Cruscan movement Mary finds an implicit contradiction between their democratic sympathies and their refined poetic style, which appealed principally to an elite taste: ‘“That is the only reason why I admire the poetry of the present age,” cried the Duke Heartwing: “I detest every thing that the multitude can partake of”.’30

  Building on the success of ‘Laura Maria’ in the Oracle, Mary prepared a collection of her poems for the press. Her home in Clarges Street became a meeting place for an array of literary figures. Among her regular visitors were editors – John Taylor, the former royal eye-doctor who had turned to journalism and become the editor of the Morning Post, and James Boaden, who took over as editor of the Oracle and exchanged many poems with Mary – and poets, notably the satirist John Wolcot (who wrote under the name Peter Pindar) and clergyman-turned-actor-turned-bookseller and all-round writer Samuel Jackson Pratt (who mostly published as ‘Courtney Melmoth’ and remained a close friend for the rest of Mary’s life). She found a particular admirer in one of Tarleton’s fellow officers, Lieutenant General ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne, playwright, poet, and socialite. His tributary poem was typical of the verses that were constantly being laid at her feet:

  Laura! when from thy beauteous eyes,

  The tear of tender anguish flows;

  Such magic in thy sorrow lies,

  That ev’ry bosom shares thy woes.

  When on thy lovely perfect face,

  The sportive dimpled smile we see;

  With eager hope the cause we trace,


  And wish to share each bliss with thee.

  For in thy highly gifted mind,

  Superior charms so sweetly blend;

  In each such gentle grace we find,

  That Envy must thy worth commend.

  Oh! who can gaze upon that lip,

  That coral lip of brightest hue;

  Nor wish the honied balm to sip,

  More fresh, more sweet, than morning dew?

  But when thy true poetic lays,

  Pierce to the heart’s remotest cell;

  We feel the conscious innate praise,

  Which feeble language fails to tell.31

  Mary engaged John Bell to publish her new book of Poems. Not only was he the publisher of the newspapers where she had made her poetic name: he was also ‘Bookseller to His Royal Highness the PRINCE of Wales’. In the light of her personal history, it must have given Mary a certain satisfaction to have this affiliation blazoned across her title page. The book was published by subscription. That is to say, production costs were defrayed by purchasers paying their money (one guinea – a substantial sum for a volume of poetry) in advance, in return for being listed in the book itself. An impressive 600 subscribers signed up.

  The process of collecting names and putting the book through production took over a year. We know this because Mary kept the letter-wrappings in which subscribers sent in their names and used the backs of them many years later, when she was poor and short of paper, on which to write the manuscript of her Memoirs. On each letter-wrapping Mary wrote the correspondent’s name and these names may be matched with those in the subscription list to the Poems of 1791. The earliest letters are postmarked March 1790. The volume was eventually published – on royal vellum paper and bound in boards (unlike most books, which were sold unbound) – on 3 May 1791. On that day the Oracle proudly reported that ‘MRS ROBINSON this day presents the world with the long wished for, and admired Collection of Poems. The patronage MRS ROBINSON has received, does honour to this Nation.’ The subscription list reads like a who’s who of late Georgian high society. It is testimony to Mary’s continuing prominence in the genteel world, despite her vicissitudes of fortune.