by Paula Byrne
Late in the year 1797 Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were formally engaged as ‘poetical correspondents’ of the Morning Post. This represented an extraordinary turnaround for Mary: in her early years of celebrity the Morning Post had dragged her through the mud. But now times and editors had changed. Her key supporter was a canny Scotsman called Daniel Stuart. Not everybody trusted him: the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson once asked Coleridge some ‘awkward questions’ about his association with Stuart, to which Coleridge replied, ‘Why, if I’m pressed as to Dan’s strict honesty, which I don’t wish to be, I should say: Dan’s a Scotchman who is content to get rid of the itch when he can afford to wear clean linen.’34 But he was known for his good temper, and was a highly successful editor. He bought the Oracle in 1795 and kept its daily circulation near one thousand, whilst also taking over the Morning Post and turning around its fortunes: when he bought the paper’s office and its copyright in the summer of 1795, circulation was at a meagre 350. By 1798 he had raised it to 2,000 and by 1803 to 4,500. No other daily paper sold more than 3,000.35
He had been editor of the paper before, when it was a pro-Pitt, anti-Prince paper in the 1780s. But when the Morning Post went public on the Prince’s morganatic marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert – which was an open secret in society, but not to be mentioned in print – the Prince’s faction promptly bought the paper in order to prevent further attacks. Stuart was fired from the editorship and John Taylor elevated from drama critic to editor (as well as being appointed oculist to the Prince of Wales). Given this history, Stuart must have taken a particular pleasure in the paper’s decline and the opportunity to install himself as both proprietor and editor. This time he positioned its politics carefully: the Morning Post became, as Coleridge put it, ‘un ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-jacobin, anti-gallican’.36 Not Tory, not Whig, not Jacobinical: independence was the editorial watchword.
This suited Mary, who by this time regarded herself as a fiercely independent writer, as sensitive to the horrors of radical extremism as she was satirical of the indulgence and corruption of the political establishment. And to have Mary on the books suited Stuart: he knew that her poems had for many years helped to sell the Oracle and he was eager to give the ‘Poetical Department’ a prominence it had not previously had in the Morning Post. The established talent of Mrs Robinson and the rising star of Mr Coleridge seemed to him to offer the ideal combination: ‘The POETRY of the Morning Post will in future be critically select. None but first-rate compositions will be admitted to our columns; and we are promised the aid of several of the most distinguished writers of the present day.’37 For three years, from December 1797 until her death, Mary regularly contributed between one and three poems per week to the paper – save in a period of severe illness in the winter of 1798–9. For this, she was paid at least a guinea a week.38 At the end of 1799 she took over the role of poetry editor from Robert Southey, continuing to publish her own verses under a range of pseudonyms, including ‘M. R.’, ‘Tabitha Bramble’, ‘Tabitha’, ‘T. B.’, ‘T.’, ‘Laura Maria’, ‘L. M.’, ‘Sappho’, ‘Bridget’, ‘Oberon’, ‘Julia’, and ‘Lesbia’ (and sometimes no name at all).39
Her most provocative new poetic persona was ‘Tabitha Bramble’. The name was taken from the character of a sex-starved spinster in Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker. Skinny, flat-chested, and still unmarried despite her best efforts, Smollett’s Tabitha is ‘a maiden of forty-five, exceedingly starched, vain and ridiculous’. There could hardly be a wittier pen name for the woman once described as the most beautiful woman in England, and the most sexually notorious. Maria Elizabeth Robinson called the Tabitha Bramble verses ‘lighter compositions, considered by the author as unworthy of a place with her collected poems’,40 but Mary included six of them in the collection in which she took most pride, Lyrical Tales.
