Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  When Wordsworth heard that Mary Robinson was preparing a volume with the title Lyrical Tales, he was working on the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. He seriously considered changing his title, for fear that a book by the famous Mrs Robinson would steal his thunder. This was a sign of his insecurity: the anonymously published first volume of Lyrical Ballads had not sold well and had been given a very mixed critical reception. Because Lyrical Ballads is now among the two or three best-known volumes of poetry in the English language, it is easy to assume that by imitating it Mary was merely cashing in on a new fashion in poetry. But at the time she was a much more celebrated author than Wordsworth, so it would be truer to say that she was assisting his reputation by imitating him. Wordsworth’s publishers must have been surprised and delighted to have received a letter from the renowned Mrs Robinson asking them whether they would be interested in publishing a new collection that ‘will consist of Tales, serious and gay, on a variety of subjects in the manner of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads’.16

  ‘Tales, serious and gay’ is an excellent description. The collection juxtaposes stories of poverty and woe with humorous tales. The influence of Lyrical Ballads is apparent from the very first poem (which was actually the last to be written, inserted just before the book was printed). Entitled ‘All Alone’ it is about a boy who loiters in a graveyard, very much in the manner of Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’, though with the difference that whereas in Wordsworth it is two siblings who lie beneath the earth, in Mary’s poem it is a mother. Wordsworth’s poem is about an adult’s failure to understand the mind of a child: the poet-narrator does not comprehend that the girl still feels close enough to her dead siblings to say ‘we are seven’ even though only five of them are alive. Robinson’s narrator, on the other hand, sympathizes with the orphaned boy, insisting that he is not ‘all alone’ while she is watching over him. Wordsworth was more interested in silences and the painful gaps between people, Robinson in the sympathetic power of ‘sensibility’ to instil fellow feeling.

  The two poets resemble each other most in their choice of subject matter. Like Wordsworth, Mary makes it her business to bestow dignity upon ordinary people by writing tragic verse not about kings and heroes but about the poor and the dispossessed: the widow of a soldier who has been killed in the wars (‘The Widow’s House’), a priest who has fled from the Terror of revolutionary France (‘The Fugitive’), a young female slave being shipped across the ocean (‘The Negro Girl’), an old man who has lost his children (‘The Deserted Cottage’), a suicidal girl whose lover is dead (‘Poor Marguerite’). All this mournful matter is interspersed with lighter pieces, such as ‘Deborah’s Parrot: A Village Tale’, most of which had been first published in the lively voice of Tabitha Bramble in the Morning Post.

  The best poem in the collection is probably ‘The Lascar’, which tells of a persecuted East Indian sailor. His existence is a scar on the body politic of imperial Britain: ‘Here, in this smiling land we find / Neglect and mis’ry sting our race.’ Mary exposes how the prosperity of the fashionable world, with its luxury goods such as the silk garments she had once delighted in wearing, was achieved through the suffering of others:

  Was it for this, that on the main

  I met the tempest fierce and strong,

  And steering o’er the liquid plain,

  Still onward, press’d the waves among?

  Was it for this, the Lascar brave

  Toil’d, like a wretched Indian Slave;

  Preserv’d your treasures by his toil,

  And sigh’d to greet this fertile soil?

  Was it for this, to beg, to die,

  Where plenty smiles, and where the Sky

  Sheds cooling airs; while fev’rish pain,

  Maddens the famish’d Lascar’s brain?17

  Mary sympathized with the Lascar, together with the widows and orphans of her collection, because by this time she perceived herself as an outcast from high society, dying ‘all alone’ in poverty and pain. One of the poems is called ‘The Poor, Singing Dame’: it tells of an ‘old dame’ who lives in a ‘neat little Hovel’ just below the turrets of the wall that ‘went round an old Castle’ inhabited by a proud lord, who is irritated by her merry singing. Towards the end of the poem, the reader learns the woman’s name: ‘When poor singing Mary was laid in her grave.’ As soon as she is dead, the lord is haunted by screech owls, which send him spiralling towards his own grave. Given that Mary spent many months during the last two years of her life in a tiny cottage on the edge of the Great Park that was dominated by Windsor Castle, it is hard to resist an autobiographical reading.

