Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  Mary has very specific costume requirements for her aristocratic characters: ‘Lady Languid is dressed in a white chemise with no waist – a Turban with one Feather of enormous Length. Short sleeves much above the elbow – a very large medallion on her bosom.’ The high-waisted chemise, exotic headdress, and medallion on the bosom were all famously associated with Perdita. The epilogue also refers to the politics of dress. There Mary praises the natural British maid, who ‘depends on nobody, for fashion’s aid’; nature is said to spurn women who dress like dolls in ‘whalebone stays and hoops of stiff cane’. The play was written shortly after Mary Wollstonecraft complained in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that uncomfortable clothes stiffened with whalebone stays were a means of both physically and mentally subduing women. The loose-fitting Perdita chemise was by this time a symbol of liberation.

  The comedy is also about the hypocrisy of the rich and titled, who have affairs behind their husbands’ backs and then on the slightest pretext condemn other women for adultery. The beautiful but dissolute Lady Languid is engaged to Sharpley, but is good friends with the banker Sir Henry Rightley, who is in love with her and tries to reform her morals: ‘a beautiful hand never appears to such disadvantage as when it shakes a dice box’. Rightley succeeds in reclaiming her after she has proved the insincerity of her friends. The fashionable ladies in Languid’s circle are selfish and catty, very much in the mould of the gossips in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. When Lady Languid loses 9,000 guineas at play, and her reputation is at stake, her friends abandon her and delight in her downfall. Mary’s ear for fashionable speech is at its sharpest in her writing for such characters: ‘To see the fritting, frowning, beauteous circle! bending over pyramids of Rouleaus – To behold their delicious Agonies – their charming anxieties – their laughable vexations, and provoking triumphs! – And if we lose, to have the bliss of seeing others as wretched as ourselves! Where else can a Woman of Fashion be happy!’5

  Mary knew she was in for trouble when both she and Dora Jordan received hate mail the day before the play opened. Dora’s note read ‘Nobody should be damned!’ and Mary was sent a ‘scurrilous, indecent, and ill-disguised scrawl, signifying to her that the farce was already condemned’.6 Dora, though intimidated, courageously vowed to go ahead and perform. Mary was nervous, as her prologue to the play suggests. Conventionally, prologues and epilogues – so important to an eighteenth-century audience – appealed to the patronage of the ladies. Mary’s begged indulgence from ‘the gentle race’ to ‘paint the living manners as they rise’, claiming disingenuously that she condemned no one in particular: ‘At Nobody we level Satire’s thorn / We trust, such characters, are yet unborn.’ She pleaded for mercy for the poor authoress, ‘for if she’s damn’d, this night will be her last’.7

  The opening night was badly timed: it coincided with the beginning of the lady gamblers’ faro season. Nobody went up as afterpiece at Drury Lane on Saturday, 29 November 1794. Takings for the evening were a respectable £334, but the reception of Mary’s farce was a disaster. This is Maria Elizabeth’s account of what happened:

  On the drawing up of the curtain, several persons in the galleries, whose liveries betrayed their employers, were heard to declare that they were sent to do up Nobody. Even women of distinguished rank hissed through their fans. Notwithstanding these manoeuvres and exertions, the more rational part of the audience seemed inclined to hear before they passed judgment, and, with a firmness that never fails to awe, demanded that the piece should proceed. The first act was accordingly suffered without interruption: a song in the second being unfortunately encored, the malcontents once more ventured to raise their voices, and the malignity that had been forcibly suppressed burst forth with redoubled violence.8

  According to the notes of William Powell, the prompter at Drury Lane, the ‘dissatisfaction to the Piece’ was so great that Mrs Jordan ‘was so much agitated as to be unable to repeat above one half of the Epilogue, which from the Opposition of Hisses and Applauses, not scarcely three lines of that could be distinctly heard’.9 Dora had battled on bravely for her friend. On that terrible first night she sent her beloved Duke of Clarence a note telling him that the play had been ‘damned most unfairly … I send these few lines to anticipate the newspapers.’10

  Dora was right to expect that the papers would be full of the controversy. To counteract the criticism, Mary, or one of her supporters, placed a puff in the London Chronicle, which emphasized the play’s moral lessons:

  The object of this piece was to place in proper ridicule the follies and vices of fashionable Life; and the piece, though obviously intended as a mere dramatic sketch, was really a pleasant portrait of the manners of the higher ranks. – There was also another purpose in this drama, of more value in point of morals: for it was also intended to show how easily a reputation may be lost by the use to which mere appearances may be converted by the aid of malice.11

  The latter was, of course, a favourite Robinson theme.

  According to the London Chronicle’s version of events, the first act ‘was very favourably received’, but an air by Mrs Jordan, ‘somewhat too long, being encored, the audience were thrown into ill humour, and the performers disconcerted. The piece then met with some opposition, but, however, was heard with applause and murmers [sic] to the end, when it was announced for Monday evening without any decisive objection or concurrence.’ It also reported that the play was written by Mrs Robinson, ‘to whom the literary world is indebted for so many beautiful effusions of poetry. The Prologue and Epilogue, which seemed to be spirited compositions, were both written by the fair author; but the agitated state of Mrs Jordan, on account of the opposition, obliged her, as we understand, to omit many lines.’12

  The fact that there was applause as well as hisses shows that there were at least some supporters. But when the play was repeated on the Monday night – minus its epilogue – the papers quipped that Nobody was ‘brought forward for the second time, and Somebody was found to applaud it, although Nobody appeared to be entertained’ and that a better title might have been St James’s Square in an Uproar.13 The next Saturday a third attempt was made, with some alterations to the text (and again no epilogue). ‘An entire new character’ was introduced, but ‘the audience still expressed so much dissatisfaction as to induce the author to withdraw it’.14 Receipts were very poor for that third performance and the play was never seen again.

  Despite her setback in the theatre, Mary continued to publish many poems. Early in 1795 she began contributing regularly to the Morning Post. Daniel Stuart, the editor, regarded her as the best-known poet of the day and she was the first person he hired to make regular poetic contributions to the paper. Under the pen name ‘Portia’, she wrote a sonnet ‘To Liberty’ and then a satirical poem on the current economic crisis and other topical matters such as the separation of George from Mrs Fitzherbert together with his impending marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. It was a bitterly cold winter of war, food shortages, and social inequality:

  Pavement slip’ry; People sneezing;

  Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;

  Nobles, scarce the Wretched heeding;

  Gallant soldiers – fighting – bleeding!

  Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;

  Courtiers, cringing and voracious:

  Titled Gluttons, dainties carving;

  Genius, in a garret, starving! …

  Arts and Sciences bewailing;

  Commerce drooping, Credit failing!

  Placemen, mocking subjects loyal;

  Separations; Weddings Royal! …

  Poets, Painters, and Musicians;

  Lawyers, Doctors, Politicians;

  Pamphlets, Newspapers, and Odes,

  Seeking Fame, by diff’rent roads.15

  In addition to publishing ‘public’ poetry of this sort, she also wrote more intimately for her friends and acquaintances. So, for instance, the following letter to a Mrs Hankin accompanied an epitaph ‘To the Memory of
Thomas Hankin, Esq’:

  If the small tribute I enclose is by you deemed acceptable, I shall feel the most sincere satisfaction. Believe me, it came from the heart, and but feebly speaks my regret for the loss of my esteemed friend, your worthy husband. I promised him when living that if he died before me I would write his epitaph. I lament that there was occasion for the melancholy task, and only wish I could perform it better.16

  Her main task that year was a new novel, which was to be much longer than her previous efforts. She was so exhausted from writing it that she went to Bath to recover, once again taking rooms in North Parade. As usual, the Oracle gave information on her movements: ‘Mrs Robinson has been at Bath, and thence round the country. She goes back again in a few days, and the latter end of October comes up to town. The purpose is to publish another Novel in three volumes, three just volumes, in the trade language – from which information and elegance will flow of course.’17 In the autumn of 1795 she also finished a tragedy, The Sicilian Lover, which she intended for presentation at Drury Lane. According to Maria Elizabeth, it was left to languish in the prompter’s closet for several months. It was never staged.

  Whilst in Bath she also suffered a personal misadventure: ‘Mrs ROBINSON has nearly fallen a sacrifice to the fury of an enraged mastiff, who lately assailed her on the Parade at Bath. General Tarleton was fortunately on the spot, and by the timely effort of great activity and strength, rescued her from a situation, which, in the helpless state of the lady, was perilous indeed.’18

  The new novel, Angelina, was published in the first week of the New Year. Mary and her publishers learnt from their mistake of having printed too many copies of The Widow: this time the first edition was in a run of 750 copies, which sold out almost immediately. Mary instructed that a second edition should be rushed into print, but sales promptly stalled, leaving her to pick up the cost of printing, thus wiping out her profits on the first edition.

  Angelina is 36, around the same age as Mary. She is the cast-off mistress of Lord Acreland. He proposes to marry Sophia Clarendon, the daughter of a West Indian merchant, but she is in love with a penniless orphan called Belmont – who, it finally transpires, is the son of Angelina and Lord Acreland. As the critics were quick to point out, some of the events in the novel ‘outrage nature, probability, and common sense’. There are all the usual ingredients of the sentimental novel: duels, swoons, madness, Gothic horrors, secret chambers, improbable reconciliations and elopements (Sophia elopes four times in the course of the novel). A fainting heroine was a prerequisite for the novel of sensibility, but Angelina contains more fainting fits than half a dozen other novels put together.

  What makes the novel interesting is the way in which Mary skilfully weaves her political concerns into its fabric, rather as the philosopher William Godwin had done in 1794 in his highly successful novel Caleb Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft was to do in her later Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Angelina was Mary Robinson’s first genuinely radical novel. The plot may have been rambling and the dialogue sometimes overstretched, but there was a serious engagement with such questions as the iniquity of rank (‘hereditary distinctions are more frequently the gifts of accident, than the rewards of virtue’), the neglect of genius (‘The poverty, too often the companion of talents, in this country, is a national discredit’), female education, women sold into marriage by their parents, the marriage market as a form of ‘legal prostitution’ (a phrase Mary attributes to the dramatist Richard Cumberland), female reputation, slavery, and aristocratic hypocrisy. Mary also directs her satirical pen at the code of gallantry: one of the aristocratic characters describes it as ‘an amusing pursuit, that neither fatigues the senses, or penetrates the heart: in short, it is—’ upon which Sophia interrupts, ‘A contemptible, destructive, and degrading avidity, to destroy the repose of every unprotected woman, whose perverse fate, renders her a fit object for pursuit … it is to profess, what you do not feel; to swear that which you never mean to perform; to flatter while you despise; to slander where you cannot triumph; and to desert the credulous fool, whom you have had the cunning to deceive.’19

  For all its radical content, the novel is not a political tract masquerading as a story. It has some very strong, colourful characters and lively dialogue across the social spectrum from fine ladies of fashion to lowly characters such as the landlord of an inn. The Oracle puffed away in its usual manner: ‘Mrs ROBINSON’S Angelina has the best praise – the praise of congenial talents.’ But the reviews were generally lukewarm, or in some cases downright hostile, with comments such as ‘the nonsensical jargon of mock sentiment and overstrained hyperbole’.20 Critics honed in on autobiographical content as well as political opinions. The Critical Review reprinted the description of the beautiful and melancholy heroine, who, like Mary herself, is a fading beauty with large and mournful eyes:

  She was drest in white muslin; a narrow black zone served to fasten the drapery, which gave her the appearance of a Grecian statue: her head was unadorned, except by nature, which had bestowed a profusion of dark auburn hair, that waved about her shoulders, and partly shaded a white forehead; her eye-brows were nearly black; her eyes of the deepest blue, her nose beautifully formed, her cheek – O grief! What a banquet hadst thou there! It had lost the bloom of youth, of health, of sweet repose!21

  The Monthly Mirror, however, urged its young female readers to buy the book:

  Angelina, ladies, has long been out of her teens, but the magic of fancy has so enriched her autumnal suit, that she is an object of no small attraction. Her story is as romantic as you can wish, and there are among you so many lovers of tales of wonder about caverns, rocks, woods, lakes, castles, abbies, and manor-houses, that we make not the least doubt of your paying a visit to the pensive Angelina, in her RUIN, which is really well imagined, and the way to it prettily laid out.

  It also drew attention to an allusion to Mary’s merchant brother George: ‘we think we know who is alluded to in the City Trader, who runs about the town to the hindrance of his business on the nights of his sister’s new play’ – presumably a reference to Nobody. ‘Those tasks of brotherly love have ensured to him the approbation of all,’ enthused the reviewer.22 In the novel the brother unashamedly collects friends to see his sister’s new play: ‘zealous to promote the fame of his sister, through a laudable pride, which taught him to consider her as the most distinguished ornament of a family whose name would be forgotten in another century, were it not immortalized by her literary labours!’23

  Dedicated Perdita-watchers would have noted some further autobiographical touches. Angelina possesses ‘a small picture, all done round with precious stones, which she will sit and cry over for whole hours without ceasing’. When George Fairford asks to see the painting, she says: ‘it is true, I have a portrait: it has been painted many years. It once bore the strong resemblance of a beloved friend: but he is gone!’24 There is also a memory of Nicholas Darby’s hostility to Mary’s becoming an actress: Sir Edward Clarendon would rather see his daughter Sophia ‘dead’ than on the stage. ‘I’d cut her legs off, if I thought she wished to disgrace herself by such an idea.’ Lady Selina, an acquaintance, responds with a defence of the profession:

  We have many females on the stage, who are ornaments to society, and in every respect worthy of imitation! For my part, I adore the Theatre, and think there is more morality to be found in one good tragedy, than in all the sermons that ever were printed. With regard to acting; it is an art which demands no small portion of intellectual acquirements! It polishes the manners; enlightens the understanding, gives finish to external grace, and calls forth all the powers of mental superiority!25

  A damning reference to a family making its money from the slave trade would have made interesting reading for Tarleton:

  Yet let me tell you, that though you have acquired wealth, in the barbarous traffic of your fellow creatures; though you have amassed treasures, sullied by the tears, if not the blood of persecuted slaves; you must not ho
pe to sacrifice a daughter, without provoking the indignation, and exciting the contempt of those who are friends to the breathing race, and enemies to oppression … can the colour of a human creature authorize inhumanity?26

  Mary’s most enthusiastic reviewer was the radical and ‘female’ polemicist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary knew her Vindication of the Rights of Woman and was soon to become acquainted with her. Wollstonecraft professed her admiration for the ‘elegant pen’ of Mrs Robinson and her ‘well-earned reputation’. She considered that Angelina’s ‘principal object’ was ‘to expose the folly and the iniquity of those parents who attempt to compel the inclinations of their children into whatever conjugal connections their mercenary spirit may choose to prescribe, and to hold forth to just detestation the cruelty of those who scruple not to barter a daughter’s happiness, perhaps through life, for a sounding title or a glittering coronet’. For Wollstonecraft, ‘the sentiments contained in these volumes are just, animated, and rational’.27 From her point of view, there could be no higher praise than this.

  Had she reviewed the novel at greater length, Wollstonecraft would doubtless also have praised Robinson’s championing of female education – a major concern in her own Vindication. The young heroine Sophia has benefited from the educational beliefs of her aunt, Juliana Pengwynn, who is clearly in the mould of Mary Robinson’s old tutor Meribah Lorrington. She is a scholarly, ‘enlightened and intelligent’ woman who has raised her niece as a woman of letters rather than giving her the traditional but useless female accomplishments. Sophia has travelled to Paris and Italy with her aunt, who is an expert on the ancients, a reader of Greek and Latin. She also writes sonnets in the style of Petrarch and is scorned for doing so. Sophia’s brutal and ignorant father disapproves of education for women, seeing his daughter in terms of her market value as a ‘piece of rich merchandise’. He takes the standard line against the dangerous influence of fiction on the minds of young girls: ‘I suppose you are for love and a cottage: this comes of reading romances; – women have no business ever to read – or to write either.’28