Tabitha Bramble made her first appearance in the Morning Post on 8 December 1797, in an ode in which she ‘Visits the Metropolis’. Daniel Stuart heralded this new voice: ‘We have received the first number of a series of Odes, by Tabitha Bramble. The elegance of the stile, and the richness of imagination displayed in this introductory Ode, will warrant our Readers in expecting much delight from the productions of this new Correspondent.’41 Robinson’s device was to satirize fashionable London life by squinting at the foibles of the ton through the eyes of an outsider. She was not averse to occasional recycling under Tabitha Bramble’s name of poems that had been published in earlier years under different soubriquets.
Walsingham, meanwhile, was vigorously puffed in the Morning Post, where it was said to have established Mary’s position ‘in the front rank of Literature’.42 The poems woven into the novel were especially admired. Signing himself ‘Francini’, Coleridge contributed his ‘The Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop’, written ‘immediately on the perusal of the beautiful poem, the Snow Drop’:
Fear no more, thou timid flower!
Fear thou no more the Winter’s might,
The whelming thaw; the ponderous shower;
The silence of the freezing night!
Since LAURA murmur’d o’er thy leaves
The potent sorceries of song,
To thee meek flow’ret! gentler gales
And cloudless skies belong.
On thee with feelings unreprov’d
Her eyes with tearful meanings fraught,
She gazed till all the body mov’d
Interpreting the spirit’s thought:
Now trembled with thy trembling stem;
And, while thou drooped’st o’er thy bed,
With imitative sympathy
Inclin’d the drooping head.43
Coleridge here represents Robinson as a potent sorcerer of song who is in exquisite sympathy with the natural world – a worthy rival to his friend Wordsworth? ‘The Snow Drop’, written for Walsingham and reprinted in the Morning Post, is indeed one of Mary’s best lyrics:
The snow-drop, Winter’s timid child,
Awakes to life bedew’d with tears;
And flings around its fragrance mild,
And where no rival flowrets bloom,
Amidst the bare and chilling gloom,
A beauteous gem appears!
All weak and wan, with head inclin’d
Its parent breast, the drifted snow;
It trembles while the ruthless wind
Bends its slim form; the tempest lours,
Its em’rald eye drops crystal show’rs
On its cold bed below …
Where’er I find thee, gentle flow’r,
Thou still art sweet, and dear to me!
For I have known the cheerless hour,
Have seen the sun-beams cold and pale,
Have felt the chilling wint’ry gale,
And wept, and shrunk like thee!44
The snowdrop appears in the heavy dew of early spring before ‘rival’ flowers such as the ‘gaudy crocus’, and it does seem to incline its head: it is a fitting image for Mary herself, who bloomed early but soon came to droop with melancholy.
Daniel Stuart sent a complimentary copy of Walsingham down to Coleridge at Nether Stowey in Somerset, enclosing a letter from Mary expressing her gratitude at his response to her poem. A second set of the four volumes of Walsingham was enclosed in the same package with a request for Coleridge to pass it on to a Mr Chubb in nearby Bridgwater. This was John Chubb, an artist and merchant from Bristol, who was a family friend of the Darbys. He had painted a watercolour of Mary, sitting at her writing desk with quill and inkwell ready; she is shown gazing at her miniature portrait of the Prince, as if to imply that it was his rejection that turned her into a writer.