  For Coleridge, Mary’s excellence lay not in her narratives, which he often found weak, but in her poetic ‘ear’ and in particular her metrical skill. Though the blank verse poems in Lyrical Tales are generally written with less suppleness than their Wordsworthian equivalents in Lyrical Ballads, Mary’s collection includes a remarkable range of metrical innovations and variations among its poems written in stanzaic and ballad form. It made a major contribution to the advance of English poetic metre: ‘Tennyson’s “Mariana” could not have been written without Mary Robinson’s experiments to create a new lyric form in English verse,’ writes one of the modern critics instrumental in the rediscovery of her poetry in the 1990s.18

  In April 1800 Mary made one of her last public appearances, a trip to the opera ‘attended by a NOBLE cicisbeo … though evidently labouring under the effects of indisposition’.19 Cicisbeo was an alternative Italian term for a cavaliere servante, which meant either an acknowledged lover or a solicitous admirer. Given Mary’s state of health, it seems most unlikely that she had any kind of romantic involvement with a nobleman this late in her life, so it must be assumed that this particular escort was motivated by courtesy and affection rather than desire. His identity is a mystery, though it is notable that at around this time in both an essay and a poem she expressed gratitude to the Earl of Moira for his habitual generosity.20 A fellow officer of Tarleton, intimate with the Prince of Wales, and the closest English friend of Lauzun, this dashing Irishman, who would eventually become Governor General of India, might have helped her out financially and escorted her to the Opera House.

  By a curious coincidence, another Mrs Robinson lived in Albemarle Street not far from Mary’s home. She hosted society events that were reported in the newspapers. To Mary she must have seemed like a shadow of her own past self, a strange double in the world she had lost. Her own social life, by contrast, revolved around her circle of literary friends. Having given a lavish description of the other Mrs Robinson’s ball one day, the Morning Post noted a little dinner of Mary’s the next: ‘Mrs ROBINSON had a conversatione, on Sunday evening, at which many of the literati were present.’21

  Two days later, the same paper reported that Mary was showing alarming symptoms of consumption. Though this was a false diagnosis, she was declining fast. Her doctor suggested that she should go west to try the waters at Bristol Wells. For Mary, this would also have been an opportunity to pay a last visit to her home city. She even thought that it would have been fitting to die there. But she did not have the money to make the journey. Reluctantly, she appealed to the wealthy men who had once supported her. Neither the Prince nor Lord Malden had been at all regular in paying his annuity. Mary seems to have written to them both. A copy of a letter on the subject has survived. It has been assumed that it was meant for the Prince, but the address ‘My Lord’ makes Malden the more likely candidate (Mary addressed the Prince as ‘Your Royal Highness’):

  My Lord

  PRONOUNCED by my physicians to be in a rapid decline, I trust that your Lordship will have the goodness to assist me with a part of the sum for which you are indebted to me. Without your aid I cannot make trial of the Bristol waters, the only remedy that presents to me any hope of preserving my existence. I should be sorry to die at enmity with any person; and you may be assured, my dear Lord, that I bear none towards you. It would be useless to ask you
to call on me; but, if you would do me that honour, I should be happy, very happy, to see you, being,

  My dear Lord,

  Yours truly,

  MARY ROBINSON.22

  There was no reply from Malden. A similar letter to the Prince about the arrears in his annuity was graced with a reply – but not with any funds.

  However bad the state of her health and her finances, Mary wanted to go on entertaining cultivated friends from the world of literature and painting. She wrote to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s old pupil, the painter James Northcote:

  Dear Sir,

  I lament that confinement to my bed will prevent my having the pleasure to receive my friend, on Friday Evening, next. The very precarious state of my health forbids my naming the period, though I hope that it is not far distant, when I shall again have the pleasure of seeing you. Be assured that I shall embrace the earliest opportunity with great easiness.23

  She was also still in touch with her artist friends the Cosways. Maria Cosway painted a series of scenes to illustrate her poem ‘The Wintry Day’.

  Still Mary went on turning out poems, not only for the Morning Post but also for the monthly magazines. In May the Lady’s Monthly Museum published a good example of her gift for light-handed lyrical versification, this time under the name Bridget:

  The Way to keep Him

  A lover, when he first essays

  A lady’s heart to gain,

  A thousand tender fears betrays,

  And talks of jealous pain!

  All day he sighs, and sighing swears,

  That love, and hope, and anxious cares,

  Destroy his peace, his nights molest,

  And agonize his ‘feeling breast!’

  If not believ’d, he ardent pays

  Obedient homage still!

  And ev’ry gentle grace displays,

  To gratify her will!

  Where’er she goes, he follows true;

  And if she flies him, he’ll pursue;

  And if she frowns – he’ll still adore;

  And if she scorns – he’ll doat the more!

  Let her another kindly treat,

  He sighs in hopeless pain;

  Let her his eyes with coldness meet,

  And ev’ry glance disdain;

  Let her avoid him, wayward prone,

  To favour all, save him alone!

  Let others see her always glad,

  But let him find her – ever sad!

  Thus would you keep a lover still,

  Unkind and careless prove;

  For man is humble – treated ill!

  And coldness fosters love!

  Spurn him with harshness, and he sighs;

  Most servile, when most cross’d;

  Reward with kindness – and he flies!

  Adore him – and he’s lost!24

  This is a mocking version of the advice promulgated in the popular eighteenth-century play, Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him, which advocated submission and adoration as the way for a woman to keep her lover happy. Mary, writing from her long and bitter experience of men, suggests precisely the opposite: abuse him and he will love you for ever, adore him and you will lose him.

  A few guineas received in return for a steady stream of poems such as this was not enough to clear her debts. An action was brought against her. She was arrested and held in custody. This must have been extraordinarily distressing, given her disability. It is not known where she was taken – possibly the sheriff’s office – though a witty comment in a letter written at the time hints at the darkness of her surroundings: ‘I hope that my health will not suffer by my present obscurity. I have seen so little Sun Shine, for some years past, that any thing short of total oblivion will now content me.’

  She was in an exceptionally awkward dilemma, as she explained in a letter to her old friend William Godwin. Her good humour shines through even as she writes while under arrest: ‘I assure you that my feelings are not wounded neither is my spirit dejected by the “cloud” you mention – and tho’ I shall not dart through it like a Sun-beam, I shall warmly feel the attentions with which you, and my most valued friends have honoured me.’ The dilemma was that because there was ‘no kind of legal separation’ between her and Robinson, she could, ‘as a married woman’, have had the action against her set aside and forced her husband to take on the debt. But she did not want to involve him. And she felt that it was beneath her dignity to borrow from her friends:

  I have had various proposals from many friends, to settle the business – but I am too proud to borrow, while the arrears now due on my annuity from the Prince of Wales would doubly pay the sum for which I am arrested – I have written to the Prince, and his answer is, that ‘there is no money at Carlton House! That he is very sorry for my situation, but that his own is equally distressing!!’ You will smile at such paltry excuses, as I do! But I am determined to persist in my demand, Half a years annuity being nearly due, which is Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds. And I am in custody for Sixty three Pounds Only! So Circumstanced I will neither borrow, beg, nor Steal. I owe very little in the world, and still less to the world, – and it is unimportant to me, where I pass my days. If I possess the Esteem and friendship of its best ornaments among which I consider you most sincerely—25

  The £63 was paid – possibly by Godwin – and the shadow of an extended stay in debtors’ prison was lifted.

  In early July, she wrote to Robert Ker Porter, another artist friend whom she had known and admired for some time.26 Porter, brother of Jane Porter the novelist, had achieved celebrity with his painting of the storming of Seringapatam in India by a small band of British Grenadiers in the spring of 1799 (the event that inspired the prologue to Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone). Mary had been commissioned to write a pen-portrait of Porter for another publication under the imprint of Richard Phillips, so she needed some biographical information:

  Dear Sir

  As Fame has a ladder which all must sooner or later ascend, who have Genius to guide them, and as you have made long strides towards the very top of its utmost altitude, I wish to hang upon your skirts, a biographical sketch of the Painter of Seringapatam for the octavo publication of Lives of Celebrated Characters. I shall thereby also have the field to scatter some flowers around the brows of your sweet and elegant Sisters: – the memoir will be anonymous, I shall therefore (if you are willing) thank you for a mere outline, which I will fill up to the best of my powers.27

  She went on to reveal that the same volume would also contain ‘a biographical sketch’ of herself that is ‘now writing by a very celebrated literary character’. The pen-portrait of Robert Porter, recognizably in Mary’s style, was duly published at the end of the year in Public Characters of 1800–1801, an annual publication that consisted of biographical sketches of notable public figures. Mary’s account of Porter gives a detailed and lively description of his famous painting and also refers to his ‘two lovely, accomplished sisters, who have presented the world with many proofs of their taste for literature’.28

  That year’s edition of Public Characters included only two female subjects: the authors Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Who, then, was the ‘very celebrated literary character’ responsible for the pen-portrait of Mrs Robinson? The opening of the essay gives the reader a strong indication:

  That this is the age of female British authors, and that the Lady who will be the subject of the following memoir, is of the number of those who have most eminently distinguished themselves amongst the numerous supporters of the female laurel, which is now confessedly one of the indisputable ‘Rights of Women,’ we trust will be made manifest to all readers, who peruse with candour the various evidences of taste and genius, which we shall point out.29

  The phrase ‘Rights of Women’ suggests that it must have been Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin. He was writing regularly for Phillips at this time; there is a reference in his journal to a ‘Character of Mrs Robinson’; and he was the most cele
brated ‘literary character’ to spend time with her while she was writing her Memoirs that year.

  The essay in Public Characters was the most detailed and accurate biographical account of her to appear prior to the posthumous publication of the Memoirs. It records, for instance, that her ancestor Richard Seys had a sister who married the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, that Mary was a collateral descendant of John Locke, that Lord Chancellor Northington was her godfather, that she was married at 15, that her relationship with the Prince of Wales lasted ‘little longer than a year’, that for twenty years she had benefited from the patronage of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and that her works were warmly admired by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted her twice. The reader even learns that a copy of the first Reynolds portrait was requested by the Duke of Chaulne for the Empress of Russia. The second Reynolds and the full-length portrait by Gainsborough were in the possession of the Prince.

  Other information included was that Mary’s father had been buried with full military honours, his old friend Admiral Gregg in attendance; that her brother was a merchant of the highest respectability at Leghorn; and that Mr Robinson was still living, ‘the only brother of Commodore William Robinson, the opulent East Indian’. At the time of writing, it was noted, Mrs Robinson enjoyed ‘a respectable circle of society, among which some of the first literary characters, male and female, may be named’. Godwin, one of the towering intellects of the age, was at the centre of that circle, closely acquainted with Mary. He may well have seen the manuscript draft of the Memoirs.

  The essay ends with a touching account of Mary’s poor health and hard literary labour, describing how she ‘has been afflicted with a rheumatic complaint upwards of eleven years, which has baffled the skill of the most eminent of the faculty, and which has been greatly increased by those close attentions to the labour of the pen, which a limited income, and helpless state of health, render absolutely necessary’. But more ‘personal beauty’ remained in her, Godwin adds, than most women possessed in the proudest May-time of their attractions: ‘She is humane and hospitable to the poor and the unhappy; and entertains her chosen friends with great warmth of affection. Her conversation is enriched by sentiment and enlivened by wit, and her manners are distinguished by suavity and politeness.’30