The two became the kind of friends who made each other laugh, who nudged each other when they shared a private opinion, and who grew up to read each other’s thoughts, such as their disbelief in the hopeless lie told by Lord G. (a.k.a. Bunny, Mrs. D.’s brother Bernard, Lord Granville) one night at Bulstrode:
We were talking the other night after supper of “Will-in-the-wisp,” one person in the company said he “had seen one once;” some said they had never seen one, but wished to do it, and others that they were not sure that they had ever seen any such thing. “Oh!” says Lord G., “I have had twenty of them round my chaise at a time, nay, 30 or 40.” A profound silence ensued, and the wicked Duchess trod on my foot, so that with the utmost difficulty I kept my countenance.7
Together the two friends noticed everything around them. They loved to walk, look, catalog, and describe. Because Mary was a consummate noticer and noter, perhaps the way she rendered into words what she saw satisfied some of the younger Margaret’s extreme need to grasp the world before her. The gap in their ages gave the older Mary a way to balance herself against the younger woman’s much greater wealth and glittering rank. Mrs. D. had a calm sense of her own worth that allowed her to appreciate how riches, eccentricities, and avid interests shaped Margaret’s lust to accumulate all there was to know about animals, minerals, and plants, and the specimens and artifacts to support that knowledge, too.
By the time Margaret invited her friend to live at Bulstrode, just after the Dean’s death, the two had achieved an intriguing balance of age and experience with title and wealth. The widow and the mother of six children stepped into her friend’s grief, directing her, insisting that she listen, and reinforcing her views, in candid correspondence with her friend’s niece Mary Dewes:
I think it very proper Mrs. Delany should have a house of her own, but beg she will not determine immediately, nor can I see any reason for her settling at Bath. Why not have a house in London? that would certainly be the most advisable; she would then be amongst her friends and relations, and she could spend every summer with her friends, who would be so happy to have her company.
Mary’s earlier decision annoyed Margaret. “I hope she remembers how much I was against the selling her house in Spring Gardens. How vexatious that it is gone! … I beg she will not take a sudden resolution, at least by no means to buy a house at Bath.”8 By the time Margaret had persuaded Mary to rent another house in London and then to spend six months a year with her at Bulstrode, to recover from years of worry as well as to relax into the guilty relief that anyone who has attended an ill person, however beloved, feels upon that person’s death, the two women had been friends for more than forty-five years.
At first she treated Mary as a convalescent. She assigned her a suite of ground-floor rooms at Bulstrode so that her friend could avoid stairs, and made the great house into a bit of a rest home for her. In the fall of 1768 Mary breakfasted with “the little Jonquil parrot … the prettiest good-humoured little creature.”9 Then the Duchess strolled her through the Bulstrode grounds toward a pond where Mary witnessed “gold and silver fish … in shoals, thousands I am sure, all swimming up in a body to the Duchess, who fed them with bread.” They walked the acres of the estate together, making “frequent stops … to examine plants and funguses.”10 This was all part of an attempt to distract Mrs. D. from her grief, because she had simply fallen apart.
In mourning, she walked alone through the Bulstrode grounds trying to “[banish] sad thoughts” by feeding the wild hares and pheasants the Duchess had tamed:
I took a basket of food for the creatures, fed them, and walked an hour and three quarters, so much amused with the variety I met with and the delightfulness of the place, that it for some time banished sad thoughts, and I was not sensible I had walked rather too much till I came home and sat down. I was chid by my kind friend, who says she will not trust me again alone.11
Like her fictional heroine Marianna, the main character of the novella she’d written ten years before in 1759 but never published, Mrs. Delany lost track of time and where she was. Marianna, all alone, got lost on a long walk and was kidnapped by gypsies, but at Bulstrode Mary had Margaret, her worrying guardian.12 Again and again Mrs. Delany was consoled by the safe view from her ground-floor windows. “A pretty and uncommon scene is now before me on the lawn: a flock of sheep, shepherd and dog at a little distance, and in the foreground (to talk like a painter) fifteen or sixteen hares feeding with peacocks and guinea-fowl. ” Bulstrode felt like a painting come alive.
Streams of visitors passed through daily. One day, when the Duchess’s son Lord Edward was ill, Lady Wallingford, Mrs. Pitt, Prince and Princess Czartoriski, a collector named Mr. Archard, and Dr. Tuxton – who bled the ill Lord Edward of “fifty ounces of blood” – all rode carriages up the long drive through Bulstrode Park and entered talking. The chatter, the servants scurrying, the caged birds squawking, wearied the bereaved Mrs. Delany, who cared little for “what’s doing in the Grand Monde. The Duchess and I were comfortably at home the whole day.”13 Yet when she returned to her apartment she was excruciatingly alone. “How solitary my dressing room …”14 Delville was auctioned off. Never once in the known letters from this time does she mention the Dean’s name, though she alludes to Ireland.
“Company … rather fatigues than entertains me.”15 But the constant company was part of the whole ambience of Portlandia. Mrs. D. was going to have to find a way to balance stimulation and fatigue, because she had accepted an invitation to enter what became affectionately known as the Hive. Besides being a social hub, Bulstrode buzzed with the activity of a nascent research institute. It was more than a grand house; it had become a prototype for a museum.
A serious botanist, Margaret possessed one of the most extensive natural history collections in England. She had began amassing shells as a child, and after her marriage collected butterflies, insects, fungi, and coral. She had purchased shelves upon shelves of antiquities, as well as paintings and ceramics and other fine art. She had designed the gardens of Bulstrode, and she had ordered its greenhouses built. She had collected countless plant specimens for those gardens and glasshouses. She built a zoo. She encouraged the local wildlife to roam her lawns, and at sunset a host of hares would nibble at the tender grass shoots below the long windows of her fortress.16
The life work of Margaret’s widowhood was her startlingly ambitious project “to have had every unknown species described and published to the World,” as her personal chaplain, the Reverend John Lightfoot (1735–88) wrote.17 Lightfoot doubled as her personal botanist and conchologist, consulting as she drew and catalogued her specimens. (He himself was the author of Flora Scotica and the winningly titled An Account of Some Minute British Shells, Either not Duly Observed, or Totally Unnoticed by Authors.)18 Our sense of specialization today can barely accommodate a person who both took holy orders and was a substantial scientist – and was employed by one woman for his expertise in religion and in God’s creations, not to mention gracing her dinner table.
As well as Lightfoot, Georg Dionysius Ehret was part of the Hive. Ehret was the stellar botanical draftsman who illustrated for Linnaeus and was also the drawing and painting teacher of the Duchess’s daughter Elizabeth. As one of Ehret’s patrons, the Duchess owned hundreds of his energetic, pulsing botanical works on vellum.19 Lightfoot was giving sermons and collecting specimens; Ehret was identifying specimens, dissecting them, and then drawing and painting them. The elderly Philip Miller, who brought the Chelsea Physic Garden into prominence and who traded specimens with John Bartram, also contributed specimens and information to the Bulstrode Hive. (Miller, a conservative who favored pre-Linnaean classification, wrote The Gardeners and Florists Dictionary: or a Complete System of Horticulture in 1724 and The Gardener’s Dictionary: Containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen, Fruit and Flower Garden in 1735.)
Slowly Mary began to incorporate Margaret’s lightness of feeling into her numbness. “It is pl
easant to see how [the Duchess] enjoys all her own possessions.”20 Picking up on others’ energy, she began to find an energy within herself again. “Mr. Ehret is here, and [the Duchess] is very busy in adding to her English herbal; she has been transported at the discovery of a new wild plant, a Helleboria.”21
When it was time to leave Bulstrode, Mrs. D. was able to lift herself up, bump along in a carriage to London, and settle in at her rental, Thatched Court House. She gathered more energy in the city, and by the time she returned to Bulstrode in the fall of 1769 she found it irresistible not to have her own project. She took up multiple quills (the flight feathers of geese were common),22 to prepare to copy out in her own hand 474 pages of Hudson’s Flora Anglica, which had been published in London in 1762. She added notes, “among them one on ‘The Fir-coned Hydnum’ – ‘this was found at Bulstrode on fir-cones, in November 1769.’ ”23 By the end of this effort, her copperplate hand had returned to its elegance. Lady Llanover marveled at her handwriting: “Mrs. Delany was then in her 70th year! but there are no blunders of the pen!”
Simply by copying the many pages of the Flora Anglica, Mrs. Delany was retraining herself, re-forming her hand, reconnecting nerves and tissue, focusing herself on composition and line. As she re-educated her fingers, she revised her vision. Her copying project was like a self-constructed program of physical therapy.
Still, nothing tasted good to her, and she had bad dreams, as she wrote her niece from Thatched Court House in London. “I eat half a roasted onion for my supper, and I dreamt of hobgoblins! … Sunday morning tasted my new tea, and was almost poisoned with it; made my complaint immediately, and hope for redress.”24 She carried her doldrums to Bulstrode, writing to her friend Lady Andover in June 1770 about “the stupidity of my spirits … how low an ebb must they be … In such a state I ought to wrap myself up in my own web, and not carry my infection abroad. All this is a gloomy indulgence of broken spirits, and I will shake it off.”25 She marshaled herself for the massive socializing that life at Bulstrode required. She and Margaret dined with the talkative, theatrical Garricks, and she undertook to do battle again with her brother.
Bunny was attempting to thwart yet another marriage, this time the union of Mary Dewes to John Port; they were guests at Bulstrode. The warrior-friend Margaret put the kibosh on Bernard’s interference by refusing to let the couple leave her house unmarried. With the silver overlay of faeryland that Portlandia seemed to retain, the couple were transformed, married and safe from Bernard, the wicked warlock of Calwich, ever ready to do mischief. The wedding of the young couple coincided with more work on the Cave – a grotto Mrs. Delany had been working on at Bulstrode since the 1750s. Now she was lining it with more shells.26 She got a chenille-work project underway, a set of chair covers embroidered with splashy images of birds.27
“And now for a little of Self & Co.!” she was able to joke, back in London. “I am an old, a very old puss in a corner.”28 Metaphor crept back into her expressions as she compared the newly married Mary Port to jewelry: “I shall want my brilliant Mary to be the locket to the bracelet.”29 By the summer of 1771 Mary Port had become pregnant and her old puss of an aunt bought a house for herself on St. James’s Place in London, hiring workmen and moving furniture and securing recipes for pap, or pablum, to feed Mary Port’s newborn.30 By now Mrs. D. had had three years of gradual rousing from the somnolence of mourning.
By December of 1771, the “old puss” ventured with the Duchess to Joseph Banks’s house.
We were yesterday together at Mr. Banks’s to see some of the fruits of his travels, and were delighted with paintings of the Otaheitie plants, quite different from anything the Duchess ever saw, so they must be very new to me! They have brought the seeds of some of them which they think will do here.31
Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) and his friend the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander (1733–82) were perhaps the most glamorous contributors to the Duchess’s Hive. When the energetic Banks inherited his family estate, he pursued his interests in botany, meeting Solander at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Solander was a student of Linnaeus who came to England, charmed the aristocracy, and was elected to the Royal Society (the equivalent of an Academy of Science). Through Solander, Banks corresponded with Linnaeus.32 Banks, too, was elected to the Royal Society, and it was there, after he made a name voyaging to Newfoundland and Labrador, that he wangled a chance to board Captain James Cook’s ship, the Endeavour. Banks and Solander accompanied Cook as ship’s botanists and zoologists on his famous voyage to the Pacific Ocean, where they collected specimens in Brazil, Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand. By the time Banks returned to England in 1771, loaded with botanical exotica, he was famous.
While Solander was busy making the first description of the kangaroo, Banks was cataloguing hundreds of plants, from eucalyptus to mimosa.33 King George III and Queen Charlotte immediately championed Banks, who became adviser to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. “They are preparing an account of their voyage,” wrote Mrs. Delany to her niece Mary, “but the Natural History will be a work by itself, entirely at the expense of Mr. Banks, for which he has laid by ten thousand pound. He has already the drawings of everything (birds, beasts, plants, and views) that were remarkable.”34
Banks and Solander showed the visiting women not only seeds and paintings but petite parrots, too. “The branches are frequently full of a little blue parrot, not bigger than a bullfinch, and they snap off the flowers so fast that the ground is quite strewed with them.” Banks and Solander confessed to Mrs. Delany about their plant-nabbing in South America, perhaps not meaning for the old puss to note their haul for the permanent record. “At Rio del Janeiro, … they landed by stealth, and in two hours time got near forty plants.”
By February 1772, Mrs. Delany, “who looks well, fresh, en bon point,” according to a friend of her niece, was so completely settled into her new house that the friend described it as “cleverly-arranged.”35 Even Mrs. D.’s impossible brother didn’t faze her. Harnessing his sadistic impulses, he contrived to make Anne’s third son, the Reverend John Dewes, his heir instead of the person who had all along expected to inherit, Anne’s first-born son, also named Bernard. “Alas, poor Bernard!” Mrs. Delany’s friend Countess Cowper exclaimed about the expected inheritor. “Some people contrive to make their family unhappy, even after they are dead!”36 In her cozy place Mrs. D. happily received gifts of food from her friends: “Venison from Mr. Montagu; pork and turkey from Mr. Dewes; fowls and hares from Sandford; a perigot pie from Duchess of Portland on the road, and potted rabbits, all within one week!!”37 Sanguine about her family, safe in her house, four years after the death of the Dean, whom she still hadn’t mentioned by name, she came to the simple statement of her turning point: “An ingenious mind is never too old to learn.”
Her insistence on keeping busy resurfaced. She was calm, engaged, located, and alive. Refreshed, her appetites had returned. And though she was not painting, and perhaps never would again, she wrote, copied, sewed, and soaked in information from all around her. She had been so parched in the years after Anne’s death and so depleted in the years taking care of the Dean that only gradually was she able to begin to take in the brilliant facts of the world one ignores when training attention on illness and death. Starting with the delight of a “jonquil parrot” or a “yellow carnation,” it took four years – the equivalent time of a university education – for her to reclaim and wake, though not to forget.
By her fourth summer at Bulstrode, Mrs. D. was completely a part of the household and the routine – and venturing about in the Duchess’s carriage. In August 1772, the two drove to Wroxton Abbey to see the Gothic Picturesque gardens planned by Sanderson Miller.38 “An open country is but a canvass on which a landscape might be designed,” Horace Walpole famously said,39 but Wroxton proved a canvas that Mrs. Delany made little progress into, because something stopped her forward motion.
The thing that many of us dread – not being able to get around,
being dependent, our range of mobility narrowing – had happened. The cause was just a little accident of nature. Mrs. Delany was stopped literally in her tracks because she was stung on the foot by an insect. Her foot swelled to such a degree that it was impossible for her to put on a shoe. (I do not mean a leather twenty-first-century shoe, one made for the right foot, one made for the left. I mean an eighteenth-century woman’s shoe, often made of fabric and sewn to order, but without a concept of left and right – both shoes cut out the same.)
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