In the early days of 1798 Mary struggled with a ‘nervous fever, attended by a depression of spirits, which all the attentions of her friends cannot alleviate’.45 She began to write her memoirs, with a view to putting straight the record of her early years before she died. ‘The vein of melancholy which pervades the pages of Walsingham,�
�� remarked the Oracle, ‘bespeaks an inquietude of mind, which in some measure proclaims the cause of her present indisposition.’46
The Morning Post informed its readers that ‘The Publisher of “The Lives of Living Authors,” has confirmed to Mrs ROBINSON the dignified title of the English Sappho: a title which was long since bestowed on her by the literary tribunal of the country.’47 By the end of February, nursed as ever by her daughter, she was ‘sufficiently recovered from her late illness, to resume her literary occupations’.48 The Morning Post monitored her every movement, plugging her books, reporting on her health, and praising her daughter for beauty, correct manners, high accomplishment, and fetching outfits: ‘The gypsy hat was first worn by MISS ROBINSON, who was also the first who introduced the Grecian head-dress, two winters ago.’49 In addition to working on her memoirs, starting another novel, and churning out new verses for the Morning Post in an array of voices and styles, Mary also began to prepare a collected edition of her poems. The English Sappho merited nothing less: the plan was to publish ‘three large volumes octavo by subscription’.50
The Duchess of Devonshire was said to be taking the lead in patronizing the edition,* but to judge from the urgency of the puffs in the Oracle and the Morning Post some weeks after this announcement, Mary may have had some difficulty in generating interest: ‘Mrs ROBINSON confines her new Edition of Poetical Works to Subscribers only. And the commencement promises all the distinguished names in the kingdom, both for rank and talents’; ‘Mrs ROBINSON, by reserving her new edition of poems for subscribers, has excited a desire to have copies, which promises to produce the most splendid and numerous list that ever graced a literary work. All party, ranks, and politics unite in patronizing a poetess, to whom the tribunal of letters has given the dignified appellation of the ENGLISH SAPPHO.’51
This sounds like the lady protesting too much that she has all the names she needs. A month later it was reported that ‘MRS ROBINSON’S new List of Subscribers to her Poetical Works, goes on with brilliant success. She has the most splendid and flattering patronage that ever distinguished a literary production.’52 It was stressed that, being subscription only, the volumes would not be available from circulating libraries; readers had to sign up (and pay up) for their own copies. The emphasis on aristocratic patronage is ironic given the way in which Mary had earlier trumpeted the fact that her true patrons were the members of the ordinary reading public. The problem was that readers of middling rank, especially women who did not have much disposable income of their own, were eager to read her poems in the papers and take out her novels from the circulating library, but this did not produce sufficient literary income to sustain Mary and her household. The collection of names seems to have stalled: the subscription edition did not appear. It was not until the sixth year after Mary’s death that her daughter produced an edition of her Poetical Works.
In the light of Mary’s excellent relationship with the editor of the Oracle, it is hardly likely to have been coincidental that her ex-lover came in for some very bad press in the paper around this time. Tarleton was criticized for his support for a new figure who had emerged in France: Napoleon Bonaparte. It was noted that his parliamentary speeches lacked style – were indeed ‘somniferous’ – now that Mary was no longer around to write them for him. The papers questioned how he could reconcile his pro-slavery stance with his professions of being the friend of ‘universal freedom’. There were quips that there would not be any more works of military history under the name of Tarleton. Stuart’s papers knew no bounds in their support for Mary, even complaining that her Sicilian Lover had not been acted despite being one of the ‘best-written plays of the present century’, which is a somewhat exaggerated claim for the work’s quality.53
Mary was now making plans to retire to the country. ‘Mrs ROBINSON, as soon as her new edition of Poems is published, means to reside wholly in the country. For this plan of retirement, a neat cottage is already preparing.’54 She and Maria Elizabeth spent the summer in this cottage, which was at Englefield Green, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Englefield Green was a newly fashionable destination for the gentry in summertime: sufficiently close to London for business, but pleasantly rural and with the prestige of being close to Windsor. New villas were being built around the green and in secluded sites that afforded excellent views of Runnymede, where Magna Carta had been signed, and Cooper’s Hill, where in the seventeenth century Sir John Denham had written one of the founding poems of the tradition of English landscape poetry.
The rest of the year was devoted principally to work on her new novel, which was much her longest.
In December, it was announced that General Banastre Tarleton was to marry Susan Bertie, illegitimate daughter of the late Duke of Ancaster. She was well educated, below middle height, in her early twenties, and worth about £20,000 a year. Tarleton was rewarded with a posting to Portugal and a ceremonial sword as a wedding present from the Prince of Wales. Tarleton christened it ‘Sweet Lips’ and it remains in the family to this day. Eighteen months after the end of his fifteen-year affair with Mary, he had succumbed to what in her novel Angelina she called ‘the old expedient – a rich wife’.
*Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796.
*Around this time Georgiana started writing poetry herself, heavily influenced by that of Mary.
CHAPTER 23
Feminist
Man is a despot by nature; he can bear no equal; he dreads the power of woman.
Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination
We have broke the destructive spell which manacled the mind; we are no longer the vassals of our imperious help-mates; we dare think; and we at length assert those rights which nature formed us to enjoy.
Mary Robinson, The False Friend
Two months after Tarleton’s wedding, Mary’s new novel was published. Back in 1791, her ‘Ode to Valour’ had ended by describing Tarleton as ‘the Faithful Friend’. For anybody who knew her story and Tarleton’s recent history, the title of the novel would have carried a strong hint: The False Friend. The Morning Post, having reported the fact that Tarleton and his bride had sailed for Lisbon, let it be known that in the novel Mary ‘made her hero perish on his voyage to Lisbon’ – poets are generally prophets, it added, ‘and Mrs ROBINSON has, in more than one instance, been correct in her predictions’.1
In reality, the Tarletons did safely reach Portugal. The only storm was in the newspapers back home, where the coverage of Mary’s novel focused on its supposed autobiographical content: ‘The sable habit in which Mrs ROBINSON has disguised her False Friend does not conceal the glaring traits of the character she means to delineate’; ‘The character of Treville in Mrs Robinson’s new novel is said to be drawn from an original. For the honour of human nature, we hope the anecdotes are not authentic.’2 There was a general consensus that the book was shaped by the end of the long affair with Tarleton. ‘A certain General would be entirely forgotten, but that a false friend will ever be remembered,’ said the Morning Post, and in the monthly magazines reviewers sympathized with the author: ‘as a domestic story, in which the author tells the tale of her own woes, it excites our sincerest sympathy’; ‘We would gladly believe the sorrow that breathes through this production to be fictitious, but, in truth, it bears marks too affecting and characteristic. Cold must be the bosom in which it awakens no interest, and hard the nature that melts not in sympathy.’3
There can be no doubt that some passages were written out of anger and bitterness towards Tarleton:
These are the despots who hold us in a state of bondage! who call themselves our idolaters, till the caprice of their natures prove their apostasy. Created to protect us, they expose us to every danger; endowed with strength to sustain our erring judgment, they are ever eager to mislead us … O man! thou pleasing, subtle, fawning, conquering foe! thou yielding tyrant! thou imperious slave! What language can describe thee?4
But in most
respects the character of Treville is actually more a literary type than a portrait of Tarleton. He is a rake in the mould of Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. ‘Too polite to be religious; too witty to be learned; too youthful to be serious; and too handsome to be discreet: in four words, a fashionable divine, divinely fashionable’, he is ‘a libertine of the most dangerous species; a dissembling sycophant; a being who hovered round the wealthy and the high-born … a coxcomb by education; a deceiver by practice; a flatterer by profession; and a profligate by nature’.5
A much more interesting character is the heroine, Gertrude St Leger. She is a self-professed disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she calls a ‘champion of her sex’.6 Like both Wollstonecraft and Mrs Robinson herself, Gertrude is a victim of excessively acute sensibility but also a free spirit, daring and unconventional. The Monthly Mirror astutely compared her to the protagonist of Godwin’s Caleb Williams: ‘She is a sort of female Williams, and, probably, Mrs Robinson was not unwilling to furnish a companion to Godwin’s well-known hero.’7
As in so many of the novels of the 1790s, there is a whiff of incest to the plot. Gertrude is in love with Lord Denmore, who awakens dangerous passions in her before she finally discovers that he is really her father. If the novel is to be read as veiled autobiography, it might be said to reveal as much about Mary’s conflicting feelings towards Nicholas Darby as it does about her pain and anger upon being deserted by Tarleton. Besides, Mary’s motivation for writing was not personal pique but a desire to explore and express the nature of the passions. Gertrude subjects her own strong sensibility to a fierce interrogation: