Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  All this time Mary was strengthening the circle of her literary acquaintance. Samuel Jackson Pratt, who wrote as ‘Courtney Melmoth’, was a regular visitor at her tea and supper parties, together with Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Taylor, the literary oculist. The group visited the theatre together and lent each other books. Maria Elizabeth, now 22 and an author herself, was always present. One day she went to see Sarah Siddons at Drury Lane with Mary Wollstonecraft, who was suffering from a head cold: ‘I increased my cold, or rather, cough, yesterday … Had not Miss R—promised to call for me, even Mrs Siddons would not have tempted me out to day.’17 After the show Mary and Maria Elizabeth had Godwin and Wollstonecraft round to a family supper with Tarleton. Wollstonecraft may have been a little jealous of Mary, to judge from the letter she wrote to Godwin the following day:

  I thought, after you left me, last night, that it was a pity we were obliged to part – just then. I was even vext with myself for staying to supper with Mrs R. But there is a manner of leaving a person free to follow their own will, that looks so like indifference, I do not like it. Your tone would have decided me – But, to tell you the truth, I thought, by your voice and manner, that you wished to remain in society – and pride made me wish to gratify you.18

  But she appears to have got over her pique and the next morning was writing happily about a supper party that Mrs Robinson had planned for the three Marys, Robinson, Hays, and Wollstonecraft.

  It was Wollstonecraft who introduced Mary to fellow novelist Mary Hays: ‘I expect Mrs Robinson and daughter, to drink tea with me, on Thursday, will you come to meet them. She has read your novel,* and was very much pleased with the main story; but did not like the conclusion. She thinks the death of Augustus the end of the story and that the husband should have been suffered to die a natural death. Perhaps she is right.’19 Hays accepted and Wollstonecraft wrote to Mrs Robinson:

  Dear Madam,

  I believe it is scarcely necessary to inform you that Miss Hays will accept of your invitation, and accompany me on Sunday next to dinner at your house.

  As you were so obliging as to offer to send the carriage for the little Fannikin, [Wollstonecraft’s young daughter Fanny Imlay] I promised to call for her. In the evening, if one of your servants will put Marguerite [Fanny’s nurse] in her way, she and Fanny may return at an early hour. You will smile at having so much of the womanish mother in me; but there is a little philosophy in it, entre nous; for I like to rouse her infant faculties by strong impressions.

  I write in haste, with kind remembrance to your Mary.20

  There is a strong sense here of a community of female friendship. Maria Elizabeth, having become a writer herself, would no doubt have held her own with the three distinguished female authors. The phrase ‘one of your servants’ suggests that the Robinson household was still reasonably well provided for at this time, however much Mary may have perceived herself as having declined into poverty.

  The friends sometimes based fictional characters on each other. Hays actually used some of Godwin’s letters for a philosopher in one of her novels and Godwin in his Fleetwood put something of Mary Robinson into a character called Mrs Gifford (could the name be a jibe at her old enemy William Gifford?):

  She was of exquisite beauty, tall, graceful, and captivating. Her tastes were expensive, and her manners gay. Her demeanour was spirited and impressive, her passions volatile, and her temper violent. With all this, she was by no means destitute of capacity. She was eloquent, witty, and sarcastic; exhibiting, when she pleased, the highest breeding, and delivering her remarks with inexpressible vivacity and grace. Thus endowed, she was surrounded, whenever she appeared, with a little army of suitors. Every youth of fashion, who had the courage to look up to her, became her professed admirer; and, among these admirers, it was pretty universally believed that all had not offered up their incense in vain … She had seen much of the high world, and she had eminently the talent of giving poignancy to her anecdotes and remarks.21

  Mary’s relationship with Tarleton was under great strain. His elder brother died at the end of 1796 and his mother was very ill. Godwin’s diary records that Tarleton was still usually present at Mary’s supper parties until the middle of March 1797. But he was conspicuously absent from a very large tea party she held on 2 April. Among her guests on this occasion were over a dozen writers, theatre people, and family friends (including the rising novelist and poet Amelia Opie, who a few years later would write Adeline Mowbray, a novel inspired by the life of Mary Wollstonecraft). Could it be that Mrs Robinson was gathering all her friends around her in order to receive support following another break-up with Tarleton?

  This time their split was permanent. The Oracle was soon reporting that Tarleton’s mother had died and that ‘if we mistake not, this is not the only loss he has recently sustained, in that which comes nearest the heart, cherished by many years of social intercourse’.22 After fifteen volatile years, their relationship was finally over. Mary was left many thousands of pounds in debt, not least because of Tarleton’s losses at the faro table and via the betting book at his club. She was seriously ill that April. She and Maria Elizabeth set off for Bath, but a ‘violent fever’ kept her confined for several weeks in lodgings somewhere along the Bath road.23 Whilst on her sickbed, she wrote a poem that may refer to the end of the affair:

  Another night of feverish pain

  Has slowly pass’d away!

  I see the morning light again;

  What does it bring? another day

  Of hope – delusive – vain! …

  I see Deceit in sainted guise

  Of holy Friendship, smile;

  I mark Oppression’s eager eyes,

  And tremble as the breath of Guile

  Assumes Affection’s sigh.24

  Godwin was not available to comfort her. In March he married Wollstonecraft and stopped seeing Mary. He only resumed his regular visits several months after Wollstonecraft’s death later that year as a result of septicaemia incurred during the birth of Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft clearly made a huge and lasting impression on Mary: her subsequent novels are markedly more ‘feminist’ than the earlier ones and she began to create heroines who were based upon Wollstonecraft and professed themselves her disciples. She praised Wollstonecraft in her Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination and came under attack in the anti-Jacobin press for her association with the so-called ‘hyena in petticoats’.

  In the autumn of 1797 the Oracle reported that ‘The work which Mrs ROBINSON is now finishing will probably be her last. Her health declines rapidly. The sting of ingratitude wounds deeply in a sensible heart. Mrs ROBINSON’S works will live. They are translated into French and German, and are very popular in those languages.’25 The work in question was a new novel, Walsingham, which was published in early December by Longman. She may have moved because of a financial dispute with her existing publisher, Hookham and Carpenter. The advantage of Longman was that they simply bought the copyright of a book for a flat fee in advance, instead of working on a complicated cost and royalty basis. They paid her £150 for Walsingham, which was printed in four volumes in a run of a thousand copies.

  Mary was by now the most regular, prolific, and high-profile contributor of poetry to the Morning Post, so the press campaign to promote the novel had a second home in addition to the Oracle. The Post puffed that it had been many years since a novel had made so much notice in the literary and fashionable world. Coleridge, the paper’s other poetry correspondent, chipped in with words of high praise. The Morning Post generated further interest by serializing extracts.

  Walsingham was Mary’s most controversial and radical novel to date. It remains one of her two strongest and most interesting books. The hero, Walsingham Ainsforth, is a figure who anticipates Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff: described as gypsy-like, he is an outsider, swarthy, passionate, violent, and dangerous. He has been raised on Rousseau’s principles, as a child of nature. He falls in love w
ith Isabella, who – like Cathy in Wuthering Heights – was brought up with him as a sister and whom he loves ‘much better than I love myself … Isabella was the companion of my studies, the play-fellow of my hours of recreation: in all my walks, in all my exercises, she was my associate: I loved her with a brother’s fondness: I felt the irresistible power of female attraction, but I felt it unmixed with the destructive passions. I adored her, purely, tenderly. It was the idolatry of innocence; nothing sexual contaminated my bosom.’26

  But – unlike Brontë’s Cathy – Isabella does not return his affections. She falls in love with Walsingham’s handsome and accomplished cousin Sir Sidney Aubrey. Walsingham is distraught when Isabella elopes with Sir Sidney, and vows to destroy him, even though he is drawn to his cousin’s undeniable charm. He begins a picaresque journey, which takes him to London where he enters fashionable society and seduces a young woman whom he mistakenly believes to be a willing Isabella. Despite risking her reputation for Sir Sidney by her elopement, Isabella insists that she will never marry him and that she has preserved her virtue. Sir Sidney mentally torments Walsingham and prevents his marriage to other women until his secret is finally revealed: Sir Sidney, in order to gain his rightful inheritance, has been passed off as a man though she is in fact a woman. She is finally united in marriage with Walsingham.

  Walsingham begins in epistolary form, but after a few letters are exchanged Walsingham sends his correspondent a packet containing an autobiographical narrative that ‘unfolds the mystery of my misfortunes’: the remainder of the novel is thus a first-person narrative written from Walsingham’s point of view. This device of beginning with letters and then moving to first-person narrative was also used by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein twenty years later, with the added layer of further first-person narratives contained within that of Frankenstein. Given her parents’ friendship with Robinson, there is a strong possibility that she learnt the technique from Walsingham. One of the two French translations of Walsingham was called L’Enfant des montagnes (‘the child of the mountains’) and the German version was Das Naturkind (‘the child of nature’): Walsingham is given a Rousseauistic education and his favourite books are La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Sorrows of Young Werther. In all this, there is a marked anticipation of Mary Shelley’s account of the natural education of Frankenstein’s creature.

  Walsingham explored many of Mary’s favoured themes: personal merit versus the accidents of birth, the fate of the fallen woman, the dangers of excessive sensibility. But there is also a new (Wollstonecraft-inspired) interest in the question of a woman’s right to inherit property. This is dramatized through the brilliant plot-twist – which some reviewers failed to notice – of the cross-dressed hero/ine Sir Sidney. Having established her name with Shakespearean and other comic cross-dressed parts in the theatre, Mary now gave a political spin to the motif in her novel: by impersonating a man, Sir Sidney is able to inherit the estate that would have been denied her as a woman. The transgendered upbringing also gave Mary a vehicle for one of her great passions: the right of a woman to receive a ‘masculine education’.

  Sidney is the perfect union of the sexes. S/he quivers with sensibility and sheds ‘involuntary tears’, but is also fit and strong: ‘he fenced like a professor of the science; painted with the correctness of an artist; was expert at all manly exercises; a delightful poet; and a fascinating companion’.27 S/he has benefited from a classical education and from vigorous physical exercise – both promoted by Wollstonecraft in her Vindication as necessary training for independent womanhood. He is adored by women, who are drawn to his irresistible combination of strength and gentleness, charm and intelligence. He is the perfect man because he is really a woman.

  The novel maintains a sustained attack on aristocratic corruption. It was accordingly condemned by anti-Jacobin critics. Walsingham is among the radical books displayed in James Gillray’s caricature ‘New Morality’, the age’s most famous satire on the radical literati of the 1790s. The Anti-Jacobin Review complained of Mary that

  Her judgement is frequently distorted by very false notions of politics. Like Charlotte Smith, she has conceived a very high opinion of the wisdom of the French philosophers; and, like many other female writers, as well as superficial male writers, she considers the authority of those whom she admires as equivalent to argument … her peers or peeresses are all either weak or wicked … The miseries and vices of the low are uniformly deduced from the oppressions and the vices of the high … this representation is hurtful, because it tends to encourage the dislike for nobility, which, from the spirit of insubordination, and the fanciful notion of equality is already too prevalent … It is possible, and, indeed, very probable, that those persons of rank with whom Mrs Robinson has been in the habit of associating, may be as bad as she represents, but it is a very unfair and false assertion to say that all the nobility are profligate … Her experience, we think, must have taught her that, at least, equal profligacy obtains among commoners and plebeians … according to Mrs Robinson, Britain is the seat of ignorance, superstition, and tyranny, while other nations are enlightened; and the means of dispelling our ignorance, and delivering ourselves from superstition and tyranny, is the adoption of the principles of Voltaire and Rousseau!!28

  In a similar tone, Tory satirist T. J. Mathias complained that Robinson was a ‘very ingenious’ lady, but that her habit of ‘whining or frisking in novels’ had the effect of making ‘our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures’ and that her fiction was ‘tainted with democracy’.29

  Another anti-Jacobin activist, Richard Polwhele, made a political distinction between Robinson’s poems and her novels. In his satirical poem with notes called The Unsex’d Females, he linked the import of loose French garments to female interest in French radical ideas. Both developments were strongly associated with Mary. ‘And ROBINSON to Gaul her Fancy gave,’ he writes, ‘And trac’d the picture of a Deist’s grave!’30 Deism was a watchword for French radicalism and Godwin’s philosophy, otherwise known as ‘Philosophism’ – a new word that entered the English language in the early 1790s, specifically with reference to what was perceived as the atheistic and dangerously democratic philosophy of the French Encyclopedists. For Polwhele, Robinson’s poems were wholesome, but her novels were beset with the French vice:

  In Mrs Robinson’s Poetry, there is a peculiar delicacy: but her Novels, as literary compositions, have no great claim to approbation – As containing the doctrines of Philosophism, they merit the severest censure. Would that, for the sake of herself and her beautiful daughter (whose personal charms are only equalled by the elegance of her mind), would that, for the sake of the public morality, Mrs Robinson were persuaded to dismiss the gloomy phantom of annihilation; to think seriously of a future retribution; and to communicate to the world, a recantation of errors that originated in levity, and have been nursed by pleasure! I have seen her ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor and joy!’ Such, and more glorious, may I meet her again, when the just ‘shall shine forth as the brightness of the firmanent [sic] and as the stars for ever and ever!’31

  For Polwhele, Mary’s radicalism was a crime against her sex and a cause of potential damnation of her eternal soul. His worry about Mrs Robinson corrupting her fair daughter is especially striking.

  Mary’s strength had always been in exposing high society to the satirist’s pen, but this time she courted extra publicity by the close parallels that she drew between real and fictional characters. Not only did she satirize the sex doctor James Graham as Dr Pimpernel and Robert Merry as Mr Doleful, but she also included several characters based on her friends: the benevolent and trusty Mr Optic is John Taylor the eye doctor and the wild but amiable Lord Kencarth is Lord Barrymore, while Gnat the philosopher, critic, and writer is Godwin. Mary’s close friend Samuel Jackson Pratt appears as himself as the writer of Liberal Opinions and Family Secrets, but under his alias Melmoth. One character wants to read Family Secrets to
see if any of her friends are in it. The female gamesters that she parodies are all based on real people: this is what made the novel so scandalous in the fashionable world. There are easily recognizable portraits of the corpulent faro banker Albinia Hobart (later Countess of Buckinghamshire), of Lady Sarah Archer, of the duellist Lord Linbourne, and several others.

  Mary had never been averse to using details of her own life for her creative works. Walsingham’s opening letter is written from Aix-la-Chapelle, where Mary lived in the mid-1780s, and her travels on the Continent infuse her writing. She sets a scene in the Cocoa Tree, the famous coffee house on St James’s Street that was a centre for gambling and one of Tarleton’s favourite haunts. She includes characters that she knew would be compared with her own self. One such is a female author (who writes poems, novels, comedies, and verse tragedies), whose comedy is jettisoned by the women of rank who set out to destroy her reputation. They send both the author and the principal actress anonymous hate mail denouncing the play, as had happened with Nobody. This character is viewed as a ‘petticoat pedant’ and is subjected to malicious reviews by jealous critics: ‘the most polished works suffer the severity of unjustifiable condemnation, merely to gratify the spleen of individuals [who] wield the pen with as little mercy as the sanguinary savage guides the blow of his death-inflicting tomahawk’. There is a passionate denunciation of a critic ‘who wantonly destroys another’s hopes, and takes from talents, industry and truth, the means of obtaining an honourable subsistence’.32

  The Telegraph gave Mrs Mary Robinson a prominent place in a list of forty-two people who ‘pay to have themselves puffed in the Newspapers’.33 It could be argued that someone who indulged in such a practice had no right to complain about harsh treatment at the hands of critics and reviewers. But what is striking about the reception of Walsingham is that the criticism was motivated above all by politics. Perdita had remade herself as what the Morning Post rightly called a ‘philosophical’ author, and that was a very hard transformation for traditionalists to accept.