Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  Maria Elizabeth was haunted by the sea, which sometimes swelled ‘high as the white cliffs that mark the shores of Britain’. She was especially struck by a recently erected monument on the pier to some brave fishermen called Gavet and Mareschal who had perished in a terrible storm when they set out in their tiny vessel in a failed attempt to save an English ship that was going down. Shipwrecks are a recurring motif in her mother’s writings and Maria Elizabeth wrote about this real-life tragedy in her one novel.39

  To Mary’s astonishment, Tom Robinson then turned up in Calais. His brother was in England on leave from India, where he had been building a career as distinguished as Tom’s was ignominious. Tom had the idea that prosperous Uncle William could help Maria Elizabeth, so he crossed the Channel in order to bring her home and present her to him. Mary was torn between concern at parting from her beloved daughter and desire to further her interests. According to the Memoirs, mother and daughter had never been separated. Mary accordingly decided to return to England with her daughter. But she was unwell again: ‘Mrs Robinson is detained on her route to England by extreme and alarming indisposition, and is now at Calais, where her Physician has ordered her to remain for a few days, till she is in a situation to cross the sea.’40 On 2 September 1792 she was strong enough to make the crossing. It was the very day of the notorious September Massacres in Paris, when over a thousand royalist prisoners, including young children, were slaughtered. Tarleton was in Paris at the time – he may have been reconciled with Mary when he passed through Calais on the way there – and was swept into the mob. Within hours of the departure of the Robinson family on the Calais to Dover packet boat, an order was received in the French port to the effect that every British subject in France should be held under arrest.

  Mary ‘rejoiced in her escape, and anticipated with delight the idea of seeing her daughter placed in wealthy protection, the great passport in her own country to honour and esteem’. However, when they met with William Robinson he lost no time in telling them his condition for giving ‘protection and favour’ to Maria Elizabeth: she would have to renounce for ever ‘the filial tie, which united her to both parents’.41 Maria Elizabeth turned down the offer: she would never abandon her mother.

  At the end of September, Tarleton returned to London and was seen with Mrs Robinson and her party at the theatre. The lovers were together again. She presented him with a gold chain ring and an accompanying love poem. Her health was still poor and the laudanum was giving her nightmares. She published some ‘Stanzas Written After Successive Nights of Melancholy Dreams’: ‘When, fev’rish with the throbs of pain, / And bath’d with many a trickling tear, / I close my cheated eyes again, / Despair’s wild bands are hov’ring near.’ She had a nightmare of being stabbed and then woke in a cold sweat. Death began to seem like a release.42

  From a biographical point of view, the most revealing of the poems written around this time is one addressed to Tarleton entitled ‘Stanzas to a Friend, who desired to have my Portrait’. It was thought by her friends to be very accurate. Published as the climax of her second volume of collected poems, it was a painfully honest self-estimate of her virtues and her foibles. It gives an insight into her ambition to be taken seriously as an author and to discard her image as a celebrated beauty. It is the ‘laurel wreath’ she desires, not titles or wealth. She begins by gently admonishing her ‘friend’ for wanting her portrait, with its fixed image and ‘lips that never move’, playfully suggesting that he desires a ‘senseless frame’ as it never answers back or reproaches him, but just smiles fixedly:

  Perhaps, when silent, you will say,

  Those lips no anger can betray;

  But, fix’d, in smiles remain;

  Those eyes, so gentle, can impart

  No keen reproach to wound the heart,

  No glance of cold disdain!

  You’ll say, this Form may quickly fade;

  One hour in glowing health array’d,

  The next, perchance, ‘tis lost!

  But, cherish’d by the Painter’s skill,

  An Age may see it blooming still,

  As Evergreens in frost.

  Mary then goes on to draw a different kind of picture from the one that Tarleton desires: ‘Then take, my Friend, / The Lasting Sketch, which here I send, / The Picture of My Mind’:

  E’en from the early days of youth,

  I’ve blessed the sacred voice of Truth;

  And Candour is my pride;

  I always Speak what I Believe;

  I know not if I Can deceive;

  Because I Never Try’d.

  I’m often serious, sometimes gay;

  Can laugh the fleeting hours away,

  Or weep – for Others’ woe;

  I’m Proud! This fault You cannot blame,

  Nor does it tinge my cheek with shame;

  Your Friendship Made Me So!

  I’m odd, eccentric, fond of ease;

  Impatient; difficult to please:

  Ambition fires my breast!

  Yet not for wealth, or titles vain;

  Let but the Laurel deck My strain,

  And, dullness, take the rest.

  In temper quick, in friendship nice;

  I doat on Genius, shrink from vice,

  And scorn the flatt’rer’s art!

  With penetrating skill can see,

  Where, mask’d in sweet simplicity,

  Lies hid the treach’rous heart.

  If Once betray’d, I scarce forgive:

  And though I pity All that live,

  And mourn for ev’ry pain;

  Yet never could I court the Great,

  Or worship Fools, whate’er their state;

  For falsehood I disdain!

  I’m Jealous, for I fondly Love;

  No feeble flame my heart can prove;

  Caprice ne’er dimm’d its fires:

  I blush, to see the human Mind,

  For nobler, prouder claims design’d,

  The slave of low desires!

  Reserv’d in manner, where unknown;

  A little Obstinate, I own,

  And apt to form opinion:

  Yet Envy never broke my rest,

  Nor could Self-Int’rest bow my breast

  To Folly’s base dominion.

  Having given her true portrait, she pleads with her lover to see her how she really is and to love her accordingly:

  Such is my Portrait; now believe

  My pencil never can deceive,

  And know me what I paint:

  Taught in Affliction’s rigid school,

  I act from Principle, not Rule,

  No Sinner – yet No Saint.43

  CHAPTER 20

  Author

  Of all the occupations which industry can pursue, those of literary toil are the most fatiguing. That which seems to the vacant eye a mere playful amusement, is in reality an Herculean labour; and to compose a tolerable work is so difficult a task, that the fastidiously severe should make the trial before they presume to condemn even the humblest effort of imagination.

  Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter

  Mary still had the ear of the Prince, not least because of his friendship with Tarleton. In October 1792, she published a sonnet addressed ‘To the Prince of Wales’, under her pen name Julia:

  From Courtly Crowds and empty joys retir’d,

  Adorn’d with Heaven’s best gift, a Lib’ral Mind!

  Still shall thy grac’d perfections be admir’d,

  Thy polish’d Manners, and thy sense refin’d …

  The poem continued with the claim that the Prince was formed ‘To prove all trivial, empty Pleasures, Vain’; in return, the ‘fond Muse’ of Julia would offer him ‘a Wreath Sublime’.1 Politics was becoming ever more polarized in response to the increasing violence in France. The Prince had recently made his maiden speech in the House of Lords, aligning himself with the more moderate faction of the Whigs. By publishing a sonnet suggesting that the Prince was renouncing the �
�empty joys’ of the fashionable world and growing to political maturity, Mary was carefully positioning herself in the middle ground. The Oracle began to represent her as a moderate rather than an all-out ‘Revolution Writer’: ‘Mrs ROBINSON’s Ode To Humanity, which graced THE ORACLE some time since, is not so popular with the Revolution Writers as some of her former works. Sensible minds are always open to conviction, and ever swayed by the admonitions of Reason.’2

  Pitt and the Tories were preparing for war. After the King of France was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution in Paris on 21 January 1793, Tarleton would have expected to rejoin the Army. But he was very ill throughout the early part of the year, suffering – ironically enough – from the same complaint that had plagued Mary ever since her night ride to Dover in pursuit of him: ‘Colonel Tarleton has been confined for some days past, with a rheumatic fever, of which he still continues much indisposed.’3 Mary nursed him and wrote poems for him. Mortality was on her mind. December had seen the death, after a short illness, of Louisa, musically accomplished daughter of novelist Mary Ann Hanway and Hanway Hanway, Tom Robinson’s old friend who had been witness at their wedding. Mary had remained friends with the Hanways and would have been especially sensitive to the death of a beautiful and talented daughter. She wrote an elegy in Louisa’s memory.4 At the same time, the execution of Louis XVI inevitably made her contemplate the fate of Marie Antoinette. The Queen and her children were still in prison, waiting to hear whether they, too, would be guillotined. Mary wrote poems in the voice of Marie Antoinette: ‘A Fragment, Supposed to be Written Near the Temple, at Paris, on the Night before the Murder of Louis XVI’ and ‘Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in Her Prison of the Temple’. In the latter she emphasized Marie Antionette’s role as devoted mother and wronged woman, as if she were a royal version of Mary herself.

  She had completed the opera she had promised Sheridan. It was called Kate of Aberdeen and there were several announcements in the Oracle claiming that it was about to go into production. Dora Jordan, the most popular comic actress of the day, was hoping to appear in it.5 The libretto had the ‘approbation of the best Authors living’ and it breathed ‘that spirit of Loyalty’ that would make it highly popular as the country was going to war, so why was the theatre management procrastinating? The probable reason was that the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was in the process of being rebuilt and the company, now managed by John Philip Kemble, was living from hand to mouth in borrowed premises. It was simply not a good time to stage a major new opera. The work was withdrawn; the Oracle promised to print it in full, but never did.6

  Mary’s supporters at the Oracle took the more jaundiced view that Kemble was prejudiced against her. There may be an element of truth in this: Kemble’s greatest asset was his sister, Sarah Siddons, greatest tragedienne of the age. Siddons was almost single-handedly responsible for the changing attitudes towards actresses at the close of the eighteenth century, bringing to her profession a new respectability and dignity. Her reputation remained unblemished, but she knew the dangerous line she was treading, and to have been seen in the company of Perdita would have been an embarrassment. Kemble may not have wanted his new theatre tarnished by the living embodiment of the old image of the actress as mere courtesan – especially as this was the period when a great deal of publicity was being given to the affair between actress Dora Jordan and the Prince of Wales’s brother, the Duke of Clarence.

  Siddons herself was sorry that decency prevented her from ever making Mary’s acquaintance. Mary sent her poems and tried to arrange an introduction, but to no avail. James Boaden, Mary’s editor at the Oracle, later wrote the authorized biography of Siddons, in which he contrasted the probity of Sarah’s personal life, in which she benefited from the protection of her brother, with the fate of Perdita, whose fall from purity he firmly blamed on her husband:

  Flattery soon withdrew the guards that reason had placed about beauty. He who should have commanded the garrison betrayed his trust, the husband made a sacrifice of his honour. Then establishments were soon seen, of which the means were invisible; the die was thrown that sealed the condition of the enchanting Maria, and she became in melancholy reality the PERDITA.7

  ‘The charming and beautiful Mrs Robinson,’ said Siddons, ‘I pity her from the bottom of my soul.’ On being invited to meet her, she wrote an exquisitely worded, regretful letter of refusal:

  I am very much obliged to Mrs Robinson for her polite attention in sending me her poems. Pray tell her so, with my compliments. I hope the poor, charming woman has quite recovered from her fall. If she is half as amiable as her writings, I shall long for the possibility of being acquainted with her. I say the possibility, because one’s whole life is one continual sacrifice of inclinations, which to indulge, however laudable or innocent, would draw down the malice and reproach of those prudent people who never do ill.8

  The mutual friend who sought to introduce Siddons and Robinson was John Taylor, royal oculist, sometime theatre critic and then editor of the Morning Post, man of letters, poet, and celebrity-chaser. He was the dedicatee of Mary’s next book, a slim volume containing three poems, Sight, The Cavern of Woe, and Solitude. There she described Taylor as ‘One whose friendship I am proud to enjoy, as proceeding from a penetrating and enlightened mind!’– though she added that she did not really like dedications, since they were ‘too frequently calculated to feed the VANITY OF HIGH RANK’. She preferred the principle of the ‘ARISTOCRACY OF GENIUS’: as with the address to the reader inserted in the third edition of Vancenza, she was consciously positioning herself as an author in the marketplace, a meritocrat rather than a coterie writer relying on the patronage of the fashionable world. Taylor returned the tribute to Mary with the dedication to his own book of poems:

  To Mrs Robinson

  Dear Madam,

  It is not because you have paid so very flattering a tribute to my professional character, as to dedicate to me one of your most beautiful Poems, that I am induced to lay the following trifles at your feet. I am too sensible of the merit of that Poem, to make so inadequate a return. My object on this occasion, is at least to tender my thanks, and to indulge myself in the pleasure of boasting that I have for many years enjoyed the friendship of one of the most accomplished women of the present age.9

  Mary was indeed becoming a celebrity poet – with the Oracle serving her as well as any modern public relations strategist. It puffed her to the skies: the publication of the slender volume of three poems was described as nothing less than the literary event of the century. The paper reported the ups and downs of her health and her relationship with Tarleton, the worldwide sales of her works (her poems were fetching three or four guineas a volume in India – ‘if this is not gratifying to Literary emulation – what is?’), her movements in and out of town (‘Mrs Robinson has been for some days in the neighbourhood of Windsor reposing in the most honourable of all gratifications, that of LITERARY FAME’), and the way in which her best pieces were being set to music as popular songs or recited on the London stage (‘Mrs ROBINSON ought to be highly flattered, when her poetry is become the subject, for painters – musical composers, translators – public recitation – and theatrical remark. She must now expect all the shafts of ENVY to assail her, and arm herself against them accordingly’).10

  In early August, Mary’s mother died. Though her brothers were wealthy, she had always refused their offers of financial assistance to help Hester: she alone was the one who cared for her mother from the day when Nicholas Darby walked out on her. According to Maria Elizabeth, Hester’s death was a severe blow, which affected Mary’s health for many months afterwards: ‘even to the latest hour of her life, her grief appeared renewed, when any object presented itself connected with the memory of her departed mother’.11 The three generations of women had, over the years, forged an extremely close bond. They had lived through public humiliation, exile, and physical disability, relying upon each other for comfort and support. A newspaper report telling
of how Mary was badly injured when she fell from her crutches around this time brings home a sense of how difficult it must have been to care for her mother in her last days.

  In the second half of 1793, Mary published two poems in very different styles: in her own name, a much-admired Monody to the Memory of Marie Antoinette Queen of France, in response to the execution of Marie Antoinette, and as ‘Horace Juvenal’, a satire in two cantos called Modern Manners, in which she lampooned such fashionable vices as gaming, gossip, and prizefighting (one of Tarleton’s favourite pursuits). A passing reference to the ‘magic force’ of ‘Fi-z—t’s eyes’ suggests that she was not without bitterness that it was Mrs Fitzherbert who commanded the Prince’s heart. Mary’s satire was said to have ‘roused a nest of hornets’ among the ton,12 but critics admired the verve and dexterity of her rhyming couplets:

  O, Fashion! delegate of taste and wit,

  Oft do I see thee triumph in the pit;

  When Hobart’s critic fan, attention draws,

  The airy signal of ill-judged applause!

  When pale-faced misses sigh from side-box rows,

  And painted matrons nod to painted beaux:

  Where the lank lord, incircled in the throng,

  Shews his white teeth, and hums a fav’rite song;

  Who, spite of season, crowds it to the play,

  Wrapp’d in six waistcoats – in the month of May;