Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  Miss Robinson, supposing that a request so unusual might proceed from the delirium excited by the opium, endeavoured in vain to dissuade her mother from her purpose. The spirit of inspiration was not to be subdued, and she repeated, throughout, the admirable poem of The Maniac, much faster than it could be committed to paper.

  She lay, while dictating, with her eyes closed, apparently in the stupor which opium frequently produces, repeating like a person talking in her sleep. This affecting performance, produced in circumstances so singular, does no less credit to the genius than to the heart of the author.

  On the ensuing morning, Mrs Robinson had only a confused idea of what had passed, nor could be convinced of the fact till the manuscript was produced. She declared, that she had been dreaming of mad Jemmy throughout the night, but was perfectly unconscious of having been awake while she composed the poem, or of the circumstances narrated by her daughter.6

  This narrative anticipates by several years English literature’s most famous story of drug-induced creativity: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of how he dreamed the poem of ‘Kubla Khan’ while under the influence of opium, but was only able to write down a fragment of it before being interrupted by the arrival of a ‘person on business from Porlock’. Literary historians have endlessly debated the veracity of Coleridge’s story of the poem’s origins: was there ever a full-scale vision or was the story invented as an excuse to justify the fragmentary nature of ‘Kubla Khan’? Who was the person from Porlock and how did he know that Coleridge was sheltering at a remote farmhouse in the Quantock hills? For that matter, did the person from Porlock really exist?

  ‘Kubla Khan’ seems to have been written in 1797, but it was not published until 1816. The earliest manuscript of the poem does not have the elaborate prefatory note concerning the person from Porlock. In 1800, Coleridge showed the unpublished ‘Kubla Khan’ to Mary. One of the last poems she wrote before her death was an ode to Coleridge that quoted several phrases from it. Mary’s ode was, indeed, the first published reference to the existence of ‘Kubla Khan’ (‘I’ll mark thy sunny dome, and view / Thy Caves of Ice, thy fields of dew!’).

  Did Coleridge share this particular poem with Mary because he knew of her involvement with opium? His concern for her health is apparent from a letter he sent to William Godwin:

  Have you seen Mrs Robinson lately? How is she? – Remember me in the kindest and most respectful phrases to her …[Humphry] Davy has discovered a perfectly new Acid, by which he has restored the use of limbs to persons who had lost them for many years, (one woman 9 years) in cases of supposed Rheumatism. At all events, Davy says, it can do no harm, in Mrs Robinson’s case – and if she will try it, he will make up a little parcel and write her a letter of instructions etc.7

  It is highly probable that Coleridge and Robinson discussed the imaginative effects of opium when they met. The sense of unconscious composition, the inability of the writing pen to keep up with the dreaming mind, the vanishing of the vision once the poet awakes: in all these respects there is an uncanny resemblance between Robinson’s account of the origin of her poem and Coleridge’s of the origin of his. Could it then be that Coleridge made up the story about the person from Porlock in order to give his poem the same kind of authenticity as ‘The Maniac’?8

  Mary’s poem about ‘Mad Jemmy’ was originally published as ‘Insanity’ in the Oracle in September 1791. As ‘The Maniac’ it appeared in her second volume of Poems. It has many references to what Coleridge, in another of his opium poems, called ‘the pains of sleep’. One stanza contains images of watching eyes, of cold, and of petrification that are highly characteristic of the opium dreams of the age, such as those described by Coleridge’s protégé Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater:

  Fix not thy steadfast gaze on me,

  Shrunk Atom of Mortality!

  Nor freeze my blood with thy distracted groan;

  Ah! Quickly turn those eyes away,

  They fill my soul with dire dismay!

  For dead and dark they seem, and almost chill’d to Stone!

  De Quincey knew both the poem and the account of its origins in Mary’s Memoirs.

  In the final stanza of Mary’s poem, the poet offers to share the pains of the maniac and calm him through her verses. Read in the context of daughter Maria Elizabeth’s persistent references to the way in which the writing of poetry served as a kind of balm for her mother, Mad Jemmy in a sense becomes the suffering Mary herself and the poem becomes a self-referential piece about the healing effects of poetry:

  Oh! Tell Me, tell me all thy pain;

  Pour to mine ear thy frenzied strain,

  And I will share thy pangs, and soothe thy woes!

  Poor Maniac! I will dry thy tears,

  And bathe thy wounds, and calm thy fears,

  And with soft Pity’s balm Enchant Thee To Repose.9

  Opium references also crop up in a range of other Mary Robinson poems. So, for instance, her ‘Ode to Health’ (1791) has ‘There I’ll press from herbs and flow’rs / Juices bless’d with opiate pow’rs, / Whose magic potency can heal / The throb of agonizing pain’ and an ‘Invocation’ in her 1793 Poems acknowledges that ‘From the Poppy I have ta’en / Mortal’s Balm, and mortal’s Bane!’10 Keats famously wrote in his ‘To a Nightingale’ of feeling the sensation of having drunk some ‘dull opiate’; Mary Robinson anticipated him by some twenty years in her ‘Ode to Apathy’:

  The poppy wreath shall bind my brows,

  Dead’ning the sense of pain;

  And while to thee I pay my vows,

  A chilling tide shall rush thro’ ev’ry vein,

  Pervade my heart, and ev’ry care beguile,

  While my wan cheek shall bear the vacant smile.11

  One of her last lyrics, ‘The Poet’s Garret’, describes the drug’s effect on the creative imagination in language that also foreshadows Keats in its mixture of archaism (‘yclept’) and yearning for poetic immortality:

  On a shelf,

  (Yclept a mantle-piece) a phial stands,

  Half fill’d with potent spirits! – spirits strong,

  Which sometimes haunt the poet’s restless brain,

  And fill his mind with fancies whimsical.

  Poor poet! Happy art thou, thus remov’d

  From pride and folly! for in thy domain

  Thou canst command thy subjects; fill thy lines;

  Wield th’ all-conquering weapon Heaven bestows

  On the grey goose’s wing! which, towering high,

  Bears thy sick fancy to Immortal Fame!12

  The ‘grey goose’s wing’ is, of course, the writer’s quill.

  Mary’s novels as well as her poems reveal the influence of opium. In Angelina, published in 1796, the heroine is prescribed opium to help her sleep and calm her feverish imagination. There is a reference to ‘the use of opiates, to tranquilize her irritated nerves, and, if possible, to deaden the powers of reflection’ and, some pages later, ‘again the powers of laudanum were called to our assistance; – by midnight they so far benumbed her faculties that she ceased to rave’. The effects of the drug are also compared to those of philosophical reflection:

  Years cannot heal the wound which sensibility receives, while the heart is warmly susceptible. – Philosophy may, like opium to the agonized, for a time deaden the acute torture of regret; but memory still survives the stupor which has benumbed the senses, and the fever returns with renovated fury; – we feel the malady with double force, because we are worn out with sorrow, weakened, and become less capable of encountering its poison.13

  Though written in the voice of a character in an epistolary novel, these words are clearly composed by a woman who knows from hard personal experience that opium is at once balm and bane. An accidental overdose of opium also furnishes a key plot twist in a later novel, Walsingham. All this suggests that Mary Robinson, not Samuel Taylor Coleridge, may legitimately be claimed as the originator of the English Romantic tr
adition of opium-inspired writing.

  Despite her ill health and depression, Mary kept a firm eye on public affairs. Like many of her Whig friends, she monitored events in France with alarm, as the Revolution they supported became increasingly militant. The King had been forced to reside in Paris, and was still head of state, but with the death of the moderate Comte de Mirabeau in April 1791, and the extremist Jacobins gaining ground, the prospect of a constitutional monarchy seemed increasingly unlikely. In June, the royal family fled Paris in the middle of the night in disguise but were arrested at Varennes and brought back to the capital, humiliated and defeated. The establishment of a republic was now a certainty.

  In England, the Whigs were split over their views of the Revolution. Mary’s friends Sheridan and Fox were on the side of the National Assembly, while Edmund Burke opposed it. In November 1790, Burke had published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which condemned both the French insurgents and their British sympathizers. Burke, who had seen Marie Antoinette in Versailles a decade earlier, described her in the most eloquent terms: she was ‘a delightful vision … glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy’. He condemned her fall from grace in a passionate denunciation: ‘Little did I dream that I should have lived to see disasters fallen upon her in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.’14

  Burke’s Reflections immediately inspired refutations in the form of Thomas Paine’s best-selling The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men. In April 1791, soon after the death of Mirabeau, Fox, who had welcomed the fall of the Bastille as the greatest event in the history of the world, rekindled a furore in Parliament when he claimed that the Revolution was ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which has ever been erected on the foundations of human integrity in any time or country’.15 In August Mary’s own contribution to the debate was published in the form of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France by a Friend to Humanity.

  Politically, Mary was torn between her sympathy for the Queen and her affiliation with the English supporters of the Revolution. She never forgot her encounter in 1781 with the Queen who had admired her so openly and approvingly. She had copied many of the Queen’s fashions and brought them to England. And she felt a special affinity with a woman who was demonized in the press: like Mary herself, Marie Antoinette had been the subject of scabrous and sometimes pornographic pamphlets. The Memoirs of Antonina of 1791, for instance, was written as an exposé of the Queen’s allegedly voracious sexual appetite, giving details of her lovers and her supposed lesbianism and drunkenness. Mary, remembering the Memoirs of Perdita with shame and anger, responded by portraying Marie Antoinette as a wronged wife and devoted mother.

  Mary’s pledge is to rescue Marie Antoinette from ‘the absurd fabrications, the ridiculous inuendoes [sic], the cruel sarcasms and unprecedented reproaches thrown upon the conduct of an illustrious Character’. ‘Though perpetually taunted with the barbarous insults of irritating malice; she has never, even for a moment, forgot that true, that innate dignity of character, which places the human soul far above the reach of sublunary calamity.’ Marie Antoinette’s beauty, intelligence, and innocence have made her the target of envious detractors: ‘Had she been less lovely, less amiable, she might have escaped the arrows of insidious envy; but when the tide of patriotic reformation flowed with impetuous fury, every private enemy, every petty detractor, enjoyed the triumph of revenge, and exultingly heaped the load of recreant malevolence on the defenceless bosom of a fallen and unfortunate woman.’16 This reads as if it were written as much about Mary herself as about Marie Antoinette.

  For Robinson, a ‘vacuity of mind, is the most dangerous calamity that can threaten humanity’. Marie Antoinette has intellectual and spiritual qualities, which ennoble her and render her worthy of compassion. In an impassioned plea, Mary asks:

  What has been the conduct of this august woman, since the memorable journey from Versailles? Has she not borne her sufferings, her humiliations, her anxieties, with the magnanimity of a Heroine, the philosophy of a Stoick? Has she not been loaded with reproaches, and branded with epithets, disgraceful to the enlightened humanity of a nation instinctively gifted with the most refined gallantry? Of what has she been accused, to authorise the virulence of rage, or the indecency of public insult? – NOTHING!17

  The rhetoric owes much to the treatment of the Queen in Burke’s Reflections, but unlike Burke Mary does not use a defence of Marie Antoinette as a pretext for an attack on the Revolution. She describes the overthrow of the ancien régime as ‘the most glorious achievement in the annals of Europe’. She also praises the members of the National Assembly who ‘by their eloquent debates, and temperate proceedings, have done honour to the French nation’. And, in direct answer to Burke, she says that it is in the power of the Assembly to prove ‘that the Days of Chivalry are not at an end; that as they have given innumerable testimonies of their patriotism and judgment, they also cherish the laudable and dignified sentiment of justice and humanity’.18 She urges her readers to give the new French Government one more chance.

  The more personal question on her mind at this time was whether or not to give Tarleton another chance. Not for the first time, he had been unfaithful to her. Late in 1791 he moved in with his ‘low caprice’, as Mary described his new woman. On 12 December, Mary published a poem in the Oracle, signed ‘Julia’ and addressed ‘To——’, with an epigraph from Shakespeare reading ‘I will instruct my sorrows to be proud.’ To those in her circle, this was a public acknowledgement of her separation from Tarleton. ‘My mind resists thy poison’d dart,’ she wrote, ‘And conscious pride sustains my heart.’

  Tarleton had left her before and always soon returned. This time, he kept her waiting. Mary threw herself into her writing, believing as always that it was the best cure for heartache. She prepared to publish the novel which she had begun writing during her residence in Bath – the book that the Oracle had promised would provide the public with ‘a new source of elegant gratification’.

  Mary Robinson’s first novel, Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity, was published on 2 February 1792. It was a literary sensation. The entire print run sold out in one day and the book quickly went through five editions. Never before had a novel by a woman achieved the status of an instant bestseller in this way. A Gothic romance in the style of the novels of Ann Radcliffe, it had an ingredient that no other female writer of the day could offer: thinly veiled references, based on intimate personal experience, to the sexual character of the Prince of Wales.

  Though nothing so crude as a work of coded autobiography, the novel draws on its author’s own life. The heroine Elvira is 15 years old at the beginning of the story, Mary’s age when she made her fateful marriage to Robinson. The novel’s epigraph reads ‘Be wary then: best safety lies in fear’, which sounds like a warning from Mary to her teenage daughter Maria Elizabeth, advising her against making her mother’s mistake of succumbing too soon to the allurements of love. Elvira is ‘a finished model of perfection’. One reviewer picked out the following description of her and said that it was a portrait of Maria Elizabeth:

  Elvira had just attained her fifteenth year: her form was the animated portrait of her mind; truth, benignity, pure and unstudied delicacy, the meekness of sensibility and the dignity of innate virtue, claimed the esteem; while the exquisite beauty of her bewitching countenance captivated the heart of every beholder! She was tall, and finely proportioned! Her complexion was neither the insipid whiteness of the lily-bosomed Circassian, nor the masculine shade of the Gallic brunette; the freshness of health glowed upon her cheek, while the lustre of her dark blue eyes borrowed its splendour from the unsullied flame, that gave her mind the perfection of intellect! … She was every thing that fan
cy could picture, or conviction adore! – Perfection could go no further!19

  This was the kind of heroine whom Jane Austen hated: ‘pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked’.20 The novel as a whole is a typical ‘romance’, with improbable plot lines, elaborate poetic language (‘novel slang’, as Austen called it), and clichéd heroines and heroes. There is a locked casket containing secret papers, hidden behind a portrait in a secret chamber – just the sort of detail that was ripe for the parody of Northanger Abbey. But there is no gainsaying the popularity of this kind of mix of the Gothic and the sentimental among female readers. The fact that the novel sold out in a day is testimony to Mrs Robinson’s gift of tapping into a lucrative market and bringing to it the added value of her celebrated name.

  The hero, Prince Almanza, bears more than a passing resemblance to the handsome young Prince that Mary had once loved:

  Almanza had just arrived at the twenty-first year of his age; his person was graceful and majestic; his features manly, regular, and sedate; his countenance, though grave, bore not the smallest trait of severity. His eyes, beaming with sensibility, were overarched by brows as dark as ebony; his hair, which was glossy as the chesnut, hung in graceful ringlets on his finely-falling shoulders … on his cloak a brilliant star distinguished him from his companions … The Prince looked like a divinity; something more than mortal diffused animation over his face!21

  The resemblances to Mary’s own story would have been readily recognizable to readers who had followed the press coverage of her affair with the Prince. There is, for instance, an attempted seduction of Elvira by the Prince’s bosom friend Del Vero, echoing Mary’s involvement with Lord Malden. Like Mary in her early years, Elvira is a naive in a world of sophistication and intrigue: ‘She now perceived, that to be, and to seem, were very distinct things.’22 The novel also confronts the issue of female reputation and, in particular, the perils that face a beautiful woman, a theme to which Mary would return in her feminist treatise some years later: