the works of mary robinson; poems
TRANSCRIPT
THE PICKERING MASTER S
THE WORKS OF MARY ROBINSON
CONTENTS OF THE EDITION
Volume 1General IntroductionBy William D. Brewer
PoemsEdited by Daniel Robinson
Volume 2Poems (continued)
Edited by Daniel Robinson
Vancenza; or, Th e Dangers of Credulity (1792)Th e Widow; or, A Picture of Modern Times (1794)
Edited by Dawn M. Vernooy-Epp
Volume 3Angelina; A Novel (1796)
Edited by Sharon M. Setzer
Volume 4Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (1796)
Edited by Orianne Smith
Volume 5Walsingham; or, Th e Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story (1797)
Edited by William D. Brewer
Volume 6Th e False Friend: A Domestic Story (1799)
Edited by Julie A. Shaff er
Volume 7Th e Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel (1799)
‘Memoirs of Mrs Mary Robinson’Letters
Edited by Hester Davenport
Volume 8Th e Lucky Escape (1778)
Impartial Refl ections of the Present Situation of the Queen of France (1791)Nobody, a Comedy in Two Acts (performed 1794)
Th e Sicilian Lover (1796)A Letter to the Women of England (1799)
‘Th e Sylphid Essays’, Morning Post (October 1799–February 1800)‘Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England’,
Monthly Magazine (1800)‘Anecdotes’ of Duke de Lauzun, Duke of Chartres and Marie Antoinette,
Monthly Magazine (1800)‘Jasper’ (1801)
Edited by William D. Brewer and Sharon M. Setzer
THE WORKS OF MARY ROBINSON
General EditorWilliam D. Brewer
Volume 1Poems
Edited by Daniel Robinson
© General introduction William D. Brewer 2009© Editorial material Daniel Robinson 2009
british library cataloguing in publication data
Robinson, Mary, 1758–1800. Th e works of Mary Robinson. Part 1, Volumes 1–4. – (Th e Pickering masters) I. Title II. Series III. Brewer, William D. (William Dean) 823.6-dc22
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
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are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
2009First published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Published 2016 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
© Taylor & Francis 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1- (set)85196-953-1
CONTENTS
General Introduction xvChronology xxxiii
Acknowledgements xxxixIntroduction xliPoems in Robinson’s Novels liiiIndex of First Lines lvReferences and Further Reading lxiiiAbbreviations lxvii
‘A Pastoral Ballad’, Poems (1775) 1‘Another’, Poems (1775) 3‘A Pastoral Elegy’, Poems (1775) 5‘An Ode to Wisdom’, Poems (1775) 6‘An Ode to Charity’, Poems (1775) 6‘Th e Linnet’s Petition’, Poems (1775) 8‘A Character’, Poems (1775) 10‘Written on the Outside of an Hermitage’, Poems (1775) 10‘A Character’, Poems (1775) 12‘Ode to Virtue’, Poems (1775) 13‘An Epistle to a Friend’, Poems (1775) 13‘On the Death of a Friend’, Poems (1775) 15‘Th e Wish’, Poems (1775) 16‘On a Friend’, Poems (1775) 18‘On the Death of Lord George Lyttelton’, Poems (1775) 19‘A Character’, Poems (1775) 21‘Ode to Spring’, Poems (1775) 21‘Letter to a Friend on Leaving Town’, Poems (1775) 22‘Written Extempore on the Picture of a Friend’, Poems (1775) 24‘Hymn to Virtue’, Poems (1775) 24‘Song’, Poems (1775) 25‘Song’, Poems (1775) 26
viii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
‘On the Birth-Day of a Lady’, Poems (1775) 27‘To Aurelia on her Going Abroad’, Poems (1775) 27‘To Love: Written Extempore’, Poems (1775) 28‘Th e Complaint’, Poems (1775) 29‘Th oughts on Retirement’, Poems (1775) 31‘An Ode to Contentment’, Poems (1775) 31‘A Song’, Poems (1775) 33‘Th e Vision’, Poems (1775) 33‘To Matilda’, Poems (1775) 37‘Written on Richmond Hill’, Town and Country Magazine ( January 1776) 39‘Captivity, a Poem’, Captivity, a Poem and Celadon and Lydia, a Tale (1777) 40‘Celadon and Lydia, a Tale’, Captivity, a Poem and Celadon and Lydia, a
Tale (1777) 47‘Lines, Dedicated to the Memory of a Much-Lamented Young Gentleman’,
World (24 October 1788) 51‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, World (31 October 1788) 51‘Th e Muse’, World (13 November 1788) 53‘To Leonardo’, World (6 December 1788) 55‘To Leonardo’, World (28 February 1789) 56‘To Anna Matilda’, World (6 March 1789) 57[‘Life’], World (15 June 1789) 59‘Lines on Beauty’, Oracle (24 June 1789) 59‘To Sir Joshua Reynolds’, Oracle (9 July 1789) 60‘To the Memory of Werter’, World (15 July 1789) 61‘Elegy on the Death of Lady Middleton’, Oracle (18 July 1789) 62‘Sonnet’, Oracle (29 July 1789) 62‘Stanzas’, Oracle (13 August 1789) 63‘Ode to Eloquence’, Oracle (5 September 1789) 64‘Lines Inscribed to the Memory of David Garrick, Esq.’, Oracle (26 Sep-
tember 1789) 65‘Sonnet’, Oracle (3 October 1789) 66‘Sonnet. Th e Mariner’, Oracle (7 November 1789) 66‘Sonnet, to the Memory of Miss Maria Linley’, Oracle (26 November 1789) 67‘Ode to Refl ection’, Oracle (7 December 1789) 67‘To the Nightingale’, Oracle (11 December 1789) 69‘Ode to Melancholy’, Oracle (17 December 1789) 70‘To Meditation’, Oracle (17 December 1789) 72‘To a Friend’, Town and Country Magazine (May 1790) 74‘To the Queen of the Fairies’, Oracle (3 June 1790) 75Ainsi va le Monde, A Poem (1790) 77‘On a Faded Bouquet’, Town and Country Magazine ( July 1790) 85
Contents ix
‘Ode to Envy’, Poems (1791) 86‘Ode to Health’, Poems (1791) 88‘Ode to Vanity’, Poems (1791) 90‘Ode to Despair’, Poems (1791) 92‘Second Ode to the Nightingale’, Poems (1791) 95‘Ode on Adversity’, Poems (1791) 98‘Ode to Beauty’, Poems (1791) 99‘Ode to the Moon’, Poems (1791) 101‘Ode to Della Crusca’, Poems (1791) 102‘Ode to Valour’, Poems (1791) 104‘Elegy to the Memory of Richard Boyle, Esq. who died at Bristol, October,
1788’, Poems (1791) 106‘Monody to the Memory of Chatterton’, Poems (1791) 108‘Cupid Sleeping’, Poems (1791) 111‘To Simplicity’, Poems (1791) 112‘Absence’, Poems (1791) 113‘Lines Inscribed to P. de Loutherbourg, Esq. R.A.’, Poems (1791) 114‘Lines on Hearing it Declared that no Women were so Handsome as the
English’, Poems (1791) 116‘To Rinaldo’, Poems (1791) 118‘To the Muse of Poetry’, Poems (1791) 120‘Th e Adieu to Love’, Poems (1791) 123‘Stanzas to Flora’, Poems (1791) 126‘To Cesario’, Poems (1791) 127‘Echo to Him Who Complains’, Poems (1791) 128‘Lines Written on the Sea-Coast’, Poems (1791) 129‘Stanzas Written under an Oak in Windsor Forest, bearing the Following
Inscription’, Poems (1791) 130‘Stanzas to the Rose’, Poems (1791) 132‘To the Myrtle’, Poems (1791) 133‘Stanzas Inscribed to Lady William Russell’, Poems (1791) 134‘Morning’, Poems (1791) 134‘Stanzas to Love’, Poems (1791) 135‘Lines Written by the Side of a River’, Poems (1791) 136‘Th e Bee and the Butterfl y: A Fable’, Poems (1791) 138‘Stanzas to Time’, Poems (1791) 139‘Canzonet’, Poems (1791) 140‘Th e Reply to Time’, Poems (1791) 140‘Stanzas’, Poems (1791) 142‘Pastoral Stanzas’, Poems (1791) 142‘Pastoral Stanzas’, Poems (1791) 143
x Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
‘Th e Origin of Cupid. A Fable’, Poems (1791) 144‘Sonnet. Inscribed to Her Grace the Dutchess of Devonshire’, Poems (1791) 145‘Sonnet to Amicus’, Poems (1791) 146‘Sonnet to Evening’, Poems (1791) 146‘Sonnet to Ingratitude’, Poems (1791) 146‘Sonnet’, Poems (1791) 147‘Sonnet. To My Beloved Daughter’, Poems (1791) 147‘Sonnet’, Poems (1791) 148‘Sonnet. Th e Peasant’, Poems (1791) 148‘Sonnet’, Poems (1791) 149 ‘Sonnet. Th e Tear’, Poems (1791) 149‘Sonnet. Th e Snow-Drop’, Poems (1791) 149‘Petrarch to Laura’, Poems (1791) 150‘Sir Raymond of the Castle. A Tale’, Poems (1791) 157‘Lewin and Gynneth. A Tale’, Poems (1791) 161‘Laura Maria to Arno’, Oracle (21 June 1791) 165‘Sonnet. To Amicus’, Oracle (3 September 1791) 166‘Impromptu on Mr. Merry’s Marriage with Miss Brunton’, Oracle (29
October 1791) 167‘Th e Moralist’, Oracle (23 November 1791) 167‘To ——’, Oracle (13 December 1791) 168‘Invocation’, Oracle (15 March 1792) 170‘Oberon to Maria on Seeing her Gather some Pensees’, Oracle (27 March
1792) 171‘Sonnet. To Independence’, Oracle (13 April 1792) 172Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Late President of the Royal
Academy (1792) 173‘Julia to Carlos’, Oracle (9 July 1792) 178‘Stanzas, Written between Dover and Calais, July 24th, 1792’, Oracle (2
August 1792) 180‘Ode to Humanity’, Oracle (20 September 1792) 181‘Sonnet’, Oracle (25 September 1792). 183‘Sonnet, to the Prince of Wales’, Oracle (20 October 1792). 184‘Stanzas Written aft er Successive and Melancholy Dreams’, Oracle (30
November 1792) 184‘Laura, to Arno’, Oracle (5 December 1792) 186‘To Mrs. Hanway, on the Death of her Lovely and Accomplished Daugh-
ter’, Oracle (26 December 1792). 187Ode to the Harp of the Late Accomplished and Amiable Louisa Hanway
(1793) 187
Contents xi
‘A Fragment, Supposed to be Written near the Temple, on the Night before the Murder of Louis the Sixteenth’, Oracle (27 February 1793) 191
‘Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in her Prison of the Temple’, Oracle (8 March 1793) 193
‘Julia to —— ’, Oracle (3 April 1793) 195‘To Him Who Lamented Seeing a Beautiful Woman Weep; though She
Declared, that Tears Relieved her Inquietude’, European Magazine 23 (April 1793) 195
‘Sonnet, Written on the Sea-Shore’, European Magazine 23 ( June 1793) 196Modern Manners, a Poem. In Two Cantos (1793) 196‘Stanzas Supposed to be Written near a Tree, over the Grave of Colonel
Bosville’, Oracle (7 September 1793) 209‘Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, on Hearing that her Son was Wounded
at the Siege of Dunkirk’, Oracle (17 September 1793) 210‘Refl ections, which with a Power so Pleasing, at Least Cheer the Condi-
tion of Life they are Unable to Change’, Oracle (21 September 1793) 211‘Sonnet to a Sigh’, Oracle (25 September 1793) 213‘Sonnet to a Tear’, Oracle (27 September 1793) 213‘Sonnet to a Rose’, Oracle (1 October 1793) 213‘Sonnet to Lesbia’, Oracle (5 October 1793) 214‘Julia to Arno’, Oracle (19 October 1793) 214‘Lines to Maria, Written on her Birth-Day, Oct. 18, 1793’, Oracle (22
October 1793) 215‘Julia to Arno’, Oracle (28 October 1793) 217‘Sonnet, in the Manner of Metastasio’, Oracle (12 November 1793) 218‘Stanzas to Fate’, Oracle (19 November 1793) 219‘Myra’, European Magazine (November 1793) 220‘Sight’, Sight, Th e Cavern of Woe, and Solitude (1793) 220‘Th e Cavern of Woe’, Sight, Th e Cavern of Woe, and Solitude (1793) 225‘Solitude’, Sight, Th e Cavern of Woe, and Solitude (1793) 229‘Ode to Rapture’, Oracle (30 November 1793) 235‘Ode to Genius’, Oracle (7 December 1793) 236‘Stanzas’, Oracle (12 December 1793) 239Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France (1793) 240‘To Zephyrus. Written in August, 1793’, Oracle (7 January 1794) 252‘Ode for the New Year’, Morning Post (7 January 1794) 254‘Elegiac Ode to the Memory of my Lamented Father, who Died in the
Service of the Empress of Russia, December 5, 1786’, Poems ([1794]) 255‘To the Memory of my Beloved Brother, who Died Suddenly at Leghorn,
in Tuscany, in the 38th Year of his Age, December 7, 1790’, Poems ([1794]) 257
xii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
‘Th e Maniac’, Poems ([1794]) 259‘To Julius’, Poems ([1794]) 262‘Th e Recantation. To Love’, Poems ([1794]) 263‘Anacreontic. To Cupid’, Poems ([1794]) 265‘Anselmo, the Hermit of the Alps’, Poems ([1794]) 266‘Donald and Mary’, Poems ([1794]) 271‘Th e Weeping Willow’, Poems ([1794]) 273‘Ode to Night’, Poems ([1794]) 274‘Ode to Hope’, Poems ([1794]) 277‘Bosworth Field’, Poems ([1794]) 279‘Stanzas Written on the Fourteenth of February, 1792, to my Valentine’,
Poems ([1794]) 282‘Stanzas Inscribed to a Friend, when Confi ned by Severe Indisposition, in
March, 1793’, Poems ([1794]) 283‘To Lisardo, on his Recovering from a Long Indisposition, in May, 1793’,
Poems ([1794]) 284‘Th e Adieu to Fancy. Inscribed to a Friend’, Poems ([1794]) 285‘Stanzas to the Author of a Celebrated Tragedy’, Poems ([1794]) 286‘Stanzas, Presented with a Gold Chain Ring’, Poems ([1794]) 287‘To the Same’, Poems ([1794]) 287‘To the Same’, Poems ([1794]) 288‘To the Same’, Poems ([1794]) 288‘Song, Inscribed to Maria, my Beloved Daughter’, Poems ([1794]) 288‘Th e Snake and the Linnet. A Fable’, Poems ([1794]) 289‘Stanzas to the Memory of a Young Lady’, Poems ([1794]) 290‘Sonnet to Hope’, Poems ([1794]) 290‘Sonnet, Written at Sea, in the Month of September, 1792’, Poems ([1794]) 291‘Sonnet. To Amicus’, Poems ([1794]) 291‘Sonnet to Memory’, Poems ([1794]) 291‘Sonnet to Fame’, Poems ([1794]) 292‘Sonnet to Time’, Poems ([1794]) 292‘Evening Meditations on St. Anne’s Hill: Inscribed to the Right Honour-
able Charles James Fox’, Poems ([1794]) 293‘Stanzas to a Friend, who Desired to Have my Portrait’, Poems ([1794]) 296‘Ode for the 18th of January, 1794’, Oracle (18 January 1794) 298‘Lines Written on Monday, January 27, 1794’, Oracle (28 January 1794) 300‘Stanzas Written at the Shrine of Bertha’, Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794) 302[‘Th e Shepherd Boy, on Yonder Mountain’s Crest’], Th e Shrine of Bertha
(1794) 304[‘Farewell! – Dear Haunts of Pleasing Woes’], Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794) 304
Contents xiii
[‘Where Tow’ring Cliff s, in Awful Splendour Rise’], Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794) 306
[‘Oh Peace! Th ou Nymph of Modest Mien!’], Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794) 306‘Stanzas’, Oracle and Public Advertiser (9 June 1794) 307‘Epilogue, by Mrs. M. Robinson. Supposed to have been Spoken aft er the
Play of Fontainville Forest’, Oracle and Public Advertiser (1 July 1794) 308‘Ode to my Beloved Daughter, (Written on her Birth-Day, Oct.18, 1794)’,
Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1794) 309‘Lines to the Rev. J. Whitehouse, (Author of Odes Moral and Descrip-
tive)’, Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1794) 311‘To Liberty’, Morning Post and Fashionable World (10 January 1795) 314‘St. James’s Street, on the Eighteenth of January, 1795’, Morning Post, and
Fashionable World (21 January 1795) 314‘To Philanthropy’, Morning Post and Fashionable World (23 January 1795) 316‘January, 1795’, Morning Post and Fashionable World (29 January 1795) 316‘To the Author of Th e Secret Tribunal’, Oracle and Public Advertiser (20
October 1795) 318‘Th e Storm’, Morning Post and Fashionable Advertiser (3 February 1796) 318‘Sonnet to Sympathy’, Th e Shrine of Bertha, 2nd edn (1796) 320Sappho and Phaon in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796) 320‘Stanzas by Mrs. Robinson’, Gentleman’s Magazine ( January 1797) 345‘Tabitha Bramble Visits the Metropolis by Command of her Departed
Brother’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (8 December 1797) 346‘A Simple Tale’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (13 December 1797) 349‘Tabitha Bramble, to her Cousins in Scotland’, Morning Post and Gazetteer
(25 December 1797) 351[‘Your Gloves I Send’], Morning Post and Gazetteer (29 December 1797) 353‘Ode Fourth. For New Year’s Day’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (1 January
1798) 355‘A New Song, to an Old Tune’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (12 January
1798) 357‘Th e Sorrows of Memory’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (26 January 1798) 358‘Sonnet’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (3 February 1798) 361‘Ode Fift h’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (14 February 1798) 361‘A New Song’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (19 February 1798) 364‘Poetical Pictures. No. I. Th e Birth-day of Liberty’, Morning Post and Gaz-
etteer (7 April 1798) 365‘Poetical Pictures. No. II. Th e Progress of Liberty’, Morning Post and Gaz-
etteer (14 April 1798) 366‘Original Sketches from Nature. Twilight’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (20
April 1798) 368
xiv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
‘Poetical Pictures. No. III. Th e Horrors of Anarchy’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (25 April 1798) 369
‘Poetical Pictures. No. IV. Th e Vestal’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (5 May 1798) 370
‘Poetical Pictures. No. V. Th e Monk’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (12 May 1798) 372
‘Poetical Pictures (In France and Italy). No. VI. Th e Dungeon’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (18 May 1798) 374
‘Th e African’, Morning Post and Gazetteer (2 August 1798) 375
Editorial Notes 377Textual Notes 427
– xv –
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Mary Darby Robinson (‘Perdita’) may have been the most chameleonic celebrity in late eighteenth-century England.1 Aft er achieving fame as an actress, royal courte-san, fashion trend-setter and Whig campaigner, she embarked on a literary career as a Della Cruscan and Romantic poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, satirist, Woll-stonecraft ian feminist and memoirist. On stage, she acted in comedic, tragic and romantic theatrical roles, frequently in male attire, and much of her verse was pub-lished under pseudonyms representing, in some cases, distinctive poetic personae: Laura, Laura Maria, Lesbia, Oberon, Sappho, Julia, Tabitha Bramble, Horace Juve-nal, T. B., M. R., Titania and Portia. It is diffi cult, perhaps impossible, to separate her from her self-representations, and no private journal or diary has come to light that might illuminate her character. Because letters are oft en written to infl uence a private, public, or perhaps even posthumous audience, they can be misleading and performative, and, in any case, very little of Robinson’s correspondence appears to have survived. As Anne K. Mellor observes, ‘Her identity – personal and authorial – can be nothing more nor less than the sum total of the scripts she performed both in public and in private, in her own narratives and those of others’.2
Following Robinson’s scandalous and disastrous aff air with the Prince of Wales, contemporary cartoonists, pamphleteers and satirical novelists caricatured her as a manipulative, avaricious and sexually insatiable prostitute. Th eir demonizations of her refl ect some of the sexual fantasies and anxieties of late eighteenth-century Eng-lish culture. Robinson’s uncompleted autobiographical narrative, incorporated aft er her death into Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson, Written by Herself (1801), is clearly an attempt to rehabilitate her reputation. In it, she laments that she has ‘been grossly misrepresented’ and that ‘of all created beings [she has] been the most severely sub-jugated by circumstances more than by inclination’.3 She portrays herself as a victim of circumstances and carefully establishes her poetic credentials by showing how her early propensities, aesthetic sensibility, education and experiences prepared her to become the eighteenth-century ‘ENGLISH SAPPHO’.4 Although Memoirs is the primary source we have for events in Robinson’s life, much of the information it provides, including the poet’s birth date, must be regarded with scepticism. In fact, it is not entirely clear who fi nished Memoirs aft er Robinson’s death. As M. J. Levy observes,
xvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
only the fi rst part is fully autobiographical; the second part, comprising roughly a third of the text, was mostly contributed by a ‘friend’, who may or may not have been Maria Elizabeth Robinson, the original editor and Mrs Robinson’s only surviving daughter.5
Aft er examining the original manuscript of Memoirs, Hester Davenport has con-cluded that it once included additional pages that were eliminated, perhaps by Maria Elizabeth.6
As Robinson’s recent biographers Davenport and Paula Byrne have shown, the date of birth recorded on Robinson’s tombstone, in her Memoirs and, until recently, in biographical and scholarly writings about her is incorrect. Whereas the published version of Memoirs states that Robinson was born in Bristol during the night of 27 November 1758, the original manuscript omits the year: ‘during a tempestuous night, on the twenty-seventh of november’, the manuscript reads, ‘I fi rst opened my eyes to this world of duplicity and Sorrow’.7 Apparently, the editor of Memoirs inserted 1758, which subsequently appeared in the printed Memoirs. According to the baptismal records for the church of St Augustine the Less in Bristol, Polly Darby, the daughter of Nicholas and Hester Darby, was born on 27 November 1756 and baptized on 19 July 1758, more than four months before the birth date given in the published Memoirs.8 Byrne argues, however, for a 1757 rather than a 1756 birth date, which would be consistent with Robinson’s statement in Memoirs that her 12 April 1773 marriage to Th omas Robinson took place when she was fi ft een and with the date of birth given in a letter published in the Morning Herald on 29 June 1781.9
Mary Darby’s early years seem to have been happy ones. Her indulgent parents placed her in a prestigious Bristol school for girls presided over by Hannah More and her elder sisters, and the Mores took their pupils to a performance of King Lear, providing Mary with her fi rst theatrical experience. Her family’s fortunes began to change, however, when her American-born father made the fi nancially disastrous decision to establish fi shing posts on the southern coast of Labrador. Nicholas Dar-by’s costly attempts to establish Labrador fi sheries were frustrated by labour problems, the brutally cold weather, hostile Inuit and interference by the local government. He and his family were reduced to penury, and their property was auctioned off in March 1768. Mary was placed in a school in Chelsea presided over by Meribah Lorrington, a brilliant and erudite alcoholic. Lorrington had obtained ‘a masculine education’ from her schoolmaster father and
was early instructed in all the modern accomplishments, as well as in classical knowl-edge. She was mistress of the Latin, French, and Italian languages … was said to be a perfect arithmetician and astronomer, and possessed the art of painting on silk to a degree of exquisite perfection.
According to Robinson, ‘All that [she] ever learned [she] acquired from this extraor-dinary woman’. She began ‘writing verses’ and ‘composing rebuses’, and her teacher ‘never failed to applaud the juvenile compositions [she] presented to her’, which
General Introduction xvii
included ‘poetical phantasies’ on love.10 Robinson notes that some of these fantasies made it into her fi rst volume of verse. When Lorrington’s bouts of intoxication and fi nancial problems led to the closure of her school, Mary was placed in a seminary in Battersea.
Mary completed her education at Oxford House in Marylebone. Th e dancing master there was also the ballet master at Covent Garden Th eatre, and he and the school’s governess advised Hester Darby to consider a theatrical career for her daugh-ter. One of Hester’s friends introduced Mary to the legendary actor-manager David Garrick, who agreed to train her as an actress. He planned for her to play Cordelia to his Lear in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy with a happy ending. As Garrick’s protégé, Mary attended many theatrical performances, and her beauty attracted both suitors and rakes, including a young law clerk named Th omas Robinson, who claimed that he was the heir of a wealthy uncle with an estate in Wales. Mary agreed to marry Th omas and wrote to Garrick to inform him that she would not pursue a theatrical career. Th e illegitimate son of a wealthy tailor, Th omas had substantial debts but had little prospect of a signifi cant inheritance. He turned out to be selfi sh, improvident, addicted to gambling and sexually promiscuous. Mary gave birth to a daughter, her future editor Maria Elizabeth, on 18 October 1774. Th e Robinsons lived far beyond their means, and Th omas was arrested for debt and sent to Fleet prison on 3 May 1775, where he languished for fi ft een months. Mary and the baby shared his confi nement, and she published Poems (1775) while in the Fleet. In Mem-oirs she refuses to ‘enter into a tedious detail of vulgar sorrows, of vulgar scenes’,11 but her poetry and novels frequently dwell on the miseries of unjust incarceration. One of the poems in her fi rst collection, ‘Th e Linnet’s Petition’, features a bird that sings plaintively for his freedom, and for her second volume of verse she wrote ‘Captivity’, a long poem that laments the suff erings of individuals and families imprisoned for debt, the ‘guiltless victim[s], to the laws of man’.12 As a protest poem, ‘Captivity’ fore-shadows the many politically and socially engaged works that Robinson produced during the 1790s.
Soon aft er the Robinsons’ release from the Fleet, Mary fortuitously encountered the actor William Brereton, who introduced her to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the manager of the Drury Lane Th eatre. With Sheridan’s encouragement and under Garrick’s tutelage, she prepared herself for the role of Juliet in Garrick’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Her stage debut took place on 10 December 1776 and launched her highly successful theatrical career. She became famous for her beauty and trim fi gure, which inspired Sheridan to cast her frequently in breeches roles. On 3 December 1779 Robinson played Perdita in a royal command perform-ance of Garrick’s adaptation of Th e Winter’s Tale, entitled Florizel and Perdita. Th e impressionable and capricious seventeen-year-old Prince of Wales witnessed her performance and became infatuated with her. In his subsequent love letters to Rob-inson he cast himself as Prince Florizel, who in the play courts Perdita, a beautiful shepherdess who turns out to be a lost princess. He frequently attended her perform-ances and sent her a miniature portrait of himself accompanied by ‘a small heart cut
xviii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
in paper’: ‘on one side was written, “Je ne change qu’en mourant” [“I change only in death”]. On the other, “Unalterable to my Perdita through life”.’13 Although the Prince pursued her relentlessly, she did not agree to become his mistress until aft er he pledged to pay her £20,000 when he came of age, an exorbitant sum in the late eighteenth century. Having become a royal courtesan, Robinson decided to retire from the stage and gave her valedictory performances on 31 May 1780. Accord-ing to A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, Robinson returned to acting in 1783, but her recent biographers maintain that her retirement in 1780 was permanent.14
When Robinson’s liaison with the Prince of Wales became public, she was vili-fi ed by the periodical press, caricaturists, pamphleteers and satirists as the predatory, sexually promiscuous and mercenary Perdita. Capitalizing on the public’s appetite for scandal and pornography, anonymous writers produced lascivious satires, pur-portedly genuine collections of Perdita’s love letters and a spurious memoir. For reasons that remain obscure, the Prince suddenly ended his aff air with Robinson less than a year aft er it began. She was left with an irrevocably ruined reputation, staggering debts and the Prince’s love letters to her. Robinson received £5,000 for the letters from the King’s representative and in October 1781 left for France, where she was, according to her Memoirs, fêted as ‘la belle Angloise’ and admired by Marie Antoinette.15 Before and aft er her continental visit, she was painted by the leading portraitists of the time: George Romney, Th omas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Rey-nolds and John Hoppner. As Anne Mellor observes, Robinson ‘may have been the most oft en painted woman of her day’.16
Following her French sojourn, Robinson returned to London and set fashion trends with her Parisian wardrobe and stylish carriages. She also began an aff air with Banastre Tarleton, celebrated in England as a hero of the American Revolu-tionary war and vilifi ed in America as a butcher. An inveterate gambler, Tarleton swift ly amassed huge debts, and his family advised him to fl ee his creditors. Mistak-enly believing that her lover was embarking for France, Robinson set off for Dover to intercept him. While en route she became seriously ill, probably with rheumatic fever, and may have had a miscarriage. Although not enough reliable evidence exists for Robinson’s medical condition to be defi nitively diagnosed, it is clear that at the age of twenty-fi ve or twenty-six she contracted a progressively crippling disease that affl icted her for the remainder of her life. Th e playwright and biographer James Boaden describes her plight during the 1794–5 theatrical season:
A perfect martyr to the rheumatism; the use of the lower limbs quite gone; carried from room to room, or from her house to her carriage like an infant; she yet had the nerve to control her bodily suff erings, so as to indulge a constant use of the pen, except at the periods of refection and exercise.17
In 1784 Robinson’s expensive lifestyle led to bankruptcy and the loss of her pos-sessions. She, Tarleton and Maria Elizabeth moved to the Continent, and she attempted to recover her health, or at least mitigate her symptoms, in the baths of
General Introduction xix
Aix-la-Chapelle. Back in England in 1788, Robinson began to publish verses in the newspaper Th e World under the pseudonym Laura. Her poem ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, probably addressed to Tarleton, attracted the attention of Robert Merry, the founder of the Della Cruscan movement. Merry had adopted the pseudo-nym Della Crusca in homage to the Accademia della Crusca, established in Florence, Italy, in 1582–3. Prominent features of Della Cruscan verse included improvisational writing, complimentary addresses to other members of the literary coterie, eroticism, high-fl own diction, liberal political sentiments and displays of emotion and sensibil-ity. Aft er seeing ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, Merry quickly penned a Della Cruscan reply. Robinson’s improvisational poetic exchanges with Merry continued at a rapid rate and, aft er the outbreak of the French Revolution, took on a political dimension. According to Memoirs,
In 1791, Mrs. Robinson produced her quarto poem, entitled ‘Ainsi va le Monde’ [‘So Goes the World’]. Th is work, containing three hundred and fi ft y lines, was written in twelve hours, as a reply to Mr. Merry’s ‘Laurel of Liberty,’ which was sent to Mrs. Robinson on a Saturday; on the Tuesday following the answer was composed and given to the public.18
Th e Della Cruscan vogue began to wane aft er William Giff ord lampooned the move-ment in Th e Baviad, mean-spiritedly mocking Robinson’s ill-health: ‘See Robinson forget her state, and move / On crutches tow’rds the grave, to “Light o’ Love”’.19 Attempting to distance the ‘English Sappho’ from the Della Cruscans, the editor of Memoirs claims that they ‘dazzled’ her with their ‘false metaphors and rhapsodi-cal extravagance [and] … she suff ered her judgment to be misled and her taste to be perverted: an error of which she became aft erwards sensible’.20 Della Crusca’s sentimental ethos, however, profoundly infl uenced Robinson’s later poetry. Th e popularity of Laura and Laura Maria inspired her to experiment with other poetic personae, such as Oberon, Sappho, Julia, Lesbia, Portia and Tabitha Bramble. Like Robinson’s more overtly Della Cruscan poems, her ‘Petrarch to Laura’ (1791) and her long sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796) are emotive and histrionic. But unlike the Della Cruscan personae, the speakers of these poems fail to establish a dialogue with the objects of their desire and, as a result, they become despairing and suicidal monologists. Although Robinson ultimately repudiated her Della Cruscan experiments, during the fi nal year of her life she participated in a Della Cruscan-style poetic dialogue with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Encouraged by her success as a poet, Robinson turned to prose and published Vancenza, or, Th e Dangers of Credulity (1792), a Gothic romance set in fi ft eenth-century Spain. Th e initial print run sold out in a single day, and four more editions followed in quick succession. Some of the romance’s commercial success must have been due to Perdita’s notoriety, and many contemporary readers probably regarded it as a roman-à-clef in which the impressionable Prince Almanza, who proposes mar-riage to the beautiful and penniless orphan Elvira, represents Robinson’s former lover the Prince of Wales. Aft er Vancenza, Robinson set all of her prose fi ction in the
xx Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
eighteenth century. Th ree of her seven completed novels, Th e Widow, or A Picture of Modern Times (1794), Angelina; A Novel (1796) and Th e False Friend: A Domestic Story (1799) are epistolary, and Walsingham; or, Th e Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story (1797) begins and ends with letters.21 During the early 1790s, epistolary novels with female protagonists were widely regarded as sexually and politically subversive. Nicola J. Watson explains that ‘the letter … in these fi ctions comes to operate not only as the locus of authentic female feeling, but also, by extension, as a condensed fi gure for the plot of the daughter’s sexual rebellion against the father and the ancien régime for which he stands’.22 Th e Widow obliquely alludes to the genre’s contro-versial sexual reputation through references to epistolary seduction novels such as Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and Claude-Joseph Dorat’s Les Malheurs de l’inconstance (1772).23 Th e plot of Th e Widow is set in motion when Julia St Lawrence marries an Englishman against her American father’s wishes and then is thought to have perished at sea. A marginalized foreigner living in seclusion without male protection or position in English society, she receives a scolding lecture from her maid and is twice nearly abducted by a titled libertine. As Lynn Hunt points out, during the eighteenth century epistolary novels such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s infl uential Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Samuel Richardson’s enormously popular Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) per-mitted readers of both genders to identify with the young female characters who display their inner selves in their correspondence. Hunt writes of the protagonist of Pamela, ‘Th e exchange of letters turns [her] … into a model of proud autonomy and individuality rather than a stereotype of the downtrodden’.24 Similarly, the letters written by Julia and Robinson’s other oppressed epistolary heroines Sophia Claren-don (in Angelina) and Gertrude St. Leger (in Th e False Friend) enable them to cling to their voice, agency and mental autonomy even in traumatic situations. Although Julia is in many respects powerless, within the self-authorizing realm of epistolary discourse she can vent her feelings, denounce upper-class misbehaviour and assert her independence by ignoring the love letters sent by an aristocrat who woos and then stalks her. For her and the chronically imprisoned Sophia Clarendon, ‘freedom lives in the mind’.25 Signifi cantly, Robinson’s radical feminist tract, A Letter to the Women of England (1799), is a letter to women asserting their ‘claims to the partici-pation of power, both mentally and corporeally’.26
Due to a series of poor publishing decisions, Robinson earned little from her literary works. Her publisher paid her only £21 for Th e Widow, her tragedy Th e Sicil-ian Lover failed to sell, sales of the second edition of Angelina stalled, and Robinson ended up owing £133.13.1. As Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Th addeus note, ‘In spite of the fact that in 1796 Robinson was the best-selling single author at Hookham [a publishing house], she cleared over her four-and-a-half year relationship with them less than £10’.27 Her relationship with her subsequent publisher Longman proved, however, more remunerative, and ‘For the last three years of her life she averaged about £150 per year’.28 Perennially short of funds, Robinson attempted to estab-lish another source of income by writing for the stage. On 29 November 1794 her
General Introduction xxi
two-act aft erpiece Nobody, a satire of aristocratic female gamblers, was performed at Drury Lane. Unfortunately, the upper-class women targeted by the comedy sent their servants to disrupt the play, and Nobody closed aft er only three performances. Th e Nobody debacle embittered Robinson against fashionable society and its abuses of power. Unlike many other liberal writers of the 1790s, whose writings became either more conservative or less overtly reformist aft er English public opinion began to turn against the French Revolution, she wrote her most politically and socially radical works during the second half of the decade.
In 1796, Robinson met the philosopher, novelist and political radical William Godwin. Godwin proudly notes in his autobiographical writings that he ‘was intro-duced … by [Robert] Merry the poet (to the) most accomplished and delightful woman, the celebrated Mrs. Robinson’.29 By that time, the success of Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Infl uence on General Virtue and Happi-ness (1793), an uncompromising rejection of all forms of government, and his novel Th ings as Th ey Are; or, Th e Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), an exploration of the injustices of late eighteenth-century society, had made him the pre-eminent radical writer in England. During the fi rst months of their friendship, he and Mary Robinson saw each other oft en. In his diary entry for 9 February 1796, Godwin recorded ‘tea [at] mrs Robinson’s, w[ith] [Francis] Twiss & [Banastre] Tarleton’. He ‘supped’ with Robinson and Merry the following day and met with her again on 29 February and 3 and 4 March.30 Robinson found her discussions and correspondence with Godwin, whom she dubbed her ‘dear Philosopher’,31 intellectually stimulating and personally gratifying, and his infl uence can be detected in the two novels that she wrote aft er meeting him, Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Cen-tury (1796) and Walsingham. Hubert de Sevrac affi rms many of the views presented in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, including Godwin’s indictment of chivalry and aristocratic privilege, his call for the redistribution of wealth, his objections to priestly authority and his confi dence in humankind’s eventual perfectibility. Wal-singham, like Caleb Williams, critiques ‘things as they are’ and presents a socially marginalized and hyper-emotional male protagonist who recounts his life in a con-fessional and unreliable fi rst-person narrative.
Soon aft er meeting Godwin, Robinson befriended his future wife, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft . In her February 1796 review of Robinson’s Angelina, Wollstonecraft endorses the novel’s social commentary: ‘Th e sentiments contained in these volumes are just, animated, and rational. Th ey breathe a spirit of independ-ence, and a dignifi ed superiority to whatever is unessential to the true respectability and genuine excellence of human beings.’32 Many of the ‘sentiments’ expressed by characters in Angelina echo feminist assertions made by Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). For example, Angelina, like A Vindica-tion, confronts the issue of ‘legal prostitution’, or marrying for money. According to Wollstonecraft , ‘To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, [women] must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sac-rifi ced, and their persons oft en legally prostituted’.33 In Angelina, Sophia Clarendon
xxii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
notes that ‘Th ere may be a legal prostitute, as well as a licentious one’, and one of her female correspondents writes that Sophia ‘had to choose between the single act of disobedience [to her father], and the degradations of falsehood, perjury, meanness, sordid, legal prostitution!’34 Both A Vindication and Angelina critique the insincere discourse of gallantry, the fetishization of female chastity and the enslavement of women. In A Vindication, Wollstonecraft asks: ‘Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them … only to sweeten the cup of man?’, and the link between slavery and female oppression is emphasized throughout Angelina, in which a fatuous and tyrannical West Indian slave-owner, Sir Edward Clarendon, attempts to sell his daughter ‘like a cargo of sugar’ to an aristocrat.35
Aft er Wollstonecraft married Godwin, she appears to have severed relations with Robinson. Robinson remained, however, a steadfast admirer of Wollstonecraft . Th e female protagonist of her novel Th e False Friend passionately advocates Woll-stonecraft ’s ‘precepts’, and her A Letter to the Women of England pays homage to A Vindication.36 A footnote in A Letter informs the reader that the author is a member of Wollstonecraft ’s ‘school’ and that ‘it requires a legion of Wollstonecraft s to under-mine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence’.37 But Robinson distinguishes her manifesto from Wollstonecraft ’s by stating that she will not address the sexist pro-nouncements of ‘philosophical sensualists’ already refuted by A Vindication.38 She also makes the radical claim that women should have the right to defend their hon-our by challenging men to duels and provides lists of accomplished female literary and historical fi gures. Citing the examples of Hannah Snell, who impersonated a man for fi ve years in the British navy, two Frenchwomen who led troops during the revolutionary wars and the soldier and diplomat ‘Madame D’Eon’, Robinson asserts that if women are ‘permitted to demand an equal share in the regulations of social order, [they] will become omnipotent’.39 In A Letter and elsewhere in her writings (most notably in Walsingham), she contests essentialist notions of male and female behaviour.
Th e poet and novelist Charlotte Smith was another important contemporary infl uence on Robinson. Smith, like Robinson, had married an unfaithful and spend-thrift husband and began her literary career aft er her husband was sent to debtor’s prison. Both authors were patronized by Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Dev-onshire, a novelist and leading Whig socialite who allowed Robinson to dedicate Captivity, Poem and Celadon and Lydia, a Tale to her and who sought subscribers for Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784). As Jacqueline Labbe has noted, in their poetry Robinson and Smith market themselves as ‘women in distress’, ‘selling their sorrows to sell their poetry’.40 Robinson quotes from Smith’s preface to Elegiac Sonnets in a footnote to her preface to Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796), inviting her readers to compare these two major sonnet sequences. In Walsingham, she has a character praise Elegiac Sonnets as ‘beautifully plaintive, and correctly har-monious’ and lament the fact that ‘so cultivated a mind [as Smith’s] should feel the pressure of real sorrows, amidst the rich and beautiful eff usions of imagination!’41
General Introduction xxiii
Moreover, Robinson’s portrayal of aristocratic French émigrés in Hubert de Sevrac is infl uenced by Smith’s Th e Emigrants, A Poem (1793) and her two French Revo-lution novels, Desmond. A Novel (1792) and Th e Banished Man. A Novel (1794). Like Armand D’Alonville, the protagonist of Th e Banished Man, Hubert de Sevrac evolves from a chivalric French aristocrat into a cosmopolitan expatriate and fam-ily man. But whereas Robinson derived inspiration from Smith’s works, Smith was determined not to be linked to the infamous ‘Perdita’. In a letter to a publisher, Smith wrote that she had ‘no passion for being confounded with … Mrs Mary Robinson & other Mistresses’.42
Robinson, like Smith, espoused feminist principles and French revolutionary ideals during a period of political reaction in England. Public opinion had turned against France and republicanism following the September 1792 massacres, the 1793 executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the Reign of Terror. Rob-inson persisted, however, in praising the initial stages of the French Revolution. In Hubert de Sevrac, she celebrates the storming of the Bastille:
the black towers tumbl[ed] to the earth; while wretches who had almost forgot the light of heaven, were led forth from their abodes of anguish, amidst the loud acclama-tions of the shouting multitude! while nature triumphed; and surrounding nations heard with astonishment, of the proudest energies which humanity is capable of evincing.43
Th e protagonist of Walsingham describes the French Revolution as a salutary, natu-ral and inevitable regeneration of the body politic:
the convulsions of regenerated France are like the contending symptoms of vitality where the object has been benumbed by suspended circulation. Th e ears of princes in the atmosphere of Versailles were deaf to supplicating merit: their hearts were closed against suff ering talents, by a petrifying torpidity, and their minds contaminated by false and vicious counsellors, – till nature shuddered at their injustice, and reason nerved her arm to scourge them.44
Th ese republican sentiments attracted the notice of the anti-feminist clergyman Richard Polwhele, who claimed that Robinson’s novels ‘merit the severest censure’ for ‘containing the doctrines of Philosophism’, or the deistic tenets of the French philosophes. In his poem Th e Unsex’d Females (1798) he condemns her Francophilia: ‘Robinson to Gaul [i.e., France] her Fancy gave, / And trac’d the picture of a Deist’s grave!’45 But while Robinson embraced republican ideals, she condemned revolution-ary violence. She was horrifi ed by the Reign of Terror, and in Th e Natural Daughter she presents Jean-Paul Marat and Robespierre as sociopathic monsters. As Sharon Setzer has pointed out, however, ‘Robinson’s lurid portraits of the Jacobin leaders do not constitute a renunciation of [her] revolutionary sentiments’. She is, rather, ‘more concerned with the gender politics that aligned Jacobins and anti-Jacobins than with the party politics that divided them’.46 Whereas Angelina associates Sir Edward’s despotic treatment of his daughter with his exploitation of slaves, Th e Nat-
xxiv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
ural Daughter invites readers to compare English fathers’ and husbands’ abuse of women to Marat’s terroristic sexual harassment of a female prisoner. Like her char-acter Mrs Sedgley, Robinson ‘execrated the cruelty and licentiousness’ of the Reign of Terror but remained ‘an idolater of Rational Liberty’.47 In A Letter to the Women of England and Th e Natural Daughter, she maintains that this ‘rational liberty’ must extend to women as well as men.
Not surprisingly, if one considers Robinson’s numerous cross-dressing theatrical performances and her multifarious public and literary personae, many of the charac-ters in her novels possess fl uid and inchoate identities. Th ey also frequently change their names. In Vancenza, Philip Alberoni, a low-born Spanish youth, becomes the servant of an Italian aristocrat. He reinvents himself by murdering his patron, steal-ing money and jewels, and joining Madrid society as an aristocratic gambler, the Marquis Petrozi. Monsieur Ravillon, a social arriviste in Hubert de Sevrac, imperson-ates the Marquis de Sevrac during a sea voyage and, as a result, one of the Marquis’s enemies fatally stabs him. In Th e False Friend, the villainous Mr Treville, a ‘Proteus [who] change[s] his conduct with every circumstance that favour[s] his design’,48 renames himself Somerton, and the racist nabob Sir Hector Upas becomes Lord Arcot. Robinson suggests that the most eff ective social climbers are those with fl uid and inauthentic identities who, like Julia Bradford in Th e Natural Daughter, succeed in ‘being all things to all people’.49
In Walsingham, Robinson presents a society swarming with impersonators. A female character, Sir Sidney Aubrey, successfully plays the role of a male baronet for eighteen years: ‘[Sir Sidney] 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 fas-cinating companion’.50 Sir Sidney becomes Walsingham’s romantic rival and agrees to fi ght him in a duel; when she reveals that she is a woman in the four-volume novel’s closing pages, he immediately falls in love with her. As Julie Shaff er observes, Sidney ‘suggest[s] through her convincing masquerade that gender is a learned rather than natural aff air that can be signifi ed and interpreted solely by the externals of behaviors and clothing’.51 Th e masquerades of other characters enable them to pose as aristo-crats. Walsingham’s friend, the giddy Lord Kencarth, is impersonated by a number of polygraphs, shape-shift ers who imitate the appearance, behaviour and lifestyle of their upper-class prototypes. Polygraphs in Walsingham are voiceless – their activi-ties are reported by Lord Kencarth – thus the reader is off ered no insight into their subjectivities. Th ey compulsively persist in their impersonations even at the risk of their health or lives. According to Kencarth, ‘a true polygraph would break an arm, fracture a leg, knock out an eye, or starve himself into a decline, rather than lose a single trait of his noble original’.52 His most dedicated impersonator drinks himself to death when he hears that his prototype is succumbing to a fever. In Robinson’s fi ction, identities tend to be polymorphic, contingent and frequently imitative. She anticipates the postmodern theory that the self and gender are performative.53 Although several of Robinson’s heroines and the eponymous protagonist of her frag-ment ‘Jasper’ (1801) appear to possess a relatively stable core self consisting of ‘innate
General Introduction xxv
qualities, which depend not on the perishable basis of worldly splendour’,54 their attempts to behave ethically and altruistically are consistently misinterpreted in a society that judges by appearances and is easily manipulated by skilful role-players.
Given her poor health, disability and chronic indebtedness, Robinson’s pro-ductivity as a writer during the last two years of her life was astonishing. She wrote Th e False Friend, Th e Natural Daughter, Letter to the Women of England, the novel-fragment ‘Jasper’, a series of satirical editorials attributed to ‘Sylphid’ (1799–1800) and numerous poems and essays, replaced Robert Southey as poetry editor of the Morning Post, translated Joseph Hager’s Picture of Palermo (1800) from the German, worked on her Memoirs and produced her most accomplished volume of poetry, Lyrical Tales (1800). In a 31 August 1800 letter she boasted about her contributions to the Post: ‘I continue my daily labours in the Post; all the Oberons. Tabithas. M R’s and indeed all most of the Poetry, you see there is mine’.55 Th e young Samuel Taylor Coleridge became an enthusiastic admirer and promoter of her poems. He recom-mended Robinson’s poem ‘Jasper’ (1800) to Southey:
She is a woman of undoubted Genius. Th ere was a poem of her’s in this Morning’s paper which both in metre and matter pleased me much – She overloads every thing; but I never knew a human Being with so full a mind – bad, good, & indiff erent, I grant you, but full, & overfl owing.56
In a subsequent letter Coleridge praised the images and metre of Robinson’s ‘Th e Haunted Beach’: ‘the Metre – ay! that Woman has an ear’.57 As many scholars have demonstrated, Robinson and Coleridge had much in common. Th ey had been infl u-enced by the Della Cruscans, wrote for the Morning Post, were Godwin’s friends, had long-standing laudanum habits, composed dream poems and employed innovative poetic techniques.58 Th e description in Memoirs of the composition of Robinson’s poem ‘Th e Maniac’ (1793) anticipates Coleridge’s prefatory note to ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816). According to Memoirs,
One night aft er bathing, having suff ered from her disorder more than the usual pain, [Robinson] swallowed … near eighty drops of laudanum. Having slept for some hours, she awoke, and calling her daughter, desired her to take a pen and write what she should dictate. Miss Robinson … endeavoured in vain to dissuade her mother from her purpose. Th e spirit of inspiration was not to be subdued, and she repeated … the admirable poem of Th e Maniac, much faster than it could be committed to paper.59
Similarly, in his preface Coleridge claims that he swift ly composed ‘Kubla Khan’ in a state of intense inspiration aft er awakening from a dream induced by an ‘anodyne’. From 1798 until Robinson’s death, she and Coleridge engaged in a mildly fl irtatious poetic dialogue. Coleridge wrote ‘Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop’ (1798) in response to her ‘Ode to the Snow-Drop’ (1797), submitted William Wordsworth’s ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’ (1800, with Robinson’s pseudonym ‘Sappho’ inserted in the poem’s fourth stanza) as a tribute to Robinson’s beauty and his ‘Th e Stranger Minstrel’ (1801) was
xxvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
inspired by her ‘Ode Inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ (1800). Aft er reading ‘Kubla Khan’ in manuscript, Robinson penned ‘To the Poet Coleridge’, in which she twice refers to his ‘sunny dome’ and ‘Caves of ice’ and converts his dulcimer-playing Abyssinian maid into a dulcimer-playing ‘nymph’.60 ‘To the Poet Coleridge’ situates Robinson and Coleridge within the visionary world of ‘Kubla Khan’ as minstrels tracing Coleridge’s ‘new paradise’ extended’ collaboratively and then separately.61 Th e repeated phrase ‘With thee I’ll trace’ shift s to ‘Th ere will I trace’ in the second half of the poem.62 Robinson relies on Coleridge’s muse, the ‘nymph … swift -smiting … her dulcimer’, to ‘wake [her] in ecstatic measures’63 but retains her imaginative autonomy. Rather than presenting herself as a passive observer and admirer of her fellow poet’s new paradise, she incorporates herself into it, explores it, extends it and interprets the nymph’s song about the ‘sunny dome’ and ‘caves of ice’ as an invocation of and tribute to Coleridge’s creativity.64
Robinson’s description of Lyrical Tales emphasizes her heterogeneous collec-tion’s relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads: ‘Th e volume will consist of Tales, serious and gay, on a variety of subjects in the manner of Words-worth’s Lyrical Ballads’.65 However, while Robinson sought a poetic relationship with her brilliant young contemporaries, Wordsworth seems to have been unwilling to link his works with hers. According to Dorothy Wordsworth, Robinson’s decision to entitle her collection Lyrical Tales prompted William to request a name change for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.66 As Ashley J. Cross points out, ‘when Lyri-cal Tales was published in November 1800, Robinson was far more famous than Wordsworth and Coleridge’ and thus Wordsworth probably felt that the close asso-ciation of their collections threatened ‘his own poetic identity’.67 Several scholars have examined the ways in which ‘All Alone’, ‘Th e Haunted Beach’ and other poems in Lyrical Tales respond to their counterparts in Lyrical Ballads. But although the infl uence of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s metrical devices, imagery, themes and lan-guage can be discerned throughout Robinson’s volume, there are major diff erences between the two collections. Whereas the tragic eff ects of the French revolution-ary wars are virtually ignored in Lyrical Ballads, they are explored in a number of poems in Lyrical Tales, including ‘Th e Widow’s Home’, ‘Th e Fugitive’, Th e Deserted Cottage’, ‘Poor Marguerite’, ‘Edmund’s Wedding’ and ‘Th e Alien Boy’. In ‘Th e Las-car’ and ‘Th e Negro Girl’ Robinson addresses another theme absent from Lyrical Ballads: the cruelty and racism of British imperialism. Moreover, nothing like the caustic, satirical voice in ‘Mistress Gurton’s Cat’ and ‘Deborah’s Parrot’ can be found in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s volume. Lyrical Tales is, therefore, a wide-ranging ‘revisionary response’ to its literary precursor that seeks to create a poetic dialogue with Wordsworth and Coleridge while simultaneously asserting Robinson’s poetic originality.68
Th e groundbreaking work of Sharon Setzer and Adriana Craciun has begun to make the case for Robinson’s importance as an editorial writer and cultural com-mentator. From 29 October 1799 to 31 January 1800, she published at least thirteen editorials in the Morning Post as ‘Sylphid’, and in the August, September, October
General Introduction xxvii
and November issues of Monthly Magazine, four instalments of her essay Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England appeared. In ‘Th e Sylphid Essays’, Robinson’s persona is a chameleonic spy who observes and reports on human activities. Th e Sylphid explains to her editor that she has ‘the gift of invis-ibility’ and is a shape-shift er ‘allowed the power of changing [her] form, as suits the observation of the moment. [She] can assume the minute exterior of the smallest insect, or personate … the most inanimate objects.’69 Her satirical editorials target the sylph Fashion (who attempts to suppress the Sylphid), the toad-eater (a syco-phantic attendant), the woman of Demi-ton (a demirep), the bear-leader (a travelling tutor), male coquets, the ‘wou’d-be man of fashion’ and Mrs Prominent, a self-appointed social, moral and literary critic.70 Th e ‘Sylphid’ editorials sometimes shift , however, into self-satire. As Setzer observes, ‘it is never quite clear how the mercu-rial nature of Fashion is diff erent from that of the shape-changing Sylphid or the name-changing Robinson’, and the Sylphid’s description of the woman of Demi-ton ‘virtually recapitulates widely circulated gossip about Robinson’s association with the Prince of Wales and others’.71 Th e constantly changing Sylphid seems hardly in a position to criticize the frequent metamorphoses of the Male Coquet or to complain that ‘few beings … are really what they seem’.72
In Robinson’s October 1800 ‘Metropolis of England’ essay she warns her readers against confusing notoriety with celebrity:
Notoriety is now the leading spring of action; and those who are most zealous in acquiring it, frequently mistake its characteristics for those of celebrity. For this impor-tant purpose, we behold authors writing in contradiction to their avowed principles; actors caricaturing nature, till they deprive her of every grace; painters presenting to the eye imaginary forms, disproportioned – distorted – and unlike any thing human; men eff eminized like women; and women assuming the masculine deportment of the other sex; all eagerly pursuing the popular phantom, Notoriety!73
Robinson was, of course, well aware of the advantages and drawbacks of notoriety, celebrity and chameleonism. As a frequently painted, scandal-prone celebrity writer who was both a cultural icon and an acute cultural commentator, she anticipates Lord Byron. She and Byron had little control over their public images, which, during their lives, oft en shaped the reception of their works. Unlike Byron, however, Robin-son has only recently received sustained critical attention. Her infl uence on writers such as Merry, Hannah Cowley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft , Mary Hays, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre (who wrote a poem entitled ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’, [1805]), Byron, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Lan-don and Felicia Hemans has yet to be fully explored.74 Th is edition of her works, which includes transcriptions of unpublished manuscripts and reproductions of texts that have been long out of print, will make the full range of her achievement as a novelist, poet, playwright, polemicist, memoirist and journalist available for the fi rst time. Although far from invisible, Robinson was, like her Sylphid, a diligent ‘spy’ on her world, and her writings provide illuminating and critical perspectives
xxviii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
on late eighteenth-century society and culture from a woman who had fi rst-hand knowledge of the squalor of debtor’s prison and the magnifi cence of Marie Antoi-nette’s court.
William D. Brewer
Notes
1. Judith Pascoe describes ‘Th e Robinson of the 1790s’ as ‘a cultural chameleon, adopting every literary fashion’ (Romantic Th eatricality: Gender Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 1).
2. A. K. Mellor, ‘Mary Robinson and the Scripts of Female Sexuality’, in P. Coleman, J. Lewis and J. Kowalik (eds), Representations of the Self fr om Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 230–59, on p. 256.
3. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, 4 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1801), vol. 1, p. 122. A new edition of ‘Memoirs’, based on Robinson’s unpublished manuscript and the 1801 version, will appear in this edition, Volume 7.
4. For references to Robinson as ‘the ENGLISH SAPPHO’, see the Monthly Review, n.s. 6 (December 1791), p. 448, and the Morning Post (14 October 1794), p. 3.
5. M. J. Levy, Introduction, in Perdita: Th e Memoirs of Mary Robinson, ed. M. J. Levy (Lon-don: Peter Owen, 1994), p. ix.
6. See H. Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Robinson (Stroud, Gloucester-shire: Sutton Publishing, 2004), pp. 74–5, and her headnote to the text of ‘Memoirs’ in this edition, Volume 7.
7. Quoted from Davenport’s transcription of Robinson’s manuscript, reproduced in this edition, Volume 7. See Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 6, and P. Byrne, Perdita: Th e Literary, Th eatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 400.
8. See A. Nathan, ‘Mistaken or Misled? Mary Robinson’s Birth Date’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 139–42.
9. Byrne, Perdita, p. 400.10. Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 32–3, 35.11. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 168.12. Captivity, a Poem and Celadon and Lydia, a Tale, see this volume, p. 44.13. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 47.14. P. H. Highfi ll, K. A. Burnim and E. A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors,
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), vol. 13, p. 35; Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 83; Byrne, Perdita, p. 407, n. 41; S. Gristwood, Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic (London: Bantam Press, 2005), p. 193, n.
15. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 95.16. Mellor, ‘Mary Robinson and the Scripts of Female Sexuality’, p. 236.17. J. Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., Including a History of the Stage,
fr om the Time of Garrick to the Present Period, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), vol. 2, p. 135.
18. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 127.19. W. Giff ord, Th e Baviad, a Paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire of Persius (London: R.
Faulder, 1791), p. 9, ll. 27–8.
General Introduction xxix
20. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 125.21. In Walsingham, the title-character’s long narrative, which is preceded by four letters and
followed by two more, is addressed to a female correspondent.22. N. J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Let-
ters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 26.23. Th e Widow, see this edition, Volume 2, pp. 337–420.24. L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 48.25. Angelina, see this edition, Volume 3, p. 213. 26. Anne Francis Randall [pseud., Robinson], A Letter to the Women of England, on the
Injustice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), p. 2. To be reproduced in this edition, Volume 8.
27. J. Fergus and J. F. Th addeus, ‘Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790–1820’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17 (1987), pp. 191–207, on p. 196.
28. Ibid., p. 197.29. W. Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. M. Philp, 8 vols
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), vol. 1, p. 51.30. Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822: Being an Edition of the Manuscripts in the Carl H.
Pforzheimer Library, ed. K. N. Cameron, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–86), vol. 1, p. 234, n. 11, J. Pascoe, Introduction, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. J. Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 38 and n. 39, and W. Godwin, MS Diary, vol. VII, Abinger Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Dep. e. 202.
31. Mary Robinson to William Godwin, 24 August 1800, quoted from Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, p. 367.
32. M. Wollstonecraft , On Poetry; Contributions to the Analytical Review, in Th e Works of Mary Wollstonecraft , ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols (New York: New York University Press, 1989), vol. 7, p. 462.
33. M. Wollstonecraft , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. C. H. Poston, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 60.
34. Angelina, see this edition, Volume 3, pp. 20–1, 331. 35. Wollstonecraft , A Vindication, pp. 144–5, and Angelina, this edition, Volume 3, p. 240. 36. Th e False Friend: A Domestic Story, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London: T. N. Longman and O.
Rees, 1799), vol. 2, p. 77. To be reproduced in this edition, Volume 6.37. A Letter to the Women of England, p. 2, n.38. Ibid., p. 1.39. Ibid., pp. 44, n., 28, n., 71, n., 73. D’Eon died in 1810, and an autopsy revealed that he
was a man.40. J. Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of
Poetry’, Wordsworth Circle, 25:2 (Spring 1994), pp. 68–71, on pp. 68, 71.41. Walsingham; or, Th e Pupil of Nature. A Domestic Story, 4 vols (London: T. N. Longman,
1797), vol. 2, pp. 271–2. To be reproduced in this edition, Volume 5.42. Charlotte Smith to William Davies, 25 April 1797, Th e Collected Letters of Charlotte
Smith, ed. J. P. Stanton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 268.43. Hubert de Sevrac, see this edition, Volume 4, p. 209. 44. Walsingham, vol. 3, pp. 261–2.45. R. Polwhele, Th e Unsex’d Females: A Poem, Addressed to the Author of Th e Pursuits of
Literature (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), pp. 17, n., 16, ll. 93–4.
xxx Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
46. S. M. Setzer, ‘Romancing the Reign of Terror: Sexual Politics in Mary Robinson’s Natu-ral Daughter’, Criticism, 39:4 (Fall 1997), pp. 531–5, on p. 532.
47. Th e Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel, 2 vols (Lon-don: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), vol. 1, p. 214. To be reproduced in this edition, Volume 7.
48. Th e False Friend, vol. 2, p. 190.49. Th e Natural Daughter, vol. 1, p. 69.50. Walsingham, vol. 1, p. 269, my emphasis.51. J. Shaff er, ‘Walsingham: Gender, Pain, Knowledge’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp.
69–85, on p. 71.52. Walsingham, vol. 4, p. 10.53. E. Ty, Empowering the Feminine: Th e Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Ame-
lia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 31, 43; Mellor, ‘Mary Robinson and the Scripts of Female Sexuality’, pp. 253–4.
54. Th e Natural Daughter, vol. 1, p. 244. See ‘Jasper. A Fragment’, in Memoirs, vol. 3, pp. 153–4. To be reproduced in this edition, Volume 8.
55. To S. J. Pratt, 31 August 1800, in Shelley and his Circle, vol. 1, p. 232.56. To Robert Southey, 25 January 1800, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.
E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), vol. 1, p. 562.57. To Robert Southey, 28 February 1800, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
vol. 1, p. 576. Coleridge ventriloquizes his praise for ‘Th e Haunted Beach’ and ‘Jasper’ through Mount Skiddaw in ‘A Stranger Minstrel’ (ll. 55–8).
58. Daniel Robinson compares Coleridge’s and Robinson’s dream poems in ‘Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and the Prosody of Dreams’, Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams, 7:2 ( June 1997), pp. 119–40.
59. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 131.60. ‘Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’, ll. 13–14, 65–6, 60, see this edition, Volume 2,
pp. 196, 197.61. Ibid., ll. 6, 23, 42, 56, see Volume 2, pp. 195, 196.62. Ibid., ll. 5, 41, see Volume 2, pp. 195, 196.63. Ibid., ll. 60, 61, see Volume 2, p. 197.64. Th e many discussions of Robinson’s response to Coleridge include A. J. Cross, ‘From
Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Liter-ary Debt’, Studies in Romanticism, 40:4 (Winter 2001), pp. 571–605, on pp. 587–92; D. Robinson, ‘From “Mingled Measure” to “Ecstatic Measures”: Mary Robinson’s Poetic Reading of Kubla Khan’, Wordsworth Circle, 26:1 (Winter 1995), pp. 4–7; and S. Luther, ‘A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs. Robinson’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (Fall 1994), pp. 391–409.
65. Letter to Unknown Publisher, 17 June 1800, Garrick Club London, quoted by Pascoe, Introduction, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, p. 54.
66. To Mrs John Marshall, 10–12 September 1800, in Th e Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Th e Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. C. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 297.
67. Cross, ‘From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales’, pp. 579, 583.68. Ibid., p. 574.69. ‘Th e Sylphid Essays’, in Memoirs, vol. 3, pp. 3–4. To be reproduced in this edition, Vol-
ume 8.70. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 68.
General Introduction xxxi
71. S. Setzer, ‘Mary Robinson’s Sylphid Self: Th e End of Feminine Self-Fashioning’, Philo-logical Quarterly, 75:4 (Fall 1996), pp. 501–20, on p. 514.
72. ‘Th e Sylphid Essays’, in Memoirs, vol. 3, p. 74.73. ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England’, Monthly
Magazine, 64:3 (1 October 1800), p. 218.74. Walsingham may have infl uenced Edgeworth’s cross-dressing Harriet Freke and female
duelists in Belinda (1801), and Robinson is a possible model for Shelley’s doomed char-acter Perdita in Th e Last Man (1826) (see Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 229). Shelley read Vancenza in 1816 and dealt with the incest theme in her novella Mathilda (written in 1819).
– xxxiii –
CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN MARY ROBINSON’S LIFE
Year Date Age Events1756/71 27 November Born to Nicholas and Hester Darby at Minster
House, College Green, Bristol.1760s Attends school run by Hannah More’s sisters.1765 7–8 Nicholas Darby leaves England with a mistress
to establish a fi shery on the southern coast of Labrador.
1767 November 9–10 Nicholas’s fi shing station attacked and pillaged by Inuit.
1768 7–11 March 10–11 Family home and possessions sold at auction.Parents separate.Mary, Hester and George (younger brother) move to London.
1769–70 11–13 Studies under Meribah Lorrington at a school in Chelsea for fourteen months.
1770 12–14 Attends boarding school in Battersea.Hester sets up a school in Little Chelsea.
c. 1771 13–15 Nicholas returns from America and forces Hes-ter to close her establishment.Mary attends Oxford House school on Maryle-bone High Street. Th e ballet master of Covent Garden (who is also the school’s dancing master) suggests that she pursue a theatrical career.
c. 1772 14–16 Meets the renowned actor-manager David Gar-rick, who prepares her for an acting career.
1773 12 April 15–16 Marries Th omas Robinson, a solicitor’s clerk, at St Martin-in-the-Fields.
1774 18 October 16–17 Birth of her daughter and future editor, Maria Elizabeth Robinson.
1775 3 May 17–18 Th omas arrested for debt and committed to Fleet Prison. Mary and Maria Elizabeth accom-pany him.
xxxiv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Summer Poems by Mrs. Robinson is published.Meets Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
1776 3 August 18–19 Husband released from Fleet Prison.Meets Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright and manager of Drury Lane Th eatre.
10 December Th eatrical debut at Drury Lane as Juliet in Gar-rick’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.2
1777 17 February 19–20 Plays Statira in Nathaniel Lee’s Alexander the Great.
24 February Amanda in Sheridan’s A Trip to Scarborough.10 April While heavily pregnant, plays Fanny in a benefi t
performance of George Colman and Garrick’s Th e Clandestine Marriage.
24 May Second daughter, Sophia Robinson, baptized.June Sophia dies.September Captivity, a Poem and Celadon and Lydia, a Tale
is published.30 September Plays Ophelia in Garrick’s adaptation of Ham-
let.7 October Lady Anne in Colley Cibber’s adaptation of
Richard III.9 October Araminta in William Congreve’s Th e Old Batch-
elor.15 December Th e Lady in George Colman’s adaptation of
Milton’s Comus.1778 10 January 20–1 Plays Emily in Hannah Cowley’s Th e Runaway.
9 April Araminta in Sir John Vanbrugh’s Th e Confed-eracy.
20 April Fanny in an adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.
23 April Octavia in John Dryden’s All for Love.30 April Plays Lady Macbeth in benefi t performance of
Macbeth. Premiere of her musical aft erpiece, Th e Lucky Escape.
15 October Lady Plume in Sheridan’s Th e Camp.11 November Palmira in James Miller and John Hoadly’s
Mahomet.1779 3 February 21–2 Miss Richly in Frances Sheridan’s Th e Discovery.
8 February Alinda in Robert Jephson’s Th e Law of Lom-bardy.
14 April Cordelia in benefi t performance of King Lear (adapted by Nahum Tate and Garrick).
10 May Performs fi rst breeches role as Jacintha in Ben-jamin Hoadly’s Th e Suspicious Husband.
Chronology xxxv
15 May Fidelia in Isaac Bickerstaff e’s version of William Wycherley’s Th e Plain Dealer (breeches role).
23 October Viola in Twelft h Night (breeches role).6 November Nancy in Th e Camp.20 November Perdita in Garrick’s condensed version of Th e
Winter’s Tale.3 December Plays Perdita in command performance attended
by the royal family. Th e seventeen-year-old Prince of Wales (later George IV) becomes infatuated with her.
1780 28 January 22–3 Plays Rosalind in As You Like It (breeches role).29 January Delivers prologue to Elizabeth Richardson’s Th e
Double Dealer.3 April Oriana in George Farquhar’s Th e Inconstant; or,
the Way to Win Him (breeches role).18 April Imogen in Garrick’s adaptation of Cymbeline
(breeches role).4 May Th e Widow Brady in Garrick’s Th e Irish Widow
(breeches role).24 May Eliza Camply in Elizabeth, Baron Craven’s Th e
Miniature Picture (breeches role).31 May Retires from the stage.2 June Anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gor-
don.18 July Press reports of the Prince’s aff air with Robin-
son. Th e lovers begin to be referred to as Florizel and Perdita.
December Th e Prince suddenly ends his relationship with Robinson.
1781 August 23–4 Th omas Gainsborough paints Robinson’s por-trait.
5 September Agrees to return Prince’s love letters for £5,000.October Visits France and is fêted by Parisian society as
‘la belle Anglaise’. Attracts the notice of Marie Antoinette.
1782 24–5 Lives in Berkeley Square, London.January–April Joshua Reynolds paints Robinson’s portrait.
Aff airs with Lord Malden and Charles James Fox.Begins long-term relationship with Banastre Tarleton, a veteran of the American Revolution-ary war.
xxxvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
1783 25–6 Sits for second (‘lost profi le’) portrait by Rey-nolds, which later serves as the basis for the frontispiece of Robinson’s Poems (1791) and her posthumous Poetical Works (1806).
13 June Press report of her pregnancy.July Rides in a chaise to Dover in pursuit of Tarleton,
whom she mistakenly believes is fl eeing to the Continent to avoid creditors. Falls ill while en route. Possibly has a miscarriage.Suff ers for the remainder of her life from progres-sive paralysis, probably due to acute rheumatic fever.
1784 April 26–7 Canvasses for Fox in Parliamentary election.15 May Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and Other
Poems is published.August Robinson’s illness and bankruptcy compel her,
Tarleton and Maria Elizabeth to leave for the continent.
1785 27–8 Convalesces at continental spas.Robert Merry (‘Della Crusca’), Hester Piozzi, Bertie Greatheed and William Parsons publish Th e Florence Miscellany, beginning the Della Cruscan movement.
5 December Nicholas Darby dies.1786 Summer 28–9 Receives treatment at Aix-la-Chapelle (health
resort).14 July Death mistakenly reported in the Morning Post.
1787 29–30 Tarleton’s A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Provinces of North America is published.
1788 January 30–1 Returns to England. Publishes Della Cruscan verse in Th e World and the Oracle under a variety of pseudonyms.
1789 14 July 31–2 French rebels storm the Bastille in Paris.1790 June 32–3 Ainsi va le Monde (‘so goes the world’), a poem
celebrating the French Revolution, is published.7 December Robinson’s older brother John Darby dies.
1791 33–4 Poems by Mrs. Robinson is published.August Impartial Refl ections on the Present Situation of
the Queen of France by a Friend to Humanity (pamphlet) is published.
Chronology xxxvii
1792 January 34–5 Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is published.
31 January Robinson’s fi rst novel, Vancenza; or, Th e Dangers of Credulity is published. It becomes an immedi-ate bestseller and goes into fi ve editions.
July–September Visits Calais, France.2–6 September Approximately 1,200 prisoners murdered in the
September massacres in Paris.1793 14 February 35–6 William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice, and its Infl uence on General Vir-tue and Happiness is published.
13 August Hester Darby dies.16 October Marie Antoinette executed by guillotine.December Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of
France is published. 1794 January 36–7 Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson. Volume the Second
is published (sometimes referred to as the 1793 edition).
14 February Th e Widow, or A Picture of Modern Times. A Novel in a Series of Letters is published.
28 May Godwin’s Th ings as Th ey Are; or Th e Adventures of Caleb Williams is published.
29 November 37–8 Robinson’s aft erpiece Nobody performed at Drury Lane before a disruptive audience. Th e play closes aft er three performances.
1796 1 January 38–9 Angelina; A Novel is published.February Th e Sicilian Lover: A Tragedy is published.
Meets the philosopher and novelist William Godwin.
1 June Dines with Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft .22 October Sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon is pub-
lished.November Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth
Century is published.1797 April 39–40 Relationship with Tarleton ends.
10 September Wollstonecraft dies.December Walsingham; or, Th e Pupil of Nature, a Domestic
Story is published.1798 14 January 40–1 Begins her Memoirs.
April Obtains subscriptions for a new edition of her Poetical Works.
Summer Recuperates in a cottage at Englefi eld Green, close to Windsor.
xxxviii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
September William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Col-eridge’s Lyrical Ballads is published.
December Tarleton marries Susan Priscilla Bertie, an heir-ess.
1799 February 41–2 Th e False Friend: A Domestic Story (epistolary novel) is published.
March A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injus-tice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes is published under the pseudonym Anne Francis Randall.
August Th e Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel is published.
October Begins writing Sylphid essays for the Morning Post.Replaces Robert Southey as poetry editor of the Morning Post.
December Meets Coleridge.1800 42–3 Writes essays on Present State of the Manners,
Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England and biographical anecdotes for Richard Phillips’s Monthly Magazine.
May Arrested for debt.Summer Translates Joseph Hager’s Picture of Palermo
from the German.November Lyrical Tales, a volume of poetry, is published.26 December 43–4 Dies.31 December Buried at Old Windsor. Godwin and John Wol-
cot (‘Peter Pindar’) attend the funeral.
Notes
1. Th e controversy regarding Robinson’s birth-date is discussed in the General Introduc-tion. Evidence suggests that she was born either 27 November 1756 or 27 November 1757 (not in 1758, the year printed in the 1801 edition of Memoirs and engraved on her tombstone but not present in her manuscript).
2. With the exception of two of Robinson’s appearances as Perdita (a part she played fourteen times), only the fi rst date of her performance in each role will be listed in this chronology. For other performance dates, consult Th e London Stage 1660–1800, Part 5: 1776–1800, ed. C. B. Hogan, vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); and H. Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Robinson (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004), pp. 231–2.
– xxxix –
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of my family – Wendy War-ren and Sarah Margaret Robinson – during the long hours of work on this volume. I owe special thanks to my friend and colleague Janine Utell for her interest and camaraderie as we both completed big projects. I am grateful for the support of Dean Matthew Poslusny, College of Arts & Sciences at Widener University. My thanks go also to Judith Pascoe and Stuart Curran for their gracious assistance at the fi nal stages but also for their trailblazing work on Mary Robinson. I am fortunate to have had the superlative assistance of Samantha Przybylowicz and of Megan Kelley. Finally, I reserve a particular expression of gratitude for my mentor and friend Paula R. Feldman, who introduced me to Mary Robinson and who taught me how to do this work.
Daniel Robinson
– xli –
INTRODUCTION
Th e prevailing concern of Mary Robinson’s poetry is fame – but not celebrity; by the time she began a serious poetic career, she had experienced enough of that (see General Introduction). Robinson seeks fame earned through poetic skill and tem-pered by virtue. Her obsession with literary fame is seen as early as 1775, in ‘Th e Vision’, from her fi rst volume: in it, Robinson describes the allegorical fi gure of Virtue as indistinguishable from the poetic muse, wearing ‘wreaths of laurel’ and promising to ‘celebrate thy name, e’en to time’s end’. Th e vision of course vanishes, leaving the transported speaker to face the reality of ‘momentary pleasures born to cloy’ (below, p. 37). Nonetheless, Robinson’s speaker ascribes the power of the vision – its ‘scenes of tranquil joy’ – to her own imagination, however painfully deceived she fi nds herself. Her poetic ambition is throughout her career consolatory and tan-talizing, stretching from ‘Th e Vision’ in 1775, written while confi ned to the Fleet Prison with a wastrel husband and infant daughter, to ‘Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’ from 1800, written aft er reading ‘Kubla Khan’ in manuscript. Robinson’s predominant poetic is simple but profound: the poet traces ‘imagination’s bound-less space’ (Volume 2, p. 196), craft s a highly wrought expression of the feelings and ideas found there, and commits that expression to paper as a shared experience with readers who, bewitched by the technical magic of lyrical eff ects, will then venerate the poet’s name – or names.
Th e fact that Robinson published many of her poems under various pseudonyms is perhaps the most important aspect of her literary career. However, Robinson never uses her pseudonyms to disguise her identity but rather to showcase her vir-tuosity. Aft er enduring the indignity of the epithet ‘Perdita’ and its humiliating associations, Robinson certainly sought to rehabilitate her image. Her poetry clearly demonstrates the association she sees between poetic accomplishment and virtue – a moral imperative she would have learned from her reading of Pope or perhaps from her instruction by the More sisters. ‘Th e wreath the Muse presents is Virtue’s claim’, Robinson writes in 1800 with an echo of ‘Th e Vision’ from 25 years before. She adds, completing the couplet, ‘’Tis Britain’s off ’ring! ’tis the wreath of Fame!’ (Volume 2, p. 96). Here she writes to the Earl of Moira, liberal patron of the arts, but she does so as Sappho, a sobriquet she feels she has most defi nitely earned aft er 25 years of writing and of publicity. ‘Sappho – To the Earl of Moira’ is like most poetic encomia in that the verse tribute ends up saying at least as much about the poet as the
xlii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
addressee. Robinson certainly knew enough about the history of the poetic laurel to know that, as Petrarch’s Laura became the most glorifi ed extra-biblical female sub-ject in literary history, so does the poet himself metaphorically transform her into his own laurel, crowning himself Apollo’s laureate. Laying claim to the laureateship of her own country – in the same poem she even refers to herself as ‘Britain’s Muse’ – Robinson is keenly aware of the trope, herself writing as both Petrarch and Laura but even more interestingly subverting Petrarch’s voice and his form through fasci-nating juxtapositions and reassignments of his metaphor and subject. For instance, her long poem ‘Petrarch to Laura’ is surprisingly not a sonnet or a sequence of son-nets but is an imitation of Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, probably the most infl uential poem on Robinson, a modernization of the Ovidian verse epistle of the Heroides in which Ovid ventriloquizes famous women from Greek and Roman history. Pope makes the medieval Eloisa his heroine, while Robinson makes the medieval Petrarch hers – using the conventions of Ovid’s form to place the prevailing fi gure of poetic masculinity in the female epistolary position. When she chooses strictly to follow Petrarchan form, she does so in the persona of the archetypical woman poet – Sap-pho – but again mediated through Pope and Ovid in her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets.
Robinson’s dozens of references to wreaths, laurels, garlands, etc. as symbols of fame pervade her poetry. She employs the exact phrase ‘wreath of fame’ twice in Sap-pho and Phaon, her most successful claim to poetic legitimacy, but also in Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France, ‘To the Memory of my Beloved Brother’, ‘Lines to the Rev. J. Whitehouse’, ‘Th e Adieu to Fancy’, ‘Tabitha Bramble, to her Cousins in Scotland’, ‘Evening Meditations on St. Anne’s Hill; Inscribed to the Right Honourable Charles James Fox’, Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ode to the Harp of the Late Accomplished and Amiable Louisa Hanway and her fi rst major poem, Ainsi va le Monde, which she dedicated to her fi rst poetic mentor and admirer, Robert Merry, or ‘Della Crusca’. Naming his literary persona aft er the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, Merry had constructed a literary identity for himself that gestured towards cultural authority, however pretentious, and he provided an exam-ple for Robinson when she began her professional literary career in 1788. Merry’s nom de plume was just another way for him to remind everyone that he had been affi liated with what had become the Royal Academy of Florence. Robinson’s names, however, made a new beginning for herself, defying her much-publicized personal history, rejecting ‘Perdita’ and essentially reifying the concept of ‘Mrs Robinson’ as professional author and as England’s unoffi cial poet laureate. She would continue using her pseudonyms aft er subsequent publication had clearly identifi ed her as the author; these names – most frequently appearing in print as ‘Laura’, ‘Sappho’, ‘Laura Maria’, ‘Oberon’, ‘Tabitha Bramble’ – are not disguises; they are more like moods. And they are all shades of ‘Mrs Robinson’.
Th e 1775 volume, Poems by Mrs. Robinson, was born out of sheer necessity but already reveals much of what would defi ne Robinson as a poet. Her ‘early love for lyric harmony’ would become her most signifi cant poetic attribute as she would go
Introduction xliii
on to create lyric forms and metrical eff ects that anticipate those of not only Col-eridge but also the likes of Keats, Shelley, Hemans, Tennyson and Poe. Robinson frequently employs musical forms, calling her poems canzonets, madrigals, songs, etc. (although she applies such terms rather loosely). In both literature and music, she points out, her tastes tended towards ‘the mournful and touching kind’.1 But a signifi cant portion of this volume was infl uenced by Robinson’s reading the poetry of Anna Aikin (later Barbauld)2 and certainly also by the experience of being newly married, of living fashionably and well beyond the young couple’s means. Th is volume appeared shortly aft er she and her infant daughter had to accompany her husband to the Fleet Prison for debt; however, it sold ‘but indiff erently’.3 Robinson, undeterred, spent her time in prison writing a more ambitious poem, ‘Captivity’, infl uenced by her experience there, that she would publish upon her family’s release from prison and that she considered ‘superior to my former productions’.4 Recog-nizing their imperfections, Robinson never republished any of the poems from this period, considering them to be ‘trifl es, very trifl es – I since perused them with a blush of self-reproof, and wondered how I could venture on presenting them to the pub-lic’.5 Writing in 1800, Robinson’s remarks are necessarily self-deprecating, but they are also an implicit assertion of her own high standards and of the quality of the work she has since presented to the public.
Robinson began writing poetry for publication in 1788, aft er her return from living abroad with Banastre Tarleton and her daughter. Robinson chose to publish in the daily newspaper the World, perhaps because of an acquaintance with the Revd Charles Este, its poetry editor, but also because it had become the site of a sensa-tional poetic exchange between Merry, as ‘Della Crusca’, and the mysterious ‘Anna Matilda’, who turned out later to be playwright Hannah Cowley.6 Robinson may have been eager to initiate a professional relationship with publishing mogul John Bell, who had founded the Morning Post in 1772. Bell had an eye for design and did much to improve the readability of the printed broadsheet, including the use of white space between paragraphs, and was the fi rst printer to discontinue use of the long ‘s’. Bell was also an innovator in the marketing of literary anthologies with his popular series Th e Poets of Great Britain, which in fi ve years, from 1777 to 1782, grew to 109 volumes.7 Bell’s latest newspaper, the World and Fashionable Advertiser, co-founded with Edward Topham in January 1787, had begun featuring the Della Crusca poems in July 1787 with enough success that Bell brought out separately a collection entitled Th e Poetry of the World in the summer of 1788. On 4 July 1788, the paper announced that future contributors thus ‘will have the gratifi cation of fi nding their favors elegantly and respectably preserved’.
Robinson saw an opportunity to ignite a literary career. Her health seriously compromised and the ‘Perdita’ aff air years behind her, she published her fi rst poem in ten years under the nom de plume ‘Laura’. It would be her second poem, ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, that would initiate her into the ranks of the Della Crus-cans. Although based on the latest tumult in her relationship with Tarleton, this poem became one of her most frequently reprinted and inspired a poetic exchange
xliv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
with Merry, writing as ‘Leonardo’ but quickly exposed as ‘Della Crusca’, and elicited a jealous poetical fi t from ‘Anna Matilda’. Th is aff air established Robinson’s persona as a major presence and gave her entry into a new literary circle. When Bell sold the paper and went on to found the Oracle, he took Robinson with him. Increasingly prolifi c, Robinson committed herself to exercising her talents in odes on the model of Collins and Gray, and she modifi ed her persona to give more of a hint of her true identity, rebranding her contributions as the work of ‘Laura Maria’. She also began experimenting with a new male pseudonym, ‘Oberon’, casting herself as a fantasti-cally fi ctional character from Shakespeare.
In 1790, Robinson’s relationship with Bell would pay off with the publication of her fi rst volume of poetry since 1777 – the politically-charged Ainsi va le Monde, inspired by Merry’s fervent celebration of the French Revolution in his poem Th e Laurel of Liberty. She signed it ‘Laura Maria’, but by February 1791 everyone knew that ‘Laura Maria’ was Mrs Robinson.8 Although Robinson’s poem provoked no hos-tile reviews, her affi liation with Merry and his politics put Robinson in the sights of critic and satirist William Giff ord, who composed a vicious but brilliant satire on the Della Cruscans called Th e Baviad. She continued to earn success with subsequent volumes published by Bell – her fi rst collection of Poems in 1791 and a successful novel, Vancenza; or Th e Dangers of Credulity, in 1792 – and became an established literary fi gure in London. Th e successful partnership between Bell and the Della Cruscans had given Robinson a new kind of celebrity: in December the Monthly Review dubbed her ‘the English Sappho’, a sobriquet she would jealously guard for the rest of her career. Reviewing the 1791 Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson and preceding a reprint of ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, the reviewer writes,
… if people of taste and judgment were impressed with a favourable idea of the poet-ess, from the merits of that performance [Ainsi va le Monde] … they will deem yet higher of our English Sappho, aft er the perusal of the present volume; in which are some pieces, equal, perhaps, to the best productions (so far as the knowledge of them is come down to us,) of the Lesbian Dame, in point of tenderness, feeling, poetic imagery, warmth, elegance, and above all, delicacy of expression, in which our ingenious countrywoman far excels all that we know of the works of the Grecian Sappho.9
At least among the more liberal readers and critics, Robinson’s association with Merry no doubt facilitated such high praise; and however much her biographer, pre-sumably her daughter, in the Memoirs attempts to distance Robinson’s later poetry from the Della Cruscans, the elaborate lyricism that she learned from Merry would continue to be characteristic of her writing.10
Of the recently recovered women Romantic poets, Robinson proceeded along a path of poetic accomplishment more like that of her male contemporaries, all of whom had their sights set on Milton. Robinson’s poetry throughout the 1790s is prolifi c, diverse and increasingly ambitious. She seems to have experimented with every poetic form at her disposal. While continuing to write in shorter lyric modes,
Introduction xlv
particularly the ode, and in literary ballads, and while frequently employing vari-ous pseudonyms and publishing in periodicals, Robinson also worked on ever-more ambitious projects. In 1792 she published a Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which she published under her own name, perhaps reminding her readers that she had twice been Reynolds’s subject for portraiture; in 1793 she attempted to exercise her familiarity with Pope in her own verse satire Modern Manners, under the facetious pseudonym ‘Horace Juvenal’; that year she also wrote her fi rst poems in blank verse, ‘Sight’ and ‘Solitude’; and she dabbled in irregular Spenserian stanzas with the allegorical ‘Cavern of Woe’. Like most British liberals, she became disgusted with the course of the French Revolution by 1794 but wrote about it with fascinat-ing personal refraction in three important poems, responding as a woman, wife and mother to the predicament of the French royal family and their eventual executions – ‘A Fragment, Supposed to be Written near the Temple, on the Night before the Murder of Louis the Sixteenth’, ‘Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation, in her Prison of the Temple’ and Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France.11
Aft er a second volume of Poems appeared to acclaim in 1794, Robinson slowed down her production of poems for the newspapers. From 1795 to 1798, she became involved in more serious literary pursuits that demonstrate her considerable versa-tility and refl ect the infl uence of new acquaintances such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft . In addition to the satirical short play Nobody and several more novels, including the ambitious and wildly successful Walsingham (1797), Robinson wrote the highly accomplished sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon and the ‘dra-matic poem’ in Shakespearean blank verse Th e Sicilian Lover.12 Aft er completing these works, Robinson had only to complete a long epic poem in blank verse, one relevant to her era, to attempt to meet the standard set by Milton. Accordingly, with both Milton and Godwin on her mind, she began craft ing the long poem that would become Th e Progress of Liberty, once assembled in the posthumous Memoirs and the 1806 Poetical Works. Parts of this poem began appearing as instalments, ‘Poetical Pictures’, in the Morning Post and Gazetteer in 1798.13
Had Robinson’s career ended in 1799, her achievement would have been impressive by any measure. Despite ill health and fi nancial woes, however, Robin-son, during her fi nal months, moved into a fi nal and concentrated period of poetic accomplishment, most of which grew out of her work on the Morning Post, under the editorship of Daniel Stuart. In November 1797, Stuart had contracted both Robinson and Coleridge to write poetry for the paper.14 Shortly thereaft er Robinson debuted her ‘Tabitha Bramble’ persona, based on the comical spinster from Smol-lett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) and inspired by Scottish poet Andrew Macdonald, who published satirical occasional pieces in newspapers during the 1780s under the pseudonym ‘Matthew Bramble’, also from Smollett’s book. Th e fi rst batch of Tabitha Bramble poems from the winter of 1797–8 are perhaps Robinson’s most daringly political. Robert Southey was the chief contributor to the paper throughout 1798 until December 1799, at which time Robinson succeeded him as poetry editor of the Post. Working for Stuart, she composed roughly a quarter of the poems in her
xlvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
entire oeuvre. In August 1800, four months before her death, she wrote to Samuel Jackson Pratt, ‘I continue my daily labours in the Post; all the Oberons. Tabithas. M R’s and indeed most of the Poetry, you see there is mine’.15 Robinson thus found herself working among a younger group of poets that also included Wordsworth, who published under the pen-name ‘Mortimer’ and wrote ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’ for Robinson in a temporary fi t of Della Cruscan sensibility.16 Moreover, it was via the Morning Post that the frequently examined relationship between Robinson and the younger Coleridge began.
First, Coleridge responded to a reprinting in the Post of Robinson’s ‘Ode to the Snow-Drop’, which fi rst appeared in the novel Walsingham, with his ‘Th e Apothe-osis, or the Snow-Drop’ under the name ‘Francini’ on 3 January 1798.17 Th e grind of working for a daily newspaper found Robinson contributing light, occasional and frequently satirical short pieces, but her creativity seems to have responded positively to such rigours. She continued her experiments with stanza forms and metre, invent-ing nonce forms that could have become as eponymous as the Spenserian stanza or the Shakespearean sonnet. Coleridge, always metrically astute himself, certainly rec-ognized this potential in Robinson. Recommending her poem ‘Th e Haunted Beach’ to Southey for inclusion in his Annual Anthology, Coleridge writes enthusiastically ‘ay! that Woman has an Ear’. Just days before Coleridge had praised her to Southey as ‘a woman of undoubted Genius’, claiming ‘I never knew a human Being with so full a mind – bad, good, & indiff erent, I grant you, but full & overfl owing’.18 When Wordsworth, perhaps to indulge Coleridge’s enthusiasm, employed the stanza form of ‘Th e Haunted Beach’ for his own ‘Solitude of Binnorie’, Coleridge sent the poem to Robinson for publication and penned a headnote for it that praises ‘the bewitch-ing eff ect of that absolutely original stanza in the original Poem’ and reminds readers that ‘the invention of a metre has so widely diff used the name of Sappho, and almost constitutes the present celebrity of Alcæus’.19 Referring ostensibly to the stanzas called Sappics and Alcaics, Coleridge also invokes Robinson’s own celebrity as the English Sappho.
Robinson’s professional poetic career would end, as it had begun with Merry, with a brilliant male poet in thrall.20 Robinson would reciprocate with admiration, writing before her death ‘Ode, Inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ and, of course, ‘Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’. But she would also produce one more volume of poetry – her ‘favorite off spring’ – Lyrical Tales, published days before her death but consisting of many poems from the Post that she had written, herself under the spell of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.21 Th ough similarly rustic and humanitarian, her Lyrical Tales is quite a diff erent animal, par-ticularly in the less ambiguous formal juxtaposition of her title as it is applied to the contents of the book: her poems are easily identifi able as narratives (‘tales’), but ones that are developed in remarkably inventive lyrical forms – far more varied, formally elaborate and sonically rich than Lyrical Ballads, whose formal properties are more debatable.22 Still, the prospect of a competing volume, from the same publisher no less, was no comfort to Wordsworth, who considered changing the title of Lyrical
Introduction xlvii
Ballads because, according to Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Mrs. Robinson has claimed the title’.23
Appropriately, within just a few days of her death, the Morning Post rushed into print notice of the event: ‘Th e literary world have to regret the loss of Mrs. Rob-inson’, adding that she ‘had been for several months in a declining state of health, which worldly troubles greatly aggravated’. Such a decline seems quite at odds with the evidence of her poetic vitality over the preceding year in the same paper; the writer, presumably Stuart, therefore points out the incongruity that ‘a woman of so much genius, of such an elegant taste, of so rich an imagination in poetry, should be cut off at a period when the mental faculties are in their prime’.24 She was interred in the churchyard of Old Windsor with one of her own poems as an epitaph, originally ‘Penelope’s Epitaph’ from Walsingham, which echoes the resounding assurance that governed her entire literary enterprise, from her earliest visions of poetic fame, that she ‘shall snatch a wreath beyond the grave’.25
Editing Robinson’s PoetryAft er her death, Robinson’s daughter, Maria Elizabeth, devoted the next several years to preserving her mother’s reputation and particularly her poetry. She fi nished the Memoirs, which Robinson had begun writing in January 1798, assembled a number of poetic tributes, including Coleridge’s ‘A Stranger Minstrel’, and published them in two volumes in 1801, with an additional two volumes of previously unpublished work. In 1804 Maria Elizabeth brought out an anthology called Th e Wild Wreath for the purpose of perpetuating her mother’s reputation by including her work alongside poetry by Southey, Coleridge, Merry, Joanna Baillie and the notorious M. G. ‘Monk’ Lewis.26 Fulfi lling the promise of a third volume of Robinson’s poems that had been circulating for years, Maria Elizabeth oversaw the publication of Robinson’s Poetical Works in 1806, in three volumes, including 35 pages of ‘Tributary Poems’. Th e ‘Advertisement’, signed by Robinson, points out that the contents are arranged ‘according to the diff erent classes of poetry’. Th is fi nal quasi-authoritative represen-tation of Robinson’s own ‘wreath of fame’ opens with ‘Petrarch to Laura’ and other long poems. Th e rest of Volume I seems to present a serious case for Robinson’s pos-terity on its own, collecting the odes and elegies and closing with Th e Sicilian Lover. Volume II collects tales and various lyrics, while Volume III presents Th e Progress of Liberty, the sonnets, including Sappho and Phaon (but without its important pref-ace) and numerous lighter lyrics, closing with ‘Th e Old Beggar’. Th e Poetical Works does seem to refl ect Robinson’s intentions to some degree; for instance, the grouping of the corpus into subgenres or ‘classes’ sounds like Robinson’s formal sophistication. But it seems that Maria Elizabeth did a considerable amount of editing herself, for much of the organization of the poems beyond the obvious categories seems random or haphazard. And the poems themselves seem tampered with by someone whose ear for metre may not have been as fi nely tuned as Robinson’s was.
xlviii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
All three posthumous publications represent what must have been an intensely personal and deeply felt process for Maria Elizabeth Robinson; and her decisions must have been coloured by her perception of her mother’s reputation at that moment and a daughter’s sense of how her mother would have liked to be remem-bered. My edition of Robinson’s poetry is necessarily quite diff erent. I have chosen to represent the poet as she appeared in the instant of publicity and in the act of building her fame. Th e poems appear, therefore, with their original signatures so that readers can see which persona Robinson assigned to a given poem. Almost all of Robinson’s newspaper poetry survives, so I have made the primacy of that source a guiding editorial principle for this edition of her poetry.
I have reprinted the fi rst published version of a poem, whether from a newspaper, magazine or book, noting substantive variants in the textual notes. I have made two exceptions; where extensive authorial revision and expansion for book publication has occurred, I have provided both versions: these are ‘Lines on Beauty’, revised as ‘Ode to Beauty’, and ‘Th e Storm’, revised as ‘Th e Negro Girl’. I have chosen to anno-tate variants that appear in the three posthumous collections of Robinson’s poetry edited by her daughter, although I do not believe that they are all authoritative. It is impossible to know for certain which changes are spurious – even though some are obviously so – because Maria Elizabeth likely worked from some authoritative cor-rected versions or manuscripts of her mother’s work that are now lost but also likely made some decisions herself aft er her mother’s death.
A particular challenge in editing Robinson’s poetry has been assessing the accu-racy of various attributions over the years. Because this is the fi rst scholarly edition of Robinson’s poetry, I have adopted a fairly conservative policy for inclusion. I have decided to exclude poems that I cannot confi rm to be Robinson’s. We simply cannot conclude that authors of her era had proprietorship of pseudonyms – espe-cially names that come from other literary works. For example, two ‘Oberon’ poems appear in the European Magazine of March 1793 and June 1794; but these poems do not seem to be Robinson’s.27 Th e second is an ‘Extempore’ on Sir John Guise, an aristocrat from Gloucester not known to be an acquaintance of Robinson. Just because Robinson is known to have used the pseudonym a few times does not mean she was the only one who did.28
Pascoe’s expert edition of Selected Poems by Robinson includes a massive list of poems attributed to Robinson that has been tremendously helpful to me in preparing my edition.29 But in preparing this edition I have been particularly cautious regarding the ‘Bridget’ attributions in her list. Robinson certainly used the signature ‘Bridget’, but I am including only two ‘Bridget’ poems, ‘Th e Way to Keep Him’ and ‘Th e Spin-ster’, both of which appeared in April 1800, just a month aft er Robinson used the name ‘Bridget’ for a character in ‘Th e Confessor – A Sanctifi ed Tale’. ‘Th e Way to Keep Him’ was reprinted in both Th e Wild Wreath and the Poetical Works; ‘Th e Spinster’ was not reprinted but is convincingly connected to Robinson’s authorship by virtue of its style and the coincidence of her editorial work for the paper. Robin-son may have been the author of the other ‘Bridget’ poems Pascoe attributes to her;
Introduction xlix
but these poems are much earlier than 1800 and were not subsequently collected as Robinson’s. Th e fi rst ‘Bridget’ poem in Pascoe’s list is ‘Aunt Bridget to her Sister Margaret, Mother of Simkin and Simon’, published in Th e World for 25 June 1789;30 although the timeframe is right, this poem is actually part of the ‘Simkin and Simon’ series of poems by Ralph Broome about the Warren Hastings impeachment trials. It is more likely that Robinson wrote the ‘Bridget’ poems ‘For the Morning Post and Fashionable World’ and ‘To the Editor of the Morning Post and Fashionable World. Letter II’, which appeared on 11 October 1794 and 5 November 1794; these are also satirical poems but seem more in line with Robinson’s favourite target, the follies of fashionable society on display. Th e style of both, however, is rough, employ-ing almost Hudibrastic tetrameters that are uncharacteristic of Robinson. And she probably was not involved with the Morning Post before Daniel Stuart bought the paper in 1795. Because I cannot with confi dence confi rm Robinson’s authorship, I have excluded these poems.
One volume occasionally attributed to Robinson is Elegiac Verses to a Young Lady, on the Death of her Brother; who was Slain in the Late Engagement at Boston (London: J. Johnson, 1776). Th e title page gives the author as ‘M. M. Robinson’, and I have seen library holdings that take these initials to mean ‘M[rs]. M[ary]. Robinson’. Th ere is, however, no contemporaneous record of Robinson writing or publishing such a work, and the volume’s ‘Advertisement’ page identifi es the author as male using gender-specifi c pronouns.
Due to space constraints, I have had to avoid reprinting poems here that appear in other volumes of this edition. For instance, the ‘Sylphid’ essays contain a few poetic snippets that will appear in context in Volume 8 of this series. Robinson’s novels frequently contain interpolated poetry – Walsingham contains as many as 28 poems. For a list of poems in Robinson’s novels and thus appearing in other volumes in this edition, see Poems in Robinson’s Novels, below.
I have silently corrected accidental features of the texts – primarily punctuation – for the ease of reading and have done so, for the most part, in agreement with later versions of the poems in the 1806 Poetical Works – not because those versions are more authoritative per se but because they represent closely enough contemporary practice regarding punctuation and compensate for the frequently haphazard nature of newspaper publication.
Daniel Robinson
Notes
1. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 4 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1801), vol. 1, p. 14.
2. See editorial note 1 to ‘Th e Linnet’s Petition’, below, p. 378.3. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 168.4. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 170.5. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 159; see also vol. 1, p. 170: ‘I never now read my early compositions with-
out a suff usion on my cheek, which marks my humble opinion of them’.
l Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
6. See editorial notes, below, pp. 382–4. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley’s Th e English Della Cruscans and their Time, 1783–1828 (Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1967) is still the authority on the subject; for the Della Crusca–Anna Matilda aff air, see pp. 159–203. See also J. M. Labbe, Th e Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 39–66; J. C. Robinson, Unfetter-ing Poetry: Th e Fancy in British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 94–96, 111–27; J. Pascoe, Romantic Th eatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 68–94; J. McGann, Th e Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 74–93.
7. See B. Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English News-papers to 1899 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 101; J. Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 117. See also I. R. Christie, Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and other Papers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).
8. Monthly Review, n.s. 4 (February 1791), p. 223.9. Monthly Review, n.s. 6 (December 1791), p. 448.10. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 125.11. See Pascoe, Romantic Th eatricality pp. 95–129; A. Craciun, British Women Writers and
the French Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 60–94; and A. Gar-nai, ‘“One Victim from the Last Despair”: Mary Robinson’s Marie Antoinette’, Women’s Writing, 12:3 (2005), pp. 381–98.
12. For commentary on Sappho and Phaon, see D. Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim’, European Romantic Review, 6 (1995), pp. 98–127; McGann, Th e Poetics of Sensibility, pp. 94–116; and P. R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 344–51. For Th e Sicilian Lover, see this edition, Volume 8.
13. In 1794 the World merged with the Morning Post; a year later, Daniel Stuart bought the paper and it became the Morning Post and Gazetteer.
14. See S. Curran, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in C. S. Wilson and J. Haefner (eds), Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35, on p. 19; and J. Hawley, ‘Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited’, in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds), British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 62–75, on p. 65.
15. Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822: Being an Edition of the Manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, ed. K. N. Cameron, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–86), vol. 1, p. 232.
16. ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’ appeared in the Morning Post on 24 November 1800.17. For the history of the printing and recovery of this exchange, see D. V. Erdman, ‘Lost
Poem Found: Th e Cooperative Pursuit and Recapture of an Escaped Coleridge “sonnet” of 72 Lines’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 65 (1961), pp. 249–68.
18. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), vol. 1, pp. 576, 562. See editorial notes to ‘Jasper’ and ‘Th e Haunted Beach’, Volume 2, pp. 436–7.
Introduction li
19. Morning Post and Gazetteer (14 October 1800). See also R. S. Woof, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’, Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), pp. 149–89, on p. 176.
20. For more on the relationship between Robinson and Coleridge, see E. L. Griggs, ‘Col-eridge and Mrs. Robinson’, Modern Language Notes, 45:2 (1930), pp. 90–5; Hawley, ‘Romantic Patronage’; T. Fulford, ‘Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge’s Muses and Feminist Criticism’, Romanticism on the Net: An Electronic Journal Devoted to Romantic Studies, 13 (February 1999); K. Ledbetter, ‘“A Woman of Undoubted Genius”: Mary Robinson and S. T. Coleridge’, Postscript: Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, 11 (1994), pp. 43–9; M. J. Levy, ‘Coleridge, Mary Rob-inson, and “Kubla Khan”’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 77 ( January 1992), pp. 159–66; S. Luther, ‘A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs. Robinson’, Studies in Romanticism, 33:3 (1994), pp. 391–409; D. Robinson, ‘From “Mingled Measure” to “Ecstatic Measures”: Mary Robinson’s Poetic Reading of “Kubla Khan”’, Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), pp. 4–7; D. Robinson, ‘Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and the Prosody of Dreams’, Dreaming: Journal for the Association of the Study of Dreams, 7 (1997), pp. 119–40; and T. Whelan, ‘Coleridge, the Morning Post, and Female “Illustrissimae”: An Unpublished Autograph’, European Romantic Review, 17:1 ( January 2006), pp. 21–38.
21. Robinson called the volume her ‘favorite off spring’ in a letter to Jane Porter (see Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. J. Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 371).
22. See Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings, ed. W. Richey and D. Robinson (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffl in, 2002), pp. 1–7, 365–8. For more comparison between Lyrical Bal-lads and Lyrical Tales, see B. Bolton, Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp 106–38; Curran, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’; A. J. Cross, ‘From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt’, Studies in Romanticism, 40:4 (Winter 2001), pp. 571–605; and Vargo, ‘Tabitha Bramble and Lyrical Tales’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 37–53.
23. Th e Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Th e Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. C. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 297.
24. Morning Post and Gazetteer (29 December 1800).25. Walsingham: or, Th e Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story, 4 vols (London: T. N. Longman,
1797), vol. 2, p. 166. See also this edition, Volume 5.26. Worrying about his reputation and Robinson’s, Coleridge had serious concerns about
Maria Elizabeth’s selection of authors, particularly of Lewis. See D. Lee, ‘Th e Wild Wreath: Cultivating a Poetic Circle for Mary Robinson’, Studies in Literary Imagination, 30:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 23–34.
27. ‘A Soliloquy’ (‘Long have the Tutelary Gods Remov’d’), European Magazine 23 (March 1793), pp. 233–4; ‘Extempore Immediately on the Death of that invaluable Man, Sir John Guise, Bart.’, European Magazine, 25 ( June 1794), p. 486.
28. A footnote in Th e Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, 3 vols (London: Rich-ard Philips, 1806) gives Daphne and Louisa as pen-names for Robinson’s poetry (vol. 1, p. xxi), but I have not found these poems. See P. Byrne, Perdita: Th e Literary, Th eatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 250. See also H. Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), p. 162, who attributes the name ‘Adelaide’ to Robinson, but Adelaide was a pen-name of Hannah Cowley. A ‘monody’ on Chatterton appeared in the Oracle
lii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
on 21 May 1791 just ten days aft er the printing of Robinson’s on 11 May 1791. Th e poem fi rst appeared in the Morning Post on 24 October 1778 and was reprinted many times.
29. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, pp. 394–491.30. Pascoe gives the date as 25 January 1789 (ibid., p. 395).
– liii –
POEMS IN ROBINSON’S NOVELS
Th e following is a list of poems that appear in other volumes of this series – with the exception of poems published previously and reprinted here. Since they fi rst appeared in a larger work, the reader is advised to fi nd them in their specifi c contexts with additional textual information provided there.
Vancenza; or, Th e Dangers of Credulity (1792), this edition, Volume 2:[‘Th e chilling gale that nip’d the rose’], rpt. as ‘Stanzas’, 1801, 1806.[‘Within the drear and silent gloom’], rpt. as ‘Th e Nun’s Complaint’, 1794.‘Th e Pilgrim’s Farewell’ [added 3rd edn], rpt. 1794, 1806.
Th e Widow; or, A Picture of Modern Times (1794), this edition, Volume 2:[‘I love the labyrinth, the silent glade’], rpt. as ‘A Fragment’, 1806.[‘Fly swift , ye tardy, mournful hours’].
Angelina; A Novel (1796), this edition, Volume 3:‘Th e Progress of Melancholy’, rpt. 1806.[‘Heav’n knows! I never would repine’], rpt. as ‘A Wish’, 1806.[‘Love was a little blooming boy’], rpt. as ‘Madrigal’, 1806.[‘And now, my friend, to peaceful scenes I’ll fl y’].
Walsingham; or Th e Pupil of Nature (1797), this edition, Volume 5:‘Penelope’s Epitaph’, rpt. as ‘Lines by Mrs. Robinson, Now Engraven on her
Monument at Old Windsor Churchyard’, 1801.‘Th e Snow Drop’, rpt. as ‘Ode to the Snow-Drop’, 1806.‘Imitation of Spencer’, rpt. in ‘Th e Foster-Child’, Volume 2, p. 197; 1804, 1806.‘Farewel to Glenowen’, rpt. 1806.‘A Refl ection’ [‘For what is life?’]‘Sonnet’ [‘Slow sail the vapours o’er the mountain’s crest’].‘Stanzas, On Jealousy’, rpt. as ‘To Jealousy’, 1806.‘Sonnet’ [‘O! many are the pangs and keen the woes’].‘Th e Savage Hunter’, rpt. as ‘Stanzas’, 1806.‘A Refl ection’ [‘Th e loathsome toad, whose mis’ry feeds’], rpt. 1806.‘Stanzas, to Love’ [not to be confused with an earlier ‘Stanzas to Love’, below,
p. 135].
liv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
‘Burlesque Fragment’.‘Burlesque Sonnet’.‘Stanzas, to Neglect’, rpt. as ‘Neglect’, 1806.‘Stanzas, on Rest’ rpt. as ‘Stanzas to Rest’ 1806.‘Stanzas, on the World’.‘Impromptu, on Woman’.‘Ode’, rpt. as ‘Ode in Imitation of Pope’, 1806.‘Th e Doublet of Grey’, rpt. 1806.‘Burlesque Stanzas’ [‘Little, barb’rous, cruel fl y’].Lines from Th e Sicilian Lover [‘’Tis in their greatness their conviction lies’].‘Sonnet’ [‘O busy World! since ev’ry passing day’], rpt. 1806.Lines from Th e Sicilian Lover [‘All outward semblance of attractive grace’].‘Stanzas, to Fortune’, rpt. as ‘Stanzas’, 1806.‘Th e Exile’, rpt. 1806.‘Madrigal’ [‘Oh! sad and watchful waits thy lover’], rpt. 1806.‘My Native Home’, rpt. 1806.‘Sonnet, to Night’.
Th e Natural Daughter (1799), this edition, Volume 7:[‘O Pity! if thy holy tear’], rpt. as ‘Th e Old Soldier’, Morning Post (31 August
1799).[‘Love said to Reason, know my pow’r’], rpt as ‘Love and Reason’, 1806.‘Sonnet’ [‘O Gold! thou pois’nous dross, whose subtle power’], rpt. 1806.[‘Unhappy is the Pilgrim’s lot’], rpt. as ‘Stanzas from the Natural Daughter’,
1806.[‘As o’er the world by sorrow prest’], rpt. as ‘Stanzas’, 1806.‘To the Blue-Bell’, rpt. 1806.[‘’Tis night! and o’er the barren plain’], rpt. as ‘Stanzas from the Natural Daugh-
ter’, 1806.
– lv –
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
A Farmer’s Wife, both young and gay, 2.19A form, as lank as any taper fi ne, 2.18A gentle soul, a beauteous form, 1.18A juggler, at a Village Fair, 1.349A little acid now and then, 2.116A lover, when he fi rst essays, 2.77A Shepherd’s Dog there was; and he, 2.160Adieu, dear Emma; – now, alas! no more, 1.15Again I smite the bounding string, 1.351Ah! beauteous Syren! shall I still believe, 1.290Ah! lust’rous Gem bright emblem of the Heart, 1.149Ah! pensive Trav’ller, if thy tear, 1.209Ah! tell me not that jealous fear, 1.287Ah! think no more, that life’s delusive joys, 1.74Ah! what art thou, whose eye-balls roll, 1.259Ah! what is he, whose haggard eye, 2.29Ah! wherefore by the Church-yard side, 2.146Ah! who has pow’r to say, 1.211Ah! who, beneath the burning ray, 2.113All I ask of bounteous heav’n, 1.16Along the smooth and glassy stream, 2.106And dost thou hope to fan my Flame, 1.55Another day, Ah! me, a day, 2.150Another night of fev’rish pain, 2.134Arno! where steals thy dulcet lay?, 1.214As Cupid wanton, giddy child, 1.25As Heav’ns own Beam awakes the gentle fl ow’r, 1.290As lately musing in a lonely shade, 1.33As Reason, fairest daughter of the skies, 1.225As Stella sat the other day, 1.8Beauty, the attribute of Heaven!, 1.116Beneath a spreading Willow, 1.273Beneath an old wall, that went round an old Castle, 2.33Beside a Wood, whose loft y shade, 1.289Bid me the ills of life endure, 2.38Blest be thy song, sweet Nightingale, 1.95
lvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Bounding billow, cease thy motion, 1.180Bring me the fl owing cup, dear boy, 2.101By the side of a mountain, o’er-shadow’d with trees, 1.143By the side of the brook, where a willow was waving, 2.51Candour, our sages say, is most divine, 1.361Capricious foe to human joy, 1.139Celestial maid, if on my way, 1.31Cesario, thy Lyre’s dulcet measure, 1.127Chill blows the blast, upon the mountain’s brow, 1.56Chloe, ’tis not thy graceful air, 1.33Close in a woodbine’s tangled shade, 1.111Close on the margin of a brawling brook, 2.157Come, bright-eyed maid, 1.88Come, glowing Rose! unfold thy blushing breast!, 1.213Come, Hope, and sweep the trembling string, 1.282Come, sportive Fancy! come with me, and trace, 2.126Crops, like Hedge hogs, high-crown’d Hats, 2.22, Dame Dowson was a granny grey, 2.86Dark was the dawn! and o’er the deep, 1.318Dark was the dawn, and o’er the deep, 2.166Day’s glory fades! and now the rustic swain, 1.293Days pass – o’er shadow’d, mournful, and unblest!, 1.218Dear shade of him, who grac’d the Mimic Scene, 1.65Deep in th’ abyss where frantic horror bides, 1.86Dim was the Cloister, where the Vestal sad, 1.370Divine inhabitant of heaven, 1.24Do you see the Old Beggar who sits at yon gate –, 2.105Dread Child of Erebus! whose pow’r, 1.274Drench’d by a fi ercly beating show’r, 2.31Enlighten’d Patron of the sacred Lyre?, 1.102Explore the Dungeon’s gloom, where, all alone, 1.374Exult my Muse! exult to see, 1.120Exulting Beauty! phantom of an hour, 1.59Exulting Beauty, – phantom of an hour, 1.99Fair dames, of fi ckle man you say, 2.69Fair was this blushing rose of May, 1.85False is the Youth, who dares by Thee recline, 1.214Far, far and wide the tempest howls –, 2.138Farewell! – dear haunts of pleasing woes!, 1.304Farewell, my friend, good angels waft thee o’er, 1.27First blessing, frail Mortality can know, 1.316Flow soft River, gently stray,, 1.136Forbear, rash Maid! thy hand restrain, 1.171From Antique Courts and banner’d Halls, 2.62From Courtly Crowds and empty Joys retir’d, 1.184From Mountains, barren, bleak, and bare, 1.346From Richmond’s verdant hills and fl ow’ry plains, 1.39Full many an anxious pang, and rending sigh, 1.210
Index of First Lines lvii
Generous, and good, sincere, and void of art, 1.21Gladly I leave the town, and all its care, 1.22Gliding o’er the moonlight heath, 1.279Go, balmy Gales, and tell Lisardo’s ear, 1.284Go, Sigh! go, viewless Herald of my breast, 1.213Hail daughter of th’ etherial sky, 1.13Hail! Goddess of persuasive art!, 1.64Hail, liberty! legitimate of Heav’n!, 1.365Hail meek-eyed daughter of the sky, 1.6Hail, sav’ry compound! luscious to the taste, 2.18Hail, Solitude serene! thou nurse of thought, 1.229Hail! Tyrant of the gloomy season, hail!, 2.15Hail wisdom, goddess of each art, 1.6Hark! the hollow moaning Wind, 1.167Hark! ’tis the merry bells that ring!, 1.307Hence, dark Despondency! away!, 1.277Hence pining grief, and black despair, 1.31Here bounds the gaudy gilded chair, 1.314‘Here Pope fi rst sung!’ O, hallow’d Tree!, 1.130Hither, God of pleasing pain, 1.265How placid is thy hour, O Twilight pale, 1.368How rarely, by the outward show, 2.218How very rare my gen’rous friend we fi nd, 1.10Humdrum complains his giddy wife, 2.107I could have borne affl iction’s sharpest thorn, 1.146I wake from Dreams of proud delight, 1.300If a perfect form can please, 1.12If aught could sooth to peace the wounded breast, 1.187If deep in gloom the day has past, 2.56If Grief can deprecate the wrath of Heaven, 1.108If ’tis the lot of mortal eye to scan, 1.257If Virtues rarely known to grace Mankind, 1.51If, while the sky, by storms o’ercast, 2.75Immortal Reynolds! thou, whose art can trace, 1.60In early youth, blithe Spring’s exulting day, 1.147In the lone Valley, on its verdant bed, 1.183In the worst den of human misery, 2.11In these degenerate times the Muses blend, 2.96In these enlightened times, when critic elves, 1.196In this dread era, when the Muses’ train, 1.311In this vain busy world, where the Good and the Gay, 1.345In vain, for me, thy gift s, display’d, 2.120In vain, thy timid love would hide, 2.102In vain to me the howling deep, 1.358Insatiate Despot! whose resistless arm, 1.292Insatiate Tyrant of the Mind, 1.90Is it in mansions, rich and gay, 2.23Is it the early smile of spring, 2.67
lviii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Is it the purple grape, that throws, 2.39It was in the days of a gay British King, 2.169Lady! ’tis somewhat strange to fi nd, 2.140Lady! whene’er those radiant eyes, 2.128Lesbia believ’d her ardent mind, 2.82Lesbia upon her bosom wore, 2.52Let fashion and fancy their beauties display, 2.74Let others wreaths of Roses twine, 1.126Let the Muse, who with classical taste can impart, 1.318Life glowing season! – odour-breathing Spring!, 2.83Light Zephyrus! gay child of Spring!, 1.252Lightly, on the breath of Morn, 1.170Long didst thou live, unruling and unrul’d, 1.366Love, I renounce thy tyrant sway, 1.123Love, thou sportive, wanton Boy, 1.59Lubin and Kate, as gossips tell, 2.78Majestic Bird! who lov’st to glide, 2.109’Mid Cambria’s hills a lowly cottage stood, 2.197, ’Mid the dread altitudes of dazzling snow, 2.40’Mid the grey horrors of his narrow cell, 1.372Miser! why countest thou thy treasure?, 2.17My Portrait you desire! and why?, 1.296Myrtilla was a Lady gay, 2.92Nature, to prove her heav’n-taught pow’r, 1.134Nature, with colours heav’nly pure, 1.235Near Glaris, on a mountain’s side, 1.157Near the top of yonder meadow, 2.110Near yon bleak mountain’s dizzy height, 1.106Night’s dewy Orb, that o’er yon limpid Stream, 1.62Nimrod, of sportsmen, the most fond of sport, 2.30Nine pieces, and each quite complete for the town!, 2.9No more shall winter’s veil be spread, 1.21Now Anarchy roam’d wide, a monster fi erce, 1.369Now, by th’ Aonian Nymphs inspir’d, 1.236Now Midnight spreads her sable vest, 1.191Now the grey wing of Twilight o’er the plain, 2.10O Anna, since thy graceful Song, 1.57O fl y thee from the shades of night, 1.128O! Let me seize thy Pen Sublime, 1.53O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray, 1.320 O! Peter, since thy sportive Muse, 2.3O Pride! behold where, at thy loft y gate, 2.132O! Rare ***** ****! he’s the wonder of nature!, 1.357O solitary wand’rer! whither stray, 2.73O thou! all wonderful, all glorious Pow’r!, 1.220O thou, to whom superior worth’s allied, 1.77O Th ou, whose sober precepts can controul, 1.67O Th ou! whose vivid Tablet still retains, 1.291
Index of First Lines lix
O Time, forgive the mournful song, 1.140O ye! who basking in the sunny sphere, 1.355O Yez! pray who has lately seen, 2.118O’er fallow plains and fertile meads, 1.134Off spring of Heav’n! from whose bland Th rone, 1.181Oft have I said my Lover’s smile, 2.80Oft have I seen yon Solitary Man, 2.164Oh! cease the sad prophetic Song, 1.195Oh! check the tear, which mem’ry bids to fl ow, 2.99Oh! come, my pretty Love, and we, 2.119Oh! had I thought, that, from the tuneful strain, 1.217Oh! Liberty! Transcendent and sublime!, 1.314Oh Peace! thou nymph of modest mien!, 1.306Oh, Sire, rever’d! ador’d!, 1.255Oh! Sympathy! thou pleasing source of pain, 1.320Oh! take these little easy chains, 1.287Old Barnard was still a lusty hind, 2.36Old Lady Dinah, peevish grown, 2.89, Old Mistress Gurton had a Cat, 2.25Old Tree! how yellow are thy leaves!, 2.143On Ida’s mount the gods were met,, 1.144On Scotia’s Hills a gentle Maid, 1.271On the base shrine of sordid Love, 1.288Orlando! when the dawn of grace, 2.108Pale Goddess of the witching hour, 1.101Pavement slipp’ry; People sneezing, 1.316Permit me dearest girl to send, 1.13Peter! Th ou son of whim and satire, 2.5Pleas’d with the calm bewitching hour, 1.302Poor insect! what a little day, 2.84‘Pride puff s up ignorance,’ says pompous Joe, 2.63Proud Child of Genius! whose immortal hand, 1.292Pure and divine, without a fault, 1.37Rapt in the visionary theme!, 2.195Resistless power, ah! wherefore reign, 1.28Sad, pensive hour! now let Refl ection see, 1.187Say not, that minutes swift ly move, 1.288Say, stern Oppression! Th ou, whose iron chain, 1.361‘Say, what is Love?’ I heard the sound, 1.165, Say, when the captive bosom feels, 1.219Says Fashion to Taste, I am strangely perplex’d, 2.97Says Lady Jane, ‘So scant is Fame, 2.81Says Time to Love, ‘Th ou idle boy, 2.12Secluded from the world’s ignoble strife, 1.47Shall the poor African, the passive Slave, 1.375Shew me the gossamer that spreads, 2.68Since dipping’s the fashion with old and with young, 2.126Since malice, dear Peter, has ventur’d to mention, 2.8
lx Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Since Quacking is grown into fashion and taste, 1.364Slow the limpid currents twining, 1.140So bends beneath the Storm yon balmy Flow’r, 1.67So fair a maid was never seen, 2.131So long, by solitude, by grief oppress’d, 1.308So sportive! so lovely! so witty! so chaste!, 2.90Soft is the balmy breath of May, 1.118Sorc’ress of the Cave profound!, 1.70Spirit of Light! Whose eye unfolds, 2.135Stay! sparkling wand’rer! whither wouldst thou rove, 1.213Steal softly on, O! ruthless Time!, 2.103Stranger beware whoe’er thou art, 1.10Sun now climbs the Eastern hill; Th e, 2.14Supreme, Enchanting Pow’r! from whose blest source, 1.172Sweet Baby Boy! thy soft cheek glows, 2.100Sweet balmy Hour! – dear to the pensive mind, 1.146Sweet Bird of Sorrow, why complain, 1.69Sweet blushing Nymph, who loves to dwell, 1.112Sweet Child of Reason, Maid serene, 1.72Sweet Mab – at thy command I fl ew, 1.75Sweet May! once the parent of Love, we behold, 2.2Sweet Picture of Life’s chequer’d hour!, 1.132Swift o’er the bounding deep the Vessel glides, 1.129Swift , o’er the wild and dreary waste, 2.76Tell me, Love, when I rove o’er some far distant plain, 1.135Tell me, that Nature welcomes rosy Spring, 1.239Tell not me of silv’ry sands, 1.263Tents, marquees, and baggage waggons, 2.111Terrifi c Fiend! thou Monster fell, 1.92Th at Love is blind, old Poets say, –, 2.142The dawn steals on, with tardy pace, 1.298The Day is past! Th e sultry West, 2.27The dusky veil of Night was thrown, 1.262Th e ev’ning sun now sinks serene, 2.133Th e hour is past! the hour of mortal pain!, 2.125Th e Jewel, which a casket holds, 2.58The knell of Death, that on the twilight gale, 1.62The lucid tear from Flavia’s eye, 1.195Th e night was long, ’twas Winter time, 2.46Th e Nightingale, with mournful lay, 2.1Th e Persian, at the dawn of day, 2.90The Rainbow glows with orient dyes, 1.286Th e Rose that hails the morning, 1.288Th e sea-beat Mariner, whose watchful eye, 1.66Th e Seasons, Lover false! are changing slow –, 2.129Th e Shepherd Boy, on yonder mountain’s crest, 1.304Th ere was a cave, o’erhung with thorn, 2.189Th is gay parterre, of motley hue, 2.57
Index of First Lines lxi
Th o’ beauty may charm, and tho’ youth may invite, 2.13Th o’ Beauty may charm the fond heart with a smile, 1.167Th ou art no more my bosom’s Friend, 1.51Th ou blear-ey’d hag, whose vapid soul, 2.112Th ou creep’st in darkness! busy thing, 2.115Th ou dazzling beam of fervid light!, 2.116Thou meekest emblem of the infant year, 1.149Th rice welcome, lib’ral Gleaner! To whose lore, 2.6Th y golden hour returns! Th e Sun, 2.98Time was, and mem’ry sickens to retrace, 2.70Time, with his wing, has stopp’d this mortal’s breath, 2.43’Tis not an April day, 1.309’Tis not thy fl owing hair of orient gold, 1.145’Tis past! and now remorseless Fate, 1.168To hail Lousia, this auspicious day, 1.27To paint the lust’rous streaks of Morn, 1.215To the heart that has feeling, what gift is so rare, 2.217Transcendent Maid! while Fashion’s race, 2.59Transcendent Valour! – godlike Pow’r!, 1.104’Twas in a little western town, 2.53’T was in a solitary glen, 2.123’Twas in the mazes of a wood, 2.191’Twas on a Mountain, near the Western Main, 2.172Twenty glances, twenty tears, 2.28Unfading branch of verdant hue, 1.133Unhappy has the Trav’ller been, 2.139Unheeded emblem of the mind!, 2.9Upon a garden’s perfum’d bed, 1.138Upon a lonely desart beach, 2.44Watch no more the twinkling stars, 2.210Welcome, thou petrifying pow’r!, 2.94What falls so sweet on Summer fl ow’rs, 2.114What is a Kiss? ’Tis but a seal, 2.4What! though thy crystal lamp, dull Night, 2.50What wounds more deep than arrows keen, 2.91When Aurora’s soft blushes o’erspread the blue hill, 1.142When Day’s retiring glow was spread, 1.178When Edwin fi rst my heart possess’d, 2.104When Fate in ruthless rage assail’d my breast, 1.147When fi rst I knew thee, Fancy’s aid, 1.285When fragrant gales and Summer show’rs, 1.63When, fr om Day’s closing eye, the lucid tears, 1.61When from the craggy mountain’s pathless steep, 1.113When memory, led by Resignation, strays, 2.93When Myra bloom’d at gay fi ft een, 1.220When Nobles live in houses gay, 2.130When, o’er the darken’d globe, the wings of night, 1.291When on my bosom Evening’s ruby light, 1.193When Resignation, bending from the sky, 1.173
lxii Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
When Superstition rul’d this land, 2.64When the bleak blast of Winter howls o’er the blue hill, 1.186When, the dread scene of death and horror o’er, 1.240When the loud torrent rushing from the rock, 1.148When the poor Exile, who the live-long night, 1.166‘When will my troubled soul have rest?’, 1.161Where freezing wastes of dazzling Snow, 2.175Where, mingling with Helvetia’s skies, 1.266Where o’er my head, the deaf ’ning Tempest blew, 1.98Where on the bosom of the foamy Rhine, 1.114Where, thro’ the spangled curtains of the Night, 1.66Where tow’ring cliff s, in awful splendour rise, 1.306While bright-ey’d Science crowns this favor’d Isle, 1.40While in the misty-mantled spheres, 1.254While o’er the waste of waters, loud and deep, 1.291While shouts and acclamations rend the skies, 2.221Who dwelt in yonder lonely cot, 2.60Who has not seen the chearful Harvest Home!, 2.121Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds, 2.117Whoe’er thou art, whose soul-enchanting song, 1.146Why dost thou linger still, sweet flow’r?, 2.144Why, from those scenes, the Passions paint, 2.55Why, if perchance thy gaze I meet, 1.142Why Tom, od zooks!, 2.67Why tremble so, broad Aspin Tree?, 2.85Wide o’er the barren plain the bleak wind fl ies, 1.148Within this narrow compass is confi n’d, 1.24Ye airy Phantoms, by whose pow’r, 1.184Ye chrystal streams, ye murm’ring fl oods, 1.19Ye crystal fountains, soft ly fl ow, 1.26Ye Glades that just open to greet the blue Sky, 1.283Ye leafl ess woods, ye hedge-rows bare, 2.43Ye mould’ring walls where Titian colours glow’d, 1.149Ye myrtles and woodbines so green, 1.3Ye nymphs! ah! give ear to my lay, 1.5Ye Sable Legions, here you stand, 2.35Ye Shepherds who sport on the plain, 1.1Ye silent haunts, ye dark embow’ring shades, 1.150Ye verdant greens, ye shady woods, 1.29Ye Wits, who wield the venom’d pen, 2.63Yon smooth expanse, that wooes the parting ray, 1.196You say, my Love, the drift ed snow, 2.13Your Gloves I send, 1.353
– lxiii –
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Backscheider, P. R., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Bass, R. D., Th e Green Dragoon: Th e Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Alvin Redman, 1957).
Bolton, B., Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Brock, C., Th e Feminization of Fame (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
Byrne, P., Perdita: Th e Literary, Th eatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004).
Christie, I. R., Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and other Papers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).
Clarke, B., From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Coleridge, S. T., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71).
Craciun, A., Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
—, ‘Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, New Literary History, 34 (2004), pp. 699–721.
—, British Women Writers and the French Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 60–94.
Cross, A. J., ‘From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Prob-lem of Literary Debt’, Studies in Romanticism, 40:4 (Winter 2001), pp. 571–605.
Curran, S., ‘Romantic Poetry: Th e I Altered’, in A. K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Femi-nism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185–207.
—, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in C. S. Wilson and J. Haefner (eds), Re-Vision-ing Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35.
—, ‘Mary Robinson and Th e New Lyric’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 9–22.
Davenport, H., Th e Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Robinson (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004).
lxiv Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Erdman, D. V. ‘Lost Poem Found: Th e Cooperative Pursuit and Recapture of an Escaped Coleridge “sonnet” of 72 Lines’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 65 (1961), pp. 249–68.
Feather, J., A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988).
Feldman, P. R. (ed.), British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, 1770–1840 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
—, ‘Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era’, New Literary History, 33 (2002), pp. 279–89.
Fulford, T., ‘Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge’s Muses and Feminist Criti-cism’, Romanticism on the Net: An Electronic Journal Devoted to Romantic Studies, 13 (February 1999).
—, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999).
—, ‘Th e Electrifying Mrs. Robinson’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002) pp. 23–35.
Garnai, A., ‘“One Victim from the Last Despair”: Mary Robinson’s Marie Antoinette’, Wom-en’s Writing, 12:3 (2005), pp. 381–98.
Griggs, E. L., ‘Coleridge and Mrs. Robinson’, Modern Language Notes, 45:2 (1930), pp. 90–5.
Gristwood, S., Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic (London: Bantam Press, 2005).
Hargreaves-Mawdsley, W. N., Th e English Della Cruscans and their Time, 1783–1828 (Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1967).
Hawley, J., ‘Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited’, in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds), British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 62–75.
Hoagwood, T. A., and K. Ledbetter, ‘Colour’d Shadows’: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Labbe, J. M., ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry’, Wordsworth Circle, 25 (1994), pp. 68–71.
—, Th e Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000).
—, ‘Romance and Violence in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales and Other Gothic Poetry’, in C. C. Barfoot (ed.), ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’: Th e Historic Moment of Lyrical Ballads (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 137–56.
Ledbetter, K., ‘“A Woman of Undoubted Genius”: Mary Robinson and S. T. Coleridge’, Post-script: Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, 11 (1994), pp. 43–9.
Lee, D., ‘Th e Wild Wreath: Cultivating a Poetic Circle for Mary Robinson’, Studies in Literary Imagination, 30:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 23–34.
Levy, M. J., ‘Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and “Kubla Khan”’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 77 ( Janu-ary 1992), pp. 159–66.
References and Further Reading lxv
Luther, S., ‘A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs. Robinson’, Studies in Romanticism, 33:3 (1994), pp. 391–409.
Mazzeo, T. J., Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
McGann, J., Th e Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1996).
Mellor, A. K., ‘Making an Exhibition of Her Self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts of Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22 (2000), pp. 271–304.
Miskolcze, R. L., ‘Snapshots of Contradiction in Mary Robinson’s Poetical Works’, Papers on Language and Literature, 31:2 (1995) pp. 206–19.
Mole, T., Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Pascoe, J., Romantic Th eatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
—, ‘Unsexed Females: Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith’, in Th e Cambridge Companion to Eng-lish Literature 1740-1830, ed. T. Keymer and J. Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 211–26.
Robinson, D., ‘From “Mingled Measure” to “Ecstatic Measures”: Mary Robinson’s Poetic Reading of “Kubla Khan”’, Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), pp. 4–7.
—, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim’, European Romantic Review, 6 (1995), pp. 98–127.
—, ‘Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and the Prosody of Dreams’, Dreaming: Journal for the Asso-ciation of the Study of Dreams, 7 (1997), pp. 119–40.
Robinson, J. C., Unfettering Poetry: Th e Fancy in British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Robinson, M., Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 4 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1801).
—, Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. J. Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000).
Shelley, P. B., Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822: Being an Edition of the Manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, ed. K. N. Cameron, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1961–86).
Vargo, L., ‘Th e Claims of “Real Life and Manners”: Coleridge and Mary Robinson’, Word-sworth Circle, 26 (1995), pp. 134–7.
—, ‘Tabitha Bramble and Lyrical Tales’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 37–53.
Webb, T., ‘Listing the Busy Sounds: Anna Steward, Mary Robinson and the Poetic Challenge of the City’, in L. M. Crisafulli and C. Pietropoli (eds), Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 79–111.
Whelan, T., ‘Coleridge, the Morning Post, and Female “Illustrissimae”: An Unpublished Autograph’, European Romantic Review, 17:1 ( January 2006), pp. 21–38.
Wiley, M., ‘Romantic Amplifi cation: Th e Way of Plagiarism’, ELH, 75 (2008), pp. 219–40.
lxvi Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
Woof, R. S., ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’, Studies in Bibliog-raphy, 15 (1962), pp. 149–89.
Wordsworth, W., and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings, ed. W. Richey and D. Robinson (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffl in, 2002).
Wordsworth, W., and D. Wordsworth, Th e Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Th e Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. C. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
– lxvii –
ABBREVIATIONS
Th e following abbreviations are used throughout the poems in Volumes 1 and 2:
1791 Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson (London: J. Bell, 1791).1794 Poems, by Mrs. Mary Robinson (London: J. Evans and T. Becket, [1794]).1801 Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthu-
mous Pieces, 4 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1801).1804 Th e Wild Wreath (London: Richard Phillips, 1804).1806 Th e Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson: Including Many Pieces
Never before Published, 3 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1806).LT Lyrical Tales. By Mrs. Mary Robinson (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees;
Bristol: Biggs and Co., 1800).rpt. reprinted in.
– 1 –
A Pastoral Ballad Poems by Mrs. Robinson (London: C. Parker, 1775).
I.Ye Shepherds who sport on the plain Drop a tear at my sorrowful tale,My heart was a stranger to pain, Till pierc’d by pride of the vale.When deck’d with his pipe and his crook, 5 A garland his temples did bind,So sweetly the Shepherd did look, I thought he could not be unkind.
II.But alas! t’other day at the fair, (Sad story for me to relate,) 10He bought ribbons for Phillis’s hair, For Phillis,1 the nymph2 that I hate.Sweet songs to beguile the dull hours, A crook, and a garland so fi ne,A posie of May-blowing fl owers, 15 Adorn’d with green myrtle and thyme.
III.Last week as they sat in the grove, Such sweetness his looks did impart,Th eir converse I’m sure was of love, And I fear, that it fl ow’d from his heart. 20I heard the soft words that he sung, Such tender, such amorous lays,Each accent that fell from his tongue, Was blended with Phillis’s praise.
IV.‘My charmer, said he, is more fair, 25 ‘Th an the jessamine3 twin’d round my bow’r, ‘What’s thyme with her breath to compare, ‘Or lavender aft er a show’r.‘Th e rose when compar’d with her cheek, ‘Drooping downward with envy it dies, 30‘When Sol thro’ a shower doth break – ‘He’s not half so bright as her eyes.’
2 Th e Works of Mary Robinson, Volume 1
V.Alas! if they never had met, I had not endur’d such keen woes,I wish he would Phillis forget, 35 And yield my poor heart some repose.Each day wou’d I sing thro’ the grove, Each moment devote to my swain,4
But if he has settled his love, My bosom is destin’d to pain. 40
VI.Adieu, to contentment and rest, Adieu, to my once lov’d repose,For I fear I can never be bless’d, Till death puts an end to my woes.To the grave will I carry my truth, 45 Take heed ah! ye nymphs by my fate,Be careful to shun the false youth, And with pity my story relate.
PART THE SECOND
I.Come join all ye nymphs of the grove, And sing of the change that I fi nd, 50At length I have conquer’d my love, And taught the dear youth to be kind.My bow’r shall with chaplets be dress’d, My lambkins no longer shall stray,For my bosom no more is oppress’d, 55 Henceforth I’ll be happy, and gay.
II.Oh jealousy, merciless foe, How did’st thou invade my fond breast,Each day, was a compound of woe, Each night, it depriv’d me of rest. 60I envied the nymphs and the swains, With malice and hatred I pin’d,Because they were strangers to pain, And felt not such torture as mine.
III.Young Daphne5 the sprightly and gay, 65 Admir’d for her beauty and grace,With Damon did wantonly play, O! I wish’d to have been in her place.I fear’d that her charms would beguile,
Poems 3
Th at her song would enchant the dear swain, 70I could not allow him to smile, For his smiles were the cause of my pain.
IV.Gay Colin by all is approv’d, And said to be witty and fair,He has oft en declar’d that he lov’d, 75 Yet none can with Damon compare.But why do I muse on past woe, And my happiness idly destroy,What blessing can heaven bestow, Superior to that I enjoy. 80
V.No danger or peril I fear, No trouble my bliss can remove,While bless’d in the smiles of my dear, In the smiles of the youth that I love.Together we sport all the day, 85 By the stream that meanders along,Or else o’er the meadows we stray, And Damon enchant with his song.
VI.Adieu to all anguish and care, To malice, and envy adieu, 90No longer will Delia6 despair, For Damon is faithful and true.Th en join all ye nymphs of the grove, And sing of the change that I fi nd,At length I have conquer’d my love, 95 And taught the dear youth to be kind.
Another Poems by Mrs. Robinson (London: C. Parker, 1775).
I.Ye myrtles and woodbines so green, Your fragrance no longer beguile,Ye bow’rs that with rapture I’ve seen, When Damon did tenderly smile.When his heart beat with every look, 5 His charmes did kindly bestow;When he left both his pipe and his crook, O’er the meadows with Delia to go.
– 377 –
EDITORIAL NOTES
Th e following abbreviation is used throughout the notes:Memoirs Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 4 vols (London: R. Phil-
lips, 1801).
Th e following editions are used throughout the notes:Th e Poetical Works of Pope, ed. H. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Th e Riverside Milton, ed. R. Flannagan (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffl in, 1998).
Th e Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffl in, 1997).
‘A Pastoral Ballad’1. Phillis: a stock name for a shepherdess in pastoral poetry. Th e name ‘Phyllis’ appears in
Virgil’s Eclogues III, V, VII and X. Th e English spelling plays on the Latin ‘phil’ to sug-gest that she is beloved. See Th omas Lodge’s sonnet sequence Phillis (1593) and Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ (1645), l. 86.
2. nymph: pastoral cliché for a young beautiful woman.3. jessamine: jasmine.4. swain: pastoral cliché for a rustic young man or shepherd.5. Daphne: another stock name in pastoral poetry, as is ‘Damon’ below. In Greek mythol-
ogy, Apollo pursues a young woman named Daphne, who is changed into a laurel tree. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.
6. Delia: the speaker’s name but also one of the many names for Diana, goddess of the moon and of chastity. See Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence To Delia (1591–1623).
‘A Pastoral Elegy’1. Pastora’s: a shepherdess.
‘An Ode to Charity’1. Faith, by Hope, and Th ee: 1 Corinthians 13:13: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity,
these three; but the greatest of these is charity’.
‘Th e Linnet’s Petition’1. Th e Linnet’s Petition: Compare with Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Th e Mouse’s Petition,
Found in the Trap where he had been Confi ned all Night’ (1773). Barbauld published her fi rst volume, Poems, under her maiden name, Aikin, to acclaim in 1773. Robinson notes in her Memoirs that she read the poems ‘with rapture’: ‘I thought them the most beautiful poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry as the most to be envied of human creatures’ (vol. 1, p. 102).
2. Aurora’s: Roman goddess of the dawn.
‘Th e Wish’1. fr om the madding croud: Th omas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751),
l. 73.
‘On a Friend’1. Corydon: a stock pastoral name for a shepherd since Th eocritus and Virgil; see Milton,
‘L’Allegro’, l. 83.
‘On the Death of Lord George Lyttelton’1. Lyttelton: George Lyttelton, fi rst Baron Lyttelton (1709–73), statesman, poet and patron
of literature. Th omson praises Lyttelton in his poem Th e Seasons (1726–30), and Fielding dedicated Tom Jones (1749) to him. Robinson writes in her Memoirs that, at the age of seven, she would sing Lyttelton’s poem ‘Th e Heavy Hours’ on her harpsichord (p. 10).
2. Hagley: a village in Worcestershire; Lyttelton is responsible for building Hagley Hall and developing the landscape around it. In ‘Spring’, from Th e Seasons, Th omson calls Hagley Park ‘the British Tempe’, l. 906.
‘Ode to Spring’1. lowing herd: see Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, l. 2.2. feather’d race: a common epithet for birds, made popular by English translations of
Homer; see Alexander Pope’s Th e Odyssey (1725–26), XXII.338; see also Jonathan Swift ’s ‘Cassinus and Peter: a Tragical Elegy’ (1734), l. 111.
‘Letter to a Friend on Leaving Town’1. Mall: a walk in St James’s Park, near Buckingham House, now Buckingham Palace, and St
James’s Palace, which was then the royal residence. See Th omas Gainsborough’s painting Th e Mall in St. James’s Park (c. 1783), which depicts fashionable pedestrians on display, the central fi gure of whom resembles Gainsborough’s portrait of Robinson (1781).
2. Ranelagh: a garden in Chelsea where the public was welcome to attend concerts, mas-querades, and other fashionable entertainments and where the fashionable middle-class could mix with the aristocracy; it was also notorious as a spot for romantic rendezvous. In her Memoirs, Robinson mentions frequent visits to Ranelagh during the early years of her marriage.
378 Notes to pages 8–22
3. Vauxhall: Vauxhall Gardens in Lambeth was another venue for public entertainments such as balls, concerts and art exhibitions but was particularly famous for its suppers and the nightly lighting of over a thousand oil lamps during the summer. Pascoe notes that Robinson is depicted in Th omas Rowlandson’s engraving Vauxhall Gardens (1785) (Romantic Th eatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 72), which also includes the fi gures of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Samuel Johnson.
4. rout: party.
‘Hymn to Virtue’1. fortune, fi ckle dame: see Shakespeare, Th e Passionate Pilgrim, xvii.10.
‘Song’1. trice: instant.
‘Song’1. Song: Th is poem was set to music by Giordani Tommaso (c. 1733–1806) and published
c. 1798.
‘To Aurelia on her Going Abroad’1. mediocrity: moderation, temperance.
‘Th e Vision’1. Philomela’s strains: the song of the nightingale.
‘Written on Richmond Hill’1. beauty’s queen: Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), socialite
and patron of the arts, resided at a cottage, aft erwards named ‘Devonshire Cottage’, near Hampton Court, on the Petersham Meadows. Taking an early interest in Robin-son’s situation and poetry, the Duchess would fi gure in Robinson’s poetry throughout her life.
2. Comus: the mythological son of Bacchus and Circe, known as the god of debauchery and excess; his name is derived from the Greek for ‘glutton’; in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (1645), known commonly as Comus since 1698, Comus appears as an antagonist to temperance and chastity, represented in the masque by ‘the Lady’, a role Robinson herself would play in December 1777.
Notes to pages 22–40 379
‘Captivity’1. Captivity: Th e volume opens with a dedication to the Duchess of Devonshire: ‘DEDI-
CATION. / To Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire. / MADAM, / YOUR Grace’s Partiality to these imperfect Lines has emboldened me to use your kind Permission, of dedicating them to you, the friendly Patroness of the Unhappy. – To paint those Virtues, which dignify your Grace’s exalted Situation, would appear in me an idle Presumption; but I cannot publish these Verses, and not take the occasion of repeating my Th anks to you, for the unmerited Favors your Grace has bestowed upon, / Madam, / Your Grace’s / Most obliged, / And most devoted Servant, / Maria Robinson.’
An apology for Robinson’s youth follows: ‘The Author fl atters herself with the pleas-ing hope, that her Youth will plead an Excuse for those Errors, which the Eye of Criticism will discover in the following little Poems.’
2. ‘blushes eloquently speak’: Robinson quotes a popular song ‘How Imperfect is Expression’, from a French air, sung by Frances Abington as Olivia in Garrick’s 1771 production of Twelft h Night. Th e song was published in pamphlet as ‘Th e New Song in the Pantomime of the Witches’ (London: John Johnston, 1772) and later in a songbook called Th e Vocal Enchantress (London: J. Fielding, 1783).
3. can paint them best: see Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717), ll. 365–6.4. Afr ic’s scorching plain … Etna fi ercely roars: Th ese lines refl ect the early infl uence of Pope’s
‘Sappho to Phaon’ on Robinson’s diction and imagery: ‘Phaon to Ætna’s scorching fi elds retires, / While I consume with more than Ætna’s fi res!’ (ll. 11–12).
5. plaintive murmurs: see Cowper’s translation of the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne (1695–1747), ‘Reciprocal Kindness the Primary Law of Nature’ (1772), l. 8.
‘Celadon and Lydia’1. Celadon: a stock pastoral name that means ‘spring green’. Th e name appears in L’Astrée
(1607–27), a pastoral romance by Honoré d’Urfé (1568–1625), made popular in Eng-land with John Davies’s translation, Astrea, A Romance (1657). In L’Astrée, Celadon disguises himself as a woman in order to share the bedroom of his beloved but refrains from making a sexual advance. Th e OED cites Êmile Littré’s French dictionary’s (1863–77) claim that the pale green colour is named for the character in d’Urfé’s novel. Th e name also appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (V.144, XII.250).
‘Lines, Dedicated to the Memory of a Much-Lamented Young Gentleman’
1. Lines … Young Gentleman: 1791 gives an epigraph from Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (l. 24), with an obvious change in pronoun: ‘Fate snatch’d him early to the pitying sky’. Richard Boyle Walsingham (1762–88) was the son of Captain Robert Boyle Walsingham (1736–80), whose naval exploits were famous. In 1791 she refers to him as ‘Lorenzo’: see ‘Elegy to the Memory of Richard Boyle, Esq.’ (below, pp. 106–8). In the Memoirs, Robinson writes that she could repeat from memory Pope’s ‘Elegy’ (vol. 1, p. 14).
380 Editorial notes to pages 40–51
‘To Him Who Will Understand It’1. To Him Who Will Understand It: Th is poem is one of Robinson’s most reprinted poems
and is biographically signifi cant. Robinson’s romantic relationship with Colonel Banas-tre Tarleton (1754–1833) was her longest and probably most fulfi lling, lasting from 1782 until 1797, though it was not without heartache. From 1776 to 1781 Tarleton served with the British in the American War for Independence, earning promotions and accolades as well as a reputation as ‘Bloody Ban’ for atrocities committed against the Americans. In 1790, an advocate for the slave trade, he became MP for Liverpool and won promotion to colonel. A year aft er parting from Robinson, Tarleton married a much younger woman in December 1798. He was awarded a baronetcy and knighted in 1816. Davenport has discovered that shortly aft er Robinson’s death Tarleton did attempt to help Maria Elizabeth with her mother’s debts (Th e Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Rob-inson (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), p. 220). Th e date of publication coincides with Robinson’s relationship with Tarleton, so biog-raphers take the addressee in the poem to be Tarleton (P. Byrne, Perdita: Th e Literary, Th eatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 248, Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 156). In the Memoirs, Maria Elizabeth Robinson gives a less personal account of the poem’s composition: ‘Conversing one evening with Mr. Richard Burke, respecting the facility with which modern poetry was composed, Mrs. Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those beautiful lines, which were aft erwards given to the public, addressed – “To Him who will understand them.”’ Maria goes on to write, ‘Th is improvisatoré produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when solemnly assured by its author, that this was the fi rst time of its being repeated’ (vol. 2, p. 116, 120–1).
2. Philomel: nightingale. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI.438–67), Tereus of Th race rapes Philomela, sister of his wife, Procne, and then cuts out her tongue to silence her; Phi-lomela reveals the rape to her sister by weaving the story into fabric; aft er then exacting revenge on Tereus, the two sisters are turned into a swallow and a nightingale. Ovid’s version of the story is ambiguous as to which becomes the nightingale, but Latin and English literary traditions identify Philomela with the nightingale because of its song – the name means ‘lover of song’ – and thus the compelling symbolism of the once mute victim having the beautiful voice of the nightingale. Th e poetic symbolism of the nightingale was enhanced with the eighteenth-century’s renewed interest in Petrarch, notably exemplifi ed by Charlotte Smith’s hugely popular Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800), in the fi rst edition of which appeared ‘Sonnet III. To a Nightingale’, inspired by Petrarch’s sonnet 311, beginning ‘Quel rosignuol, che si soave piagne’; Petrarch’s sonnet suggests the bird’s song is a lament for the loss of a child or a lover (and thus possibly alluding to Procne, whose revenge includes the murder of her child with Tereus, or to Philomela); Smith associates the ‘poor melancholy bird’ with her own unhappy situation – thus making the myth of Philomela all the more relevant to women such as Smith and Robinson who were driven to diffi cult circumstances and thus to professional authorship by wastrel husbands. See also Smith’s ‘Sonnet VII. On the Departure of the Nightingale’; her Elegiac Sonnets also includes four other translations of Petrarch’s sonnets.
3. Philosophy: reason.4. drink Oblivion to my Woes: an allusion to the classical river of forgetfulness, Lethe,
in Greek mythology. See ‘To Anna Matilda’, ll. 67–70 (below, p. 58).
Notes to pages 51–3 381
‘Th e Muse’1. Th e Muse: Th is poem appeared in the World with the following editorial headnote: ‘Of
Poetical Trifl es, where is there, even from Della Crusca, any Writing with more shew of Facility, and more beautifully Finished, than much of the following?’ Robinson sub-stantially revised and expanded this poem for her 1791 volume, where it appears fi rst in the sequence.
2. Enthusiast’s: probably a reference to Joseph Warton’s poem Th e Enthusiast; or, Th e Lover of Nature (1744), which celebrates nature as a source of poetic inspiration and which portrays Shakespeare as an ingenious child of nature.
3. ‘Golden Quill’: Although Shakespeare’s sonnet 85 contains the phrase, it more likely derives from the opening line of ‘To Del Crusca. Th e Pen’ by ‘Anna Matilda’, which appeared in the World, Fashionable Advertiser on 10 July 1787: ‘O! seize again thy golden quill’. In a later poem ‘To Della Crusca’ dated 22 December 1788, Cowley, writ-ing as ‘Anna Matilda’, again applies this phrase to Merry as ‘Della Crusca’ (l. 77) (see ‘To Anna Matilda’, below, pp. 57–8). ‘Anna Matilda’ is the pen name of poet and playwright Hannah Cowley (1743–1809).
4. Sacchini: Antonio Sacchini (1730–86), Italian opera composer who lived in London from 1773 to 1781, during which time several of his operas premiered to great acclaim.
‘To Leonardo’1. To Leonardo: ‘Leonardo’ is one of the pen names of Robert Merry (1755–98), who also
wrote under the name ‘Della Crusca’ (see ‘Ode to Della Crusca’ below, pp. 102–4). ‘Leonardo’ began this poetic correspondence with his poem ‘To Laura’, appearing in the World on 21 November 1788 and expressing sympathy for the heartache ‘Laura’ had described in ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’. Th e editors of the World, unaware that ‘Della Crusca’ and ‘Leonardo’ were one and the same, prefi xed to ‘To Laura’ the follow-ing headnote: ‘Sauce for a Nation, when a Poet is to make it, will be made as follows: Imagery and Pathos are the Ingredients of old: Th e Proportions, till better off er, to be according to Della Crusca. / Della Crusca may say, as Falstaffe said before him – his Performances not only shew his own Powers, but produce the Powers of other Writers. / A School, as it were, from him, has formed – Anna Matilda fi rst, a Lady to be praised whenever mentioned; and aft er her Laura, and now Leonardo, are of it – Of the Della Crusca School.’ Merry and other British writers had lived in Florence in the early 1780s, producing two collections of poetry, Th e Arno Miscellany (1784) and Th e Florence Miscellany (1785), that celebrated Italian culture and propagated a particularly emotional and ornamental style of verse that became known as Della Cruscanism, named aft er the Accademia della Crusca in Florence.
2. Friendship’s Name: ‘To Laura’ concludes with the off er: ‘And for a Lover lost, receive a Friend’ (l. 66).
3. ‘Triumph!’ – I can ‘Bear’: See ‘To Laura’, l. 62, where ‘Leonardo’ exhorts her to ‘learn to triumph, or to bear!’
4. ‘Th rob Divine’: Merry’s own phrase from his poem ‘To Anna Matilda’, l. 37, which appeared in the World on 21 August 1787 signed by ‘Della Crusca’. Robinson’s use of the phrase slyly may indicate her awareness that ‘Leonardo’ and ‘Della Crusca’ are the
382 Notes to pages 53–6
same person and, with the emphasis on ‘again’ in the next line, ironically suggests that ‘Leonardo’ is something of a feckless lothario.
5. native Skies: In ‘To Laura’, ‘Leonardo’ had advised ‘Laura’ not to go abroad – ‘Here, rather here, thy ills confound’ (l. 53). ‘Leonardo’ responded with a sonnet ‘To Laura’; see ‘To Leonardo’ (‘Chill blows the blast, upon the mountain’s brow’) below, pp. 56–7.
‘To Leonardo’1. To Leonardo: Merry’s sonnet ‘To Laura’, a reply to her poem ‘To Leonardo’ (above, pp.
55–6), appeared in the World on 10 January 1789 with the following editorial head-note: ‘We hear of Sonnets every day; but seldom is it we have seen one metrically correct, aft er the manner of Petrarch. Th e following is so. To this praise may be added, the Name [‘Leonardo’] which appears above it.’ Himself formally astute, Merry undoubt-edly thought it appropriate to compose a proper sonnet addressed to ‘Laura’, the name of Petrarch’s idealized beloved. ‘To Laura’, although not strictly speaking an Italian son-net, which rhymes ABBAABBA in the octave, nonetheless matches the diffi culty of the rhyme scheme with its ABABABAB octave. Th e headnote no doubt refers to the abun-dance of sonnets since the publication of William Lisle Bowles’s and Charlotte Smith’s that do not follow the strict rules of the Italian form. Curiously, aft er the complaint that few sonnets are metrically correct, the World prints Robinson’s response with the heading ‘SONNET’, although her poem consists of 18 lines, whereas the sonnet is traditionally only 14. In her 1791 Poems Robinson’s ‘To Leonardo’ appears with the fi nal three lines of Mer-ry’s sonnet ‘To Laura’ as an epigraph: ‘Yes, Laura, yes, pure as the virgin snows, / Th at on the bosom of the whirlwind move, / For thee, my faithful, endless Passion glows.’A footnote in 1791, moreover, identifi es ‘Leonardo’ as ‘Della Crusca’. Th e poetic corre-spondence between ‘Leonardo’ and ‘Laura’ would ignite the jealousy of ‘Anna Matilda’: see ‘To Anna Matilda’, below, pp. 57–8.
2. Chill blows the blast: the opening phrase of Merry’s ‘Elegy Written on the Plain of Fon-tenoy’, fi rst published in the World as by ‘Della Crusca’ (26 July 1787).
3. ‘Th e feast of Reason, and the fl ow of Soul’: from Pope’s Imitations of Horace, II.i.128.
‘To Anna Matilda’1. To Anna Matilda: Th e poetical correspondence between ‘Leonardo’ and ‘Laura’ ignited
the jealousy of ‘Anna Matilda’, the pen name of poet and playwright Hannah Cowley (1743–1809). Her poem ‘To Della Crusca’, appearing in the World for 26 February 1789, exposes ‘Leonardo’ as ‘Della Crusca’: ‘Yes, write to Laura! speed thy Sighs, / Tell her, her Della Crusca dies; / In sweetest measures sing thy woes, / And speak thy hot Love’s ardent throes; – / And when it next shall please your Heart / Towards some other Fair to start, / Th e gentle Maiden’s vers’d in cures, / For every ill, fond Love endures. / … / False Lover! Truest Poet! now farewell!’ (ll. 33–40, 45). Cowley’s poem appears in the World with the date 22 December 1788, indicating that it is a response to Merry’s fi rst poem ‘To Laura’ (see note 1 to ‘To Leonardo’, above, p. 382). Robinson’s ‘To Anna Matilda’ is dated 26 February 1789 to stress the imme-diacy of her response and eagerness to allay the other woman’s fears. Robinson’s response comically impugns ‘Anna Matilda’ as a potential murderess, urging her not to succumb to revenge and jealousy, personifi ed as a hideous Medusa. For more on the drama played
Notes to pages 56–7 383
out in this poetical love triangle, see J. M. Labbe, ‘Th e Anthologised Romance of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda’, Romanticism on the Net, 10 (2000).
2. rosy-pillow’d bed: referring to ‘To Della Crusca’, ll. 11–12: ‘Th e freshest Rose-leaves for my head / Shall form a blushing scented Bed’. Th e British Album version quotes ‘blushing scented Bed’ directly – see textual note.
3. Myrtle: a symbol of love. In ‘To Della Crusca’, Cowley calls the myrtle ‘Love’s devoted Tree’ (l. 21); and, renouncing love, she writes that the myrtle ‘Shall ne’er unfold its od’rous Boughs’ (l. 18).
4. em’rald eye: Othello, III.iii.165–6: ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-ey’d monster’.
5. Metastassio’s: or Metastasio, pseudonym of Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi (1698–1782), Italian librettist and poet famous for infl uencing the style of Opera seria; an edition of his works appeared in 1755. Mozart adapted Metastasio’s libretto for his opera La clemenza di Tito (1791). Smith’s third edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1786) added a translation of ‘the thirteenth cantata of Metastasio’. See ‘Sonnet, in the Manner of Metastasio’ (below, pp. 218–19).
6. ‘the Bacchanalian strain’: Robinson quotes Cowley’s ‘To Della Crusca’ to correct comi-cally Cowley’s implication that ‘Laura’ is an alcoholic, or at least a debauched libertine. Alluding to the fi nal line of ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, ‘Anna Matilda’ essentially accuses ‘Laura’ of taking solace in alcohol: ‘She drinks Oblivion to its pains – / And vows to stain her pallid cheek / With juices of Red Grapes so sleek, / And sings adieus in Bac-chanalian strains’ (ll. 41–4). But the joke is on ‘Anna Matilda’, as ‘Laura’ archly points out that her rival has missed the classical allusion to the river of forgetfulness, Lethe, in Greek mythology.
7. ‘brew’d enchantment’s’: quote from Milton’s Comus, l. 696. Robinson had performed the role of ‘the Lady’, the character who speaks the lines quoted, in a Drury Lane production of Comus in December 1776.
[‘Life’]1. [Life]: Th e poem appears in the World with ‘LAURA’ as a heading in place of a title. For
her 1791 volume, Robinson revised the poem, titled it ‘Life’, and gave it an epigraph from Edward Young’s (1683–1765) Th e Revenge, A Tragedy (1721): ‘What is this world? – thy school, O misery! / Our only lesson is to learn to suff er’ (II.i).
‘Lines on Beauty’1. Lines on Beauty: When Bell left the World to found the Oracle Robinson went with him.
‘Lines on Beauty’ is her fi rst poem to appear in the new paper; only a couple of her poems would appear in the World aft er this one. Bell would go on to publish several of Robinson’s books, including Ainsi va le Monde (1790), Poems (1791), Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1792), and her fi rst novel, Vancenza; or Th e Dangers of Credulity (1792). With the change in newspapers, Robinson adopted a new moniker – ‘Laura Maria’. When ‘Lines on Beauty’ appeared in the Oracle, subtitled ‘Bell’s New World’, it appeared with the following headnote as a comment on its new poetical corre-spondents and on those who remained with the World: ‘ Whilst we can boast the female Correspondence of an Adelaide, an Edwin, Laura Maria, Sappho, and others, we
384 Notes to pages 57–9
shall not be Jealous of the admired talents of Della Crusca, or Anna Matilda: in proof of which we give the following very elegant Specimen’.
Robinson’s manuscript apparently titled the poem ‘Sonnet on Beauty’, causing the editors to emend the title to ‘Lines on Beauty’, as they explain in footnote: ‘We have pre-sumed to substitute the word Lines for Sonnet in the original; a Sonnet being a short Poem consisting of fourteen lines only, with Rhymes adjusted by a particular Rule’. Revised extensively as ‘Ode to Beauty’ (below, pp. 99–100).
‘To Sir Joshua Reynolds’1. To Sir Joshua Reynolds: Th is poem was incorporated into Ainsi va le Monde (ll. 73–94);
the section from Ainsi va le Monde was reprinted in the Oracle on 3 March 1792 on the day of Reynolds’s interment. Reynolds (1723–92) was the leading English painter of the eighteenth century; he was the fi rst President of the Royal Academy. Reynolds painted Robinson twice in 1782 and 1783. See also Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (below, pp. 173–8).
‘To the Memory of Werter’1. To the Memory of Werter: 1791 adds to the title ‘Written in Germany, in the Year 1786’.
Robinson’s poem participates in the popular sensation that accompanied the Europe-wide success of Th e Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, 1787), a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). An English translation by Daniel Malthus, from a French translation of the German, appeared fi rst in 1779 and was reprinted several times over the next decade. In the novel, a brilliant and sensitive young man, Werther or, in English, ‘Werter’, falls in love with a young peasant woman named Lotte, or, in English, ‘Char-lotte’, who marries an older man of more ordinary temperament; in despair Werther shoots himself with pistols unwittingly provided to him by Lotte.
Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) includes sonnets written in the persona of Werther. In poor health and at the urging of her doctor, Robinson did visit Aix-la-Chapelle, a fash-ionable spa town in Germany, in 1786. Merry, writing as ‘Della Crusca’, published ‘Elegy, written aft er having read Th e Sorrows of Werter’ in the World, Fashionable Advertiser (26 July 1787). Robinson may have added the subtitle to assert that her poem was written free of the infl uence of Merry’s.
2. With female … Shakspeare: Cymbeline, IV.ii.217–16.3. virtues: see Merry’s ‘Elegy’, ll. 27–8: ‘While Virtue goads him with unrelenting thorn,
/ Th e frantic Lover bears it not – but dies’. A footnote to Merry’s poem explains that ‘Virtue’ prevented Werter from ‘any immoral gratifi cation’.
4. Vide Th e Sorrows of Werter: see Malthus’s version, Letter LXXVII, Th e Sorrows of Werter, A German Story, 2 vols (London: G. Wilson, 1787), vol. 2, pp. 74–5.
5. ‘Churlish Priest’: Hamlet, V.i.240.
‘Elegy on the Death of Lady Middleton’1. Elegy on the Death of Lady Middleton: Th e editors of the Oracle printed an obituary to
follow Robinson’s poem: ‘Th e virtues of this accomplished Ornament to Human Nature, were such as invited a vast number of her tenants to attend her Ladyship’s Funeral. Th e weather was however unfavourable; but the zeal of the melancholy train was such, as to
Notes to pages 59–62 385
evince how highly her Ladyship was held in the estimation of the numerous objects who had felt and been supported by the infl uence of her universal charities … Th is exemplary character of true Nobility died on the 29th of June last, in the 43d year of her age.’
Margaret, Lady Middleton, née Gambier (c. 1746–89), and her husband, Charles, Lord Middleton (1726–1813), were actively involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade.
2. spotless mind: a recurring phrase in Robinson’s poetry, from Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 209; see also ‘Ode to Beauty’, ll. 24, 40 (below, p. 100); ‘To Simplicity’, l. 33 (below, p. 113).
‘Sonnet’1. Sonnet: Original headnote: ‘We are happy to introduce to Public View any Specimen of
Classic Elegance, however short. – A Fragment of Sappho is dearer to the Reader of real Taste, than a whole Epic Poem that reaches not beyond Mediocrity. Th e following little Sonnet relishes of the true Attic Taste; it breathes the tender Strain of Sappho, with the soft pathetic Melancholy of Collins.’
Th is headnote is signifi cant because it is one of the fi rst associations between Robin-son’s poetry and that of Sappho; she would become known as ‘the English Sappho’, fi rst called so in the Monthly Review 6 (December 1791), p. 448; see Introduction, above, p. xliv. For more on Collins, see also note 1 to ‘Ode to Rapture’, below, p. 410.
‘Lines Inscribed to the Memory of David Garrick, Esq.’1. David Garrick, Esq.: David Garrick (1717–79) was the leading actor, director and pro-
ducer of his day; in 1747 Garrick purchased Th eatre Royal, Drury Lane, and managed it until his retirement in 1776. He is particularly noteworthy for his productions of Shake-speare. In 1773, Robinson became Garrick’s protégé and studied the role of Cordelia to his Lear. At the urging of her mother, Robinson, however, gave up on her theatrical ambi-tions when she accepted the marriage proposal of Th omas Robinson. Her subsequent marital and fi nancial diffi culties encouraged her to renew her interest in the stage; aft er meeting with playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), who took over from Garrick, she auditioned for and won the role of Juliet, with Garrick again as her tutor, making her fi rst appearance on the stage at Drury Lane on 10 December 1776. She per-formed in 29 productions until May 1780 (Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, pp. 227–9). Th is is the fi rst poem since 1777 to be signed ‘by Mrs. Robinson’.
2. Garrick’s remains … Westminster Abbey: Garrick was the fi rst actor to be buried in Poet’s Corner. Th e only other actor buried there is Laurence Olivier (1907–89).
‘Sonnet, to the Memory of Miss Maria Linley’1. Maria Linley: Mary Linley Tickell (c. 1758–87), noted soprano and sister-in-law to
Richard Brinsley Sheridan; she and her sister Elizabeth sat for Gainsborough (Th e Linley Sisters, 1772). In 1780, she married playwright Richard Tickell (1751–93).
386 Notes to pages 62–7
‘Ode to Refl ection’1. Ode to Refl ection: Original headnote: ‘Th e following elegant Verse, not to be unac-
companied by the best praise, is thus prefaced – where, mingling sweetly with Poetry, Philosophy, so true to feeling, raises and adorns, as perfect as Poetical, the judgment and the imagination participate, delighted in their eulogy. If the youthful Bard lingers with peculiar fondness upon particular parts, we think they will be the following – “Th e sad Vacuum of the sated Mind.” – “Ambition mocking the tender claims of Life, and cancel-ling its sweetest bonds.” – “Pity’s tear bathing the wounded Heart,” &c. &c. To instance nearly the whole, we could do, if we had room.’
2. ‘Vaulting Ambition’: Macbeth, I.vii.27.3. ‘Fiend Despair’: Charlotte Smith, ‘To My Children’, l. 9, in Emmeline, Th e Orphan of the
Castle, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1788), vol. 1.
‘To the Nightingale’1. To the Nightingale: Original headnote: ‘Th e last Verse of this charming Bard was fi tly
praised for its Truth and for its Passion – for Th ought and Pathos, that elevated and purifi ed. [see ‘Ode to Refl ection’, above] / Th e Poet whose pen is plucked fr om Pity’s Wing, with melancholy, as well as melody, aiming aft er the passes to the heart, owes much to congeniality of subject, where the fl ow of fancy and the querulousness of regret can combine to eff ects that are striking. / Milton and Thomson have written, and well too, upon this subject; so that the eulogium is suffi cient, to say that the present is their superior. Something, perhaps, from amplifi cation – more, perhaps, from closer thought, and yet further, it may be from surpassing tenderness of mind.’
Milton’s fi rst sonnet (‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray’) fi rst appeared in 1645; but, unlike Petrarch and, later, Smith, Milton fi nds its song hopeful. See Robin-son’s preface to Sappho and Phaon (below, p. 321). An excerpt later appeared in Maria Elizabeth’s novel Th e Shrine of Bertha.
2. Cynthia’s: epithet for the Greek goddess of the moon, Artemis, so called because of her supposed birth upon Mount Cynthus, on the Greek isle of Delos.
‘Ode to Melancholy’1. Ode to Melancholy: Th is poem appeared with the following editorial headnote: ‘Th us
rapid is the stream of this Writer’s melody – Laura Maria is of Milton’s school – we have much of the exquisite imagery of his early Song recalled to our minds by the Ode that follows. It muses over the Spectres that glide across the dim vestibule of day, or, lingering by the Haunted Tower, listening to the nightly noise of the boding Raven, mournfully moralizing upon the misery of Man. / Th e structure too of the Verse is admi-rable – / “Winding in liquid lapse its pleasurable way,” / with suavity and strength, like the Belvidere Apollo.’
Th e Apollo Belvidere, or Pythian Apollo, is an ancient marble sculpture of Apollo aft er defeating the Python that was discovered in the late fi ft eenth century and then was installed at the Cortile del Belvedere at Rome in 1511. Th e comparison is to Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ (1645), in which the speaker shuns ‘loathed Melancholy’ and pledges to live with the goddess Euphrosyne, or Mirth, one of the three Greek Graces.
Notes to pages 67–70 387
2. light-heel’d Mirth: Th e Graces were lovers of dance and song; see Milton’s famous couplet: ‘Com, and trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe’, ‘L’Allegro’, ll. 33–4.
‘To Meditation’1. To Meditation: On 22 December 1789, the editors of the Oracle previewed this poem in
the ‘To Correspondents’ column: ‘Laura Maria’s beautiful Ode to Meditation – is received. Th e success of this Writer’s taste, in seizing upon the images of fl eeting thought, so congenial with the subjects of her song, is rare and enviable indeed.’
When it appeared in print four days later, the editors prefi xed the following head-note: ‘It is well, where the Poet’s Name is a Passport to Praise. Here, whatever may be the varieties of Character and Feeling, every Reader pauses; and, as he sympathizes with the Sorrows of her Muse, / Invokes fair Peace upon her gentle breast. / If there be one being so ungentle as to scoff at this, we wish him the perceptions he is deprived of. To those happily “warm’d with Poetic Fire,” the appeal for judgment lies – where similar Genius may be adorn’d with Diffi dence and Modesty also, that are the same.’
A shortened version of this poem appeared in a collection Odes, by G. Dyer, M. Rob-inson, A. L. Barbauld, Rack, J. Ogilve, R. F. Cheetham, &c. (Manchester: G. Nicholson, T. Knott; London: Champante & Whitrow, 1797), with ll. 5–26, 89–98 omitted.
2. Promethean art: Prometheus’s gift of fi re to humankind is a metaphor for learning and the advancement of civilization.
‘To the Queen of the Fairies’1. ‘fr inged lid’: l. 67 from Ambrose Philips’s ‘Ode to the Honourable Miss Cartaret’, pub-
lished in Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, 58 vols (London: J. Rivington, 1779–80), vol. 44, p. 353.
2. ‘Il Ferito’: Italian for ‘the wounded’. Merry, writing as ‘Il Ferito’, published a poem, ‘Subjection’, in the Oracle for 29 May 1790 promising to ‘quit for e’er’ England’s ‘fatal shore’, prompting numerous responses, including one that Robinson cites as an epigraph to this poem in 1791 and that appeared the day before this one. Th e original headnote reads: ‘Oberon is as light as the exhalations that the Poet mentions, “melting into Air, into thin Air.” – Th ere is a Fairy Expedition in the swift production of this sweet Verse, as aptly respondent as Titania could wish, where all Jealousy is done away in mutual admiration.’ Another poem ‘To Il Ferito’, signed by ‘Philo-poesis,’ appeared the same day in the same column and further identifi es ‘Il Ferito’ as Della Crusca. Merry, incidentally, would have known that Il ferito is the title of a 1752 painting by Gaspare Traversi (c. 1722–70).
Ainsi va le Monde1. Ainsi va le Monde: so goes the world (French): An excerpt of this poem (ll. 159–86)
appears in 1801, vol. 2, p. 179–80. Robinson’s Memoirs provide the following account of its composition: ‘In 1791, Mrs. Robinson produced her quarto poem, entitled “Ainsi va le Monde.” Th is work, containing three hundred and fi ft y lines, was written in twelve hours, as a reply to Mr. Merry’s “Laurel of Liberty,” which was sent to Mrs. Robinson on a Saturday; on the Tuesday following the answer was composed and given to the public’ (vol. 2, p. 127).
388 Notes to pages 70–7
Th e poem was reprinted in 1806 with the heading ‘Inscribed to a Friend. Written at the beginning of the French Revolution’. Th e references to Merry as well as the fi nal verse paragraph are omitted there.
2. MERRY … DELLA CRUSCA POEMS: Merry published his poem Th e Laurel of Liberty (London: John Bell, 1790) under his own name to commemorate the fi rst anni-versary of the French Revolution and dedicated it to ‘the National Assembly of France the true and zealous representatives of a Free People’. Th e poem is boldly anti-monarchi-cal and warns that a conservative reaction against the Revolution would lead England to suppression of freedom and ultimately to its destruction.
3. Elegy … by Mr. Merry: Merry’s anti-war poem ‘Elegy Written on the Plain of Fontenoy’ appeared in the World on 16 November 1787 and in the European Magazine for Novem-ber 1787. Th e Battle of Fontenoy (1745) in Belgium was part of the War of Austrian Succession, in which the French defeated the allied English, Dutch and Hanoverian armies.
4. ‘pours the varying verse’: Pope, Imitations of Horace (1733–8), II.i.268, where Pope praises Dryden for modernizing English poetic metre.
5. Chatterton: Th omas Chatterton (1752–70), a brilliant young English poet whose poverty and subsequent suicide made him a romantic fi gure of ignored genius. See Rob-inson’s ‘Monody to the Memory of Chatterton’, below, pp. 108–11.
6. Otway: Th omas Otway (1652–85), English playwright who, like Chatterton, died in poverty at a young age.
7. Garrick: see note 1 to ‘Lines Inscribed to the Memory of David Garrick, Esq.’, above, p. 386.
8. Kneller’s: Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), principal painter to the Crown, from Charles II to George I, also noted for his paintings of Hampton Court Beauties, inspired by Lely’s Windsor Beauties (see note below) but which were deliberately less erotic in nature, and portraits of Isaac Newton.
9. Lely’s: Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680), Dutch-English painter who was portraitist of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and, upon the Restoration, Charles II. Lely was Kneller’s predecessor as principal painter to the Crown and painted his series Windsor Beauties in the 1660s. In contrast to Kneller’s ‘prim’ and ‘simpering’ beauties, Lely’s were noted for their voluptuous languor.
10. languid eye: Pope, Imitations of Horace 2.i.149–50: ‘Lely on animated Canvas stole / Th e sleepy Eye, that spoke the melting soul’.
11. Reynolds: see Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, below, pp. 173–8. Rob-inson adapted this verse paragraph (ll. 73–94) from her earlier poem ‘To Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (see above, p. 60). On the day of Reynolds’s burial, 3 March 1792, the Oracle reprinted this verse paragraph, along with the preceding lines (ll. 61–72), with the fol-lowing headnote: ‘On the melancholy occasion, we have to notice this as the day of his interment. Some honour it is in our power to pay his Memory, by re-printing a beautiful Poem, tributary to his Genius from the Muse of Laura Maria.’
Th e European Magazine for March 1792 printed ll. 73–94 under the heading ‘Mrs. Robinson’s Muse has paid the following Tribute to the Fame of Sir Joshua’, with its obitu-ary for Reynolds, which included a eulogy attributed to Edmund Burke (p. 213).
12. ‘warm’d with a spark’: Robinson may be alluding to Merry’s ‘To Anna Matilda’ from the World (5 December 1787), where ‘Della Crusca’ describes how ‘Anna Matilda’’s poetry is a catalyst for poetic inspiration out of his emotional desolation: ‘Yet from Matilda’s pure celestial fi re / One ruby spark shall to his gloom be given, / Lur’d by its light, his
Notes to pages 77–80 389
fancy may aspire, / And catch a ray of bliss – a glimpse of Heaven’ (ll. 17–20), British Album, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: John Bell, 1792), vol. 1, p. 23.
13. Maintenon: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame Scarron, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), was the secret second wife of French King Louis XVI. Historians note her considerable political infl uence and reputation for piety; for her, the king founded the Royale Maison de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr, a school for poor girls of noble families fallen upon hard times.
14. ‘smooth’d … of day’: Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 322.15. Bastile: Th e Bastille was a fortress-prison built in the fourteenth century that housed reli-
gious and political dissidents as well as ordinary criminals. Robinson alludes to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the start of the French Revolution. It had become a sym-bol of monarchical tyranny but on Bastille Day only housed seven prisoners; the crowd that gathered was primarily aft er the gunpowder and weapons stored there.
16. rights of man: Th e Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen (or ‘Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen’) was a seminal document of the French Revolution, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly on 27 August 1789, that asserted natural rights and popular sovereignty as opposed to the divine right of kings. Th omas Paine’s Rights of Man would appear in 1791 as a defence of the principles of the French Revolution.
17. Ether: heavenly air.18. graces: In Greek mythology the three graces were lovers of song and dance and were
usually depicted dancing. See ‘Ode to Melancholy’, above, pp. 70–2 (see also note 2, p. 388).
19. strings: Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, is oft en depicted playing a lyre.20. Cecilia: Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians, commemorated notably by
Dryden’s ‘Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), where her song is compared to Orpheus and his lyre. By having Cecilia (not here sainted) sing to Apollo’s lyre, Robinson similarly combines the sacred with the pagan.
‘Ode to Envy’1. Parian stone: Th e Greek island Paros, in the southern Aegean, has been famous for its
white marble since at least the sixth century bc; it was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1537 to 1832.
‘Ode to Health’1. Helvetia’s shade: Roman name for a region of the Alps in western Switzerland.2. fi llet: a narrow headband.3. Hygeian Maid: Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health.
‘Ode to Vanity’1. ‘Trump of Fame’: phrase from Th omas Morell’s libretto to Georg Friedrich Händel’s Th e
Choice of Hercules (1751).2. adamantine spells: see Paradise Lost, I.i.48.3. chains of scorpions: see Luke 10:19.
390 Notes to pages 80–91
‘Ode to Despair’1. fi rst Murd’rer’s: Cain; see Genesis 4:8–16.2. Th e Bastile: see note 15 to Ainsi va le Monde, above, p. 390.
‘Second Ode to the Nightingale’1. plumy race: see Alexander Pope, Th e Iliad (1720), XXIV.383; also James Th omson, Th e
Seasons, ‘Winter’, l. 137.2. sparry: crystalline.
‘Ode to Beauty’1. Ode to Beauty: For an earlier version of this poem, see ‘Lines on Beauty’ (above, pp. 59–60).2. spotless mind: from Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 209; see also l. 40 below; ‘Elegy on the
Death of Lady Middleton’, l. 22 (above, p. 62); ‘To Simplicity’, l. 33 (below, p. 113).
‘Ode to the Moon’1. ‘garish Sun’: Romeo and Juliet, III.ii.25.
‘Ode to Della Crusca’1. Ode to Della Crusca: Robinson’s metre matches Merry’s ‘Ode to Tranquility’, published
as by ‘Della Crusca’, in the World, Fashionable Advertiser on 25 August 1787. See note 1 to ‘To Leonardo’, above, p. 383.
2. throb divine: from Merry’s poem ‘To Anna Matilda’, l. 37.
‘Ode to Valour’1. inscribed to … TARLETON: Th e 1806 Poetical Works omits the inscription and ll.
51–60; see note 1 to ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, above, p. 381. 2. Ammon: Alexander the Great, who according to ancient legend called himself son of
Ammon, the Egyptian god that Greeks held to be the equivalent of Zeus.3. Calpe’s rock: the rock of Gibraltar on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula; it
became a British territory at the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713; from 1779 to 1783, during the American War of Independence, Spain and France unsuccess-fully attempted to capture Gibraltar from the British.
4. Iberia’s: Spain’s.5. Wolfe: General James Wolfe (1727–59) famously died while defeating the French at
the Battle of Quebec (1759); Benjamin West’s 1770 painting Th e Death of General Wolfe depicts Wolfe in a Christ-like pose.
‘Elegy to the Memory of Richard Boyle, Esq.’1. Son of Mrs. Walsingham: see note 1 to ‘Lines, Dedicated to the Memory of a Much-
Lamented Young Gentleman’, above, p. 380.2. Orpheus … to move: Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI.1–5.
Notes to pages 93–107 391
3. ‘Th e low ingratitude of man’: from Della Crusca [Robert Merry], ‘To Anna Matilda’, World, Fashionable Advertiser (31 July 1787), l. 24.
4. ‘To me ’tis happiness to die’: Othello, V.ii.290.
‘Monody to the Memory of Chatterton’1. Chatterton: see note 5 to Ainsi va le Monde, above, p. 389. To promote the new volume
of Robinson’s poems, the Oracle printed this poem in its entirety on 11 May 1791 – the week of the book’s publication – with the following headnote: ‘And where can be found more graceful dignity of Song – more tenderness of Complaint – more melody of Verse, than are visible in the following Poem? – Th e poignant regrets of a Poet for the loss of Him, who, in Youth, amid penury and distraction, lone and unfriended, produced such strains as only Genius could create, and only Dullness not catch at with rapture. / Creative Genius and the glow of Verse, / Th e Pomp and Prodigality of Heav’n [second line from Th omas Gray’s ‘Stanzas to Mr. Bentley’, l. 20]’.
On 16 May, the Oracle remarked that the ‘Monody’, which they had printed ‘by per-mission’, is ‘very tender and fi nished’. Curiously, the Oracle, on 21 May 1791, reprinted Hannah Cowley’s monody on Chatterton, fi rst published in the Morning Post on 24 October 1778, under the authorship of Cowley’s pen-name Adelaide. An excerpt later appeared in Walsingham (1797).
2. Chill penury … GRAY: adapted from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, ll. 51–2.
3. ‘mortal coil’: Hamlet, III.i.66.
‘Cupid Sleeping’1. Cupid Sleeping: Th is poem and the following, ‘To Simplicity’, were reprinted in Town
and Country Magazine (October 1791), pp. 474–5.2. ‘dimple sleek’: Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, l. 30.
‘To Simplicity’1. Lady Duncannon: Harriet Ponsonby, née Spencer, Lady Duncannon (1761–1821),
sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Like her sister, Lady Duncannon was politi-cally liberal and the subject of scandal. 1806 omits the inscription.
2. spotless Mind: Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 209; see ‘Elegy on the Death of Lady Mid-dleton’, l. 22, above, p. 62; ‘Ode to Beauty’, ll. 24, 40, above, p. 100.
‘Absence’1. ‘sad similitude’: Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 360.
‘Lines Inscribed to P. de Loutherbourg’1. P. de Loutherbourg, Esq. R.A.: Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), painter and
member of the Royal Academy, exhibited his painting View in Switzerland at the Royal Academy in 1791, having returned from Europe with an interest in mysticism. In 1789 some controversy surrounded Loutherbourg and his wife for having set up a public prac-
392 Notes to pages 107–14
tice as faith healers. Robinson knew Loutherbourg from his work as chief stage designer at Drury Lane Th eatre from 1773 to 1789.
2. sparry: crystalline.3. Welkin’s: archaism for the sky.4. th’ immortal Poet: probably Milton, based on the imagery in the above lines, although
Robinson below cites Shakespeare, from Claudio’s contemplation of death in Measure for Measure, with imagery perhaps drawn from Dante – perhaps a curious confl ation of all three poets.
5. Measure for Measure: ‘And blown with restless violence round about / Th e pendant world’, III.i.124–5. Although Robinson cites Shakespeare, the phrase also appears in Milton, Paradise Lost, II.1052.
‘Lines on Hearing it Declared that no Women were so Handsome’1. Mrs. Sheridan’s ... St. Cecilia: Elizabeth Ann Sheridan, née Linley, sat for Reynolds’s St.
Cecilia (1775).
‘To Rinaldo’1. Rinaldo: Robert Merry; see note 1 to ‘To Leonardo’, above, p. 382.
‘To the Muse of Poetry’1. But ah … 1791: ‘Armida’ may be Cowley again, in an attempt to revive the Della Crusca-
Anna Matilda-Laura triangle from the World. Rinaldo and Armida are characters from Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581). Rinaldo is a Christian knight, Armida a seductive witch.
2. Welkin: see note 3 to ‘Lines Inscribed to P. de Loutherbourg’, above.3. ‘weedy waste’: from Anna Matilda’s ‘To Della Crusca, who said, “When I am Dead, Write
my Elegy”’, World (19 June 1789); in Th e British Album, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Bell, 1790), vol. 2, p. 171. Th is quote may be Robinson’s attempt to reveal Armida as Cow-ley.
‘Th e Adieu to Love’1. Th e Adieu to Love: Th e title alludes to Merry’s ‘Th e Adieu and Recall to Love’ (1787), the
poem that started the Della Crusca-Anna Matilda series of poems in the World. Pascoe suggests that Robinson or her daughter did not reprint the poem because either or both may have ‘wanted distance from the persona of this poem, with her allusions to a life in the thrall of passion’ (Romantic Th eatricality, p. 94).
‘To Cesario’1. CESARIO: A footnote in 1806 identifi es Cesario as ‘Miss M. Vaughan, daughter of
Th omas Vaughan, Esq. of Molesy Hurst, Surry’. Th omas Vaughan (fl . 1772–1820), poet and dramatist associated with the Della Cruscans.
Notes to pages 114–27 393
‘Echo to Him Who Complains’1. Della Crusca: In his 1793 volume, William Kendall asserts that the poem to which Robin-
son refers was his own composition: ‘At the moment this sheet was printing off , the Poems of Mrs. Robinson were sent to the author by a friend. In page 123 of that elegant collection, is contained an answer to the above Elegy, entitled “Echo to him who complains.” Th e Elegy is stated by Mrs. R. to have appeared in the Oracle of the 25th of June, 1790, addressed to Laura, and signed ‘Ignotus.’ In a note on this signature, the writer is supposed to be Della Crusca. Suffi ciently gratifi ed by the fl attering mistake and by the exquisite poem to which it has given rise, Mr. K. would not have mentioned this circumstance, had he not been anxious to prevent every suspicion of interfering with the literary property of Mr. Merry. In the years 1789 and 1790, Mr. K. resided in London, where he wrote this Elegy. Having a particular reason to wish its insertion under the signature Ignotus, he left a copy himself at the Offi ce of Th e World, where he was unknown. Not observing its appearance, he called a few days aft er, requesting the composition might be returned, but was informed it had been mislaid. How it came into Th e Oracle, he cannot explain. Th e superior elegance of Mrs. Robinson’s Echo, induces the author to present it to the reader, who will perceive a diff erence in the last stanza of the original Elegy, which in its primitive form, ended thus: “What power like Laura’s scornful eye / Awakes the ruthless rage of pain? / What terror bursting from the sky, / Like Love distracts the tortur’d brain?” / A slight variation he imag-ines occurred also in other verses, but the rhimes were similar’ (Poems by William Kendall (London: G. G. & J. Robinson; Exeter: G. Dyer, 1793), p. 17).
2. ‘To raze the troubles of the brain’: ‘Raze out the written troubles of the brain’, Macbeth, V.ii.42.
‘Stanzas Written under an Oak in Windsor Forest’1. Enough for me … POPE: the fi nal couplet of Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713), l. 433–4.2. ‘Here Pope first sung!’: Th is phrase is the inscription cited in the title. In 1791 the
epigraph appears above the title.3. Muse of fi re: Shakespeare, Henry V, prologue, l. 1. 4. Herne the hunter: In English folklore, Herne the Hunter is a said to haunt Windsor
Forest; see Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.iv.28–38.
‘To the Myrtle’1. To the Myrtle: Th is poem reappears in the Whitehall Evening Post, unsigned, above ‘Th e
Mince Pie’ (see note 1 to ‘Th e Mince Pie’, Volume 2, p. 428); the fi nal stanza is omitted.
‘Stanzas Inscribed to Lady William Russell’1. Lady William Russell: Lady William Russell (1771–1808) is listed as one of the subscrib-
ers to the 1791 Poems; she is not the more famous Lady William Russell who inspired Byron’s Beppo (1817).
394 Notes to pages 128–34
‘Morning’1. Chanticleer: a rooster, from Chaucer’s ‘Th e Nun’s Priest Tale’ in Th e Canterbury Tales
(c. 1400).
‘Lines Written by the Side of a River’1. daisies pied: Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.894. 1806 adds quotation marks.
‘Th e Bee and the Butterfl y’1. to-morrow’s fare: Th omson, Th e Seasons, ‘Autumn’, l. 191.
‘Pastoral Stanzas’1. Pastoral Stanzas: In the 1791 volume this poem is prefaced with the following note: ‘Th e
two following little Poems were written at a very early period of the Author’s life’. Th e 1806 subtitle reads ‘Written at Fift een Years of Age’. See the next poem, p. 143.
‘Th e Origin of Cupid’1. Ida’s mount: a mountain in Crete, sacred to Zeus and supposedly his birthplace.
‘Sonnet to Ingratitude’1. He that’s ungrateful … YOUNG: from the play Bursiris, King of Egypt (1719), II.i, by
Edward Young (1683–1765), English poet and playwright. Th e Works of the Author of the Night-Th oughts, 5 vols (London: A. Millar et al., 1767), vol. 2, p. 28.
‘Petrarch to Laura’1. Petrarch to Laura: Excerpts from this poem appear also in Maria Elizabeth Robinson’s
novel Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794). Th is is the lead poem in 1806.2. Ere such a soul … Pope: Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, ll. 197–200. 3. life’s dull round: a well-known phrase from ‘Written at an Inn in Henley’ (1764), l. 17, by
the poet William Shenstone (1714–63).4. Mrs. Dobson’s Life of Petrarch: Robinson refers to Susannah Dobson’s (1742–95) trans-
lation (1775) of Jacques Françoise P. A. de Sade’s (1705–78) Mémoires pour la vie de Françoise Pétrarque (1764–67). In her Letter to the Women of England (London: Long-man and Rees, 1799), Robinson cites Dobson as an important eighteenth-century ‘Female Literary Character’, p. 100.
5. auburn tresses: In Petrarch’s Canzoniere Laura’s hair famously is golden, allowing Petrarch to pun on the Italian ‘l’oro’ (gold).
6. laurel: Th e play on laurel and Laura runs throughout Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Th e laurel wreath is symbolic of poetic achievement and thus immortality: the laurel tree is an ever-green, and in Greek mythology the favourite tree of Apollo, the god of poetry.
7. Hebe: the Roman goddess of youth.8. sublunary: earthly.
Notes to pages 135–56 395
9. ‘Awoke … left behind!’: Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 248: ‘And wake to all the griefs I left behind’.
‘Sir Raymond of the Castle’1. Sir Raymond … A Tale: 1791 and 1806 give a prefatory note for this poem and ‘Lewen
and Gyyneth. A Tale’: ‘Th e following little Poems are written aft er the Model of the Old English Ballads, and are inscribed to those who admire the simplicity of that kind of versifi cation’. Th e 1806 note presumably also refers to ‘Donald and Mary’ from 1793 as it appears between these two from 1791. Beginning with ‘Celadon and Lydia’ (1777), Robinson participated in the eighteenth-century ballad revival that began with Th omas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765; four editions by 1794). Th e popularity of Percy’s collection created a vogue for primitive poetry that included creative forger-ies of supposedly archaic poems, such as Th omas Chatterton’s Felix Farley and Th omas Rowelie poems and James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, and later, original poetry by Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Th e ballad revival obviously had a huge infl uence on Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), particularly on Coleridge’s ‘Th e Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Th e Idiot Boy’, and then on Rob-inson’s own Lyrical Tales. Th e popularity of the ballad also coincided with that of the Gothic novel, a genre which frequently featured interpolated ballads.
‘Lewin and Gynneth’1. Lewin and Gynneth. A Tale: In 1806 the spelling of the names was changed to ‘Llwhen’
and ‘Gwyneth’ throughout. Also, 1806 adds a subheading ‘Written in the year 1782’ and a footnote: ‘From Mr. John Williams’s prose translation of a lately discovered Welsh Poem, preserved in the Collection of Arthur Price, Esq. It is supposed to have been writ-ten by Tateisin, in Ben Batridd, A. D. 534’. ‘Tateisin’ is likely a printer’s error: Taleisin was a sixth-century Celtic British poet; a fourteenth-century Welsh manuscript contains poems attributed to Taleisin.
‘Laura Maria to Arno’1. Laura Maria to Arno: On 30 May 1791 the Oracle reported that ‘Mrs. Robinson is also
at Bath, and extremely ill at her house on the North Parade. – Th e gout, with which she is troubled, has attacked her head so severely, that she is scarcely able to hold her-self upright.’ Th is news inspired a poem, ‘On Mrs. ROBINSON’s visiting BATH. Th e Cause, Bad Health’ by ‘Arno’, published in the Oracle on 8 June 1791. Pascoe identi-fi es ‘Arno’ as Bertie Greatheed (Romantic Th eatricality, p. 69). Greatheed (1759–1829), English dramatist, poet and one of the original Della Cruscans, contributed to Th e Arno Miscellany in 1784. A shortened version of Arno’s poem, however, appears in 1801 and 1806 with James Boaden identifi ed as the author. So ‘Arno’ is Boaden (1762–1839), English poet and playwright; he was hired by Bell to edit the Oracle and was a friend of Robinson. Robinson, no doubt recuperating, did not respond to Boaden’s Arno until aft er she read his poem ‘What Is Love’, published 15 June 1791 in the Oracle:
396 Notes to pages 156–65
WHAT IS LOVE
It is not Love – to seize the LyreAll kindling with the fi nger’s fi re,And, bearing to some Beauty’s throne,Strike out its sympathies of tone;
By wand’ring measures wildly tostIn liquid lab’rinths to be lost;Tranc’d in extatic sorrows lie,’Till overpower’d pulsation die.
Th e pains that genuine passion pressNo human harmonies express – Th e strains our rapt’rous praise may move,But still the magic is not Love; –
It is not Love! – On yonder steep,Th at fl ings its bold brow o’er the deep,Th e melancholy Rover hangs,And, drooping, weeps unpitied pangs.
He bares his ever burning breastBy rending agonies possest,And, as his keener suff erings urge,Smiles at the threat’nings of the Surge.
Th e Wreck upon the breakers castTh e wave that whelms the faithless mast,Th e sigh that puff s the parting breath,He listens to – and thinks on Death.
He hears him in the groaning airBursting the heart of wild Despair,And through his throbbing senses fl yeStrange solemn sounds, that bid him die.
He hovers o’er the furious deep,And ponders on perpetual sleep;But, fl ashing cross his frenzied mind,Hope brings the Fair, and brings her kind.
She lures him from the fatal shore,And tempts his fever’d frame no more;Th e tort’ring Pity gives – to save,And, ling’ring, let him live a Slave. ARNO
Boaden’s poem is a denunciation of love experienced only through literature and a call to actual experience. Robinson, characteristically, responds with a warning that real love is fraught with real emotional peril. Her poetic response appeared with the following
Notes to page 165 397
editorial headnote: ‘And is not the following spirited and bold? Is it not original and impassioned? Is it not liberal in commendation? And is not the Man happy, so sweetly addressed, so tenderly admonished?’
Robinson’s response to ‘Arno’/Boaden prompted a response from Lorenzo later that week – ‘To Laura Maria, On reading her Poem addressed to Arno, in the Oracle 21st June, 1791’, which refutes her advice: ‘Oh! teach him the luxurious bliss / Of Woman’s dear enchanting Smile’ (ll. 31–2).
2. ‘perpetual sleep’: Arno, ‘What Is Love’, l. 30.
‘Impromptu on Mr. Merry’s Marriage with Miss Brunton’1. Mr. Merry’s Marriage with Miss Brunton: Ann Brunton Merry (1769–1808) was one of
the leading actresses of the day; she married Merry in 1791; the couple emigrated to the United States in 1796 for fi nancial reasons. Th e Oracle (26 October 1791) published a poem ‘On a late Marriage’ which opens with a quote from Sappho: ‘“Blest as th’ immor-tal Gods is he” / Who meets with such a Wife; / As all who know her, must agree, / She’ll Merry be – thro’ life.’ Merry’s second attempt at tragedy, Lorenzo (1791), was a critical and commercial failure, sustaining only six performances.
‘Th e Moralist’1. Th e Moralist: Original headnote: ‘In the Style of Gray’s Northern Odes, with all the
tenderness of his Eton Prospect’.
‘To ——’1. To ——: In 1794 and 1806 this poem appears with an epigraph: ‘“I will instruct my Sor-
rows to be proud.” Shakespear.’ From King John, III.i.68.
‘Invocation’1. Invocation: Original headnote: ‘Interested, if we surmise rightly about as sweet a Change-
ling, as him, for whom if Fancy fable not, he erewhile strove with Titania. / Th is Writer has looked at Shakspeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a taste, that in eff ects may be happily described by one of his own Similes – / Like the sweet South / Breathing upon a bank of Violets, / Stealing and giving odour.’
On 17 March 1792 the Oracle printed an unsigned response, ‘Oberon and Titania’, a playful dialogue in which the fairy queen jealously interprets Robinson’s poem, signed ‘Oberon’, as a seduction poem; a minor quarrel ensues, and the dialogue concludes with Oberon’s assurance that Titania need not doubt his fi delity. It is prefaced with the follow-ing headnote: ‘Th e fi ne Poem in Th ursday’s Oracle, has called from a fancy congenial, the following little Drama. To the Addressed, the Author will stand clearly revealed: We give it immediate conveyance.’ In 1801 the author of the response is identifi ed as James Boaden (see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396).
2. ‘highest Noon’: midnight; Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’, l. 68.3. austral: southern.
398 Notes to pages 165–70
‘Sonnet. To Independence’1. Sonnet. To Independence: Printed with the following editorial headnote: ‘And has not
Mr. Steevens yet one word or retraction, from what he has asserted relative to Son-net Writing?’ Editor and critic George Steevens (1736–1800) omitted Shakespeare’s sonnets from his 1793 edition; Steevens is known for his other fl ippant and scornful remarks on the sonnet form: in 1780, he called the sonnet a ‘metrical whim’, adding, ‘I profess I am one of those who should have wished it to have expired in the country where it was born’ (Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (London: C. Bathurst et al., 1780), p. 682). Th e following day, 14 April 1792, the Oracle printed ‘Sonnet. To Dependence’ by ‘Arno’ in response to Robinson’s sonnet; see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396.
Hence timid Traitor to the cause of Worth, Th at, check’st the honest freedom of his face, And clothing it with fawning meek grimace,Bend’st godlike Man to pore upon the earth;
To shun the proud gaze of an Idiot’s eye, With palpitating heart to watch and wait Th e tardy opening of his heavy gate,When feebly sounds the knock of Misery.
Th ou liveried Slave, who hear’st the tremulous tale, Buoy not with fruitless hope the Wretch’s claim; Th ou know’st a Suppliant and a Dun the same,Tell him, with Him, thou serv’st no claims avail.
Bid him depend upon his feeble arm; Nor call in vain on Power to keep him warm. ARNOApril 13, 1792
Robinson’s sonnet appeared in the Morning Post the week before the publication of 1794 with the following headnote: ‘Th e following beautiful Sonnet is selected from the Sec-ond Volume of Mrs. Robinson’s Poems. Its own intrinsic Merit carries with it its best Comment.’
Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds1. Th us when thy … Broome: from ‘To Mr. Pope’ (1739), ll. 23–28, by William Broome
(1689–1745). See note 1 to ‘To Sir Joshua Reynolds’, above, p. 385.2. ‘the lap of Earth’: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, l. 117.3. Count Ugolino, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds: Reynolds’s painting Count Ugolino and
his Children in the Dungeon was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773. Th e horrifi c story of Ugolino’s and his children’s deaths is famously recounted in Dante’s Inferno, canto XXXIII.
Notes to pages 172–6 399
‘Julia to Carlos’1. Julia to Carlos: Evidently, this poem is a response to a sonnet ‘To Mrs. Robinson’, signed
‘Carlos’, that appeared in the New London Magazine ( June 1792), p. 277. Although the sonnet addresses her by name in the title and as ‘gentle Laura’, Robinson chose to respond as ‘Julia’. In 1794 the poem appears with the fi nal two lines of Carlos’s sonnet as an epi-graph: ‘And since thy cruel breast refus’d to save, / I only ask one tear, to glisten on my grave!’
‘Julia to Carlos’ appeared in the Oracle with the following editorial headnote: ‘An admirable Writer, as elegant and fervidly Poetical as ever. In the 8th Line is a delightful application of a sweet idea. Th e Sun is introduced with a grandeur and pomp of expres-sion that fi lls the mind. How is it to be answered?’ Th e answer came with ‘Carlos to Julia’ on 17 July 1792 in the Oracle.
2. my form: Carlos’s sonnet begins by comparing Robinson to ‘the Paphian Maid; / Beauty’s bright model, love’s bewitching form!’, ll. 1–2.
3. ‘Pendent World’: Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.i.125.
‘Stanzas, Written between Dover and Calais’1. Stanzas … 1792: Although one of her more biographically signifi cant poems (see R. D.
Bass, Th e Green Dragoon: Th e Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Alvin Redman, 1957), pp. 318–21, Byrne, Perdita, pp. 283–4, Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 171, S. Gristwood, Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic (London: Ban-tam Press, 2005), pp. 259–60), ‘Stanzas’, in its original context, signed by Julia, would have appeared to result from Julia’s aff air with Carlos. In truth the poem arose from a bitter separation from Tarleton as well as from illness and continued fi nancial distress; Robinson resolved to visit Spa in Germany but illness kept her in Calais for a time. Maria Elizabeth Robinson is coy regarding the specifi cs but reprints the poem in 1801 with the following remarks: ‘In the midst of the depressing feelings which Mrs. Robinson experienced, in once more becoming a wanderer from home, she courted the inspiration of the muse, and soothed, by the following beautiful stanzas, the melancholy sensations that oppressed her heart’ (Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 133–4).
Th is poem also appeared in the anthology Th e Lyre of Love, 2 vols (London: John Sharpe, 1806), vol. 2. It was set to music by composer James Hook (1746–1827), pub-lished as ‘I Have Lov’d Th ee, Dearly Lov’d Th ee’ (1812), and by Th omas Welsh (c. 1780–1848), published as ‘Bounding Billows’ (1820).
2. ********: Th e asterisks suggest the eight-letter name ‘Tarleton’, while the European Maga-zine provides a more ambiguous long dash.
‘Ode to Humanity’1. Ode to Humanity: Original headnote: ‘If we have not been hurried away, by vivid Pas-
sages of the purest Poetry, past the calmness of decision, we think the following is by much the best Ode of this Writer. Th e strength of her impersonations comes very fast indeed aft er Sackville’s Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates, parts of which are better than any thing in Spenser. – As, for instance, of age: / Crook-back’d he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed; / Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four; / With old lame bones, that rattled by his side; / His scalp all pil’d, and he with eld forlore, / His
400 Notes to pages 178–81
wither’d fi st still knocking at Death’s door: / Fumbling, and driveling as he draws his breath; / For brief – the shape and Messenger of Death. / Written 1560 / In a similar spirit, are conceived the Famine and the Death of the elegant Laura. Will she allow us to recommend the above Author to her perusal?’
Th e Mirror for Magistrates (1559–1610) is a major collection of Tudor poetry on the lives of various historical fi gures; ‘Induction’ by Th omas Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1536–1608), fi rst appeared in the second edition of 1563.
Th e original printing avoids reference to the political import of the poem, but a few months later, in January 1796, the Oracle commented that this poem ‘is not so popular with the Revolution Writers as some of her former works’, responding to the obviously moderate sentiment it expresses (Byrne, Perdita, p. 290). In 1794 the poem appears with the subheading ‘Written in the month of September, 1792’; in 1806 with ‘Written during the Massacres at Paris, in September, 1792’. Th e September Massacres began on 2 September 1792 and continued over several days, dur-ing which time angry Parisian mobs murdered priests and aristocrats, including women and children, who had been arrested by the revolutionary government and who were believed to be counter-revolutionary.
‘Sonnet, to the Prince of Wales’1. Sonnet, to the Prince of Wales: As Davenport points out, Robinson happily had reunited
with Tarleton and, despite her personal history with the prince, composed this sonnet as an expression of hope that the future king would provide needed leadership as the ten-sions between France and England escalated (Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 174).
‘Stanzas Written aft er Successive and Melancholy Dreams’1. Stanzas … Melancholy Dreams: Original headnote: ‘The following has all the internal
Evidence of Writing “warm from the Soul and faithful to its Fires.” Th e Feelings of the lovely Poet live in every Line of this delightful Verse.’ Quote from ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 54.
2. LAURA: Robinson had not used the ‘Laura’ signature since ‘To the Memory of Werter’ in the World for 15 July 1789. Th is poem prompted a consolatory response from ‘Arno, to Laura Harassed by Melancholy Dreams’, appearing in the Oracle on 4 December 1792:
O, why, o’er the Couch where thy beauty reposes, Do Phantoms thus hold their despotic dominion? Th ere Love should expand the sweet shield of his pinion,And Fragrance thy Pillow encompass with Roses.
Not a breath but should whisper accession of pleasure, Fond Fancy should people a world with new charms, Dear Poesy’s Harp should not vibrate alarms,But deliciously mazes of Harmony measure.
I would bid some clear Spirit with magic embrace Defend thee from Phantasies hovering nigh,
Notes to pages 181–6 401
Like the mist-rending Sun with a glance of his EyeTh ese cloudy oppressions from Heaven to chase.
Yet Oblivion complete should not dare thus to bind Th y fancy so vivid in slumber profound, Bud delighted the Fairy should wander around,To regions of blessedness only confi n’d.
Th e Seraph Sublimity there should aspire, To touch thy rich Thought with his Torch so divine, Th e spark from the God should enkindle the Shrine,And blaze the bright fl ame of Celestial Fire.
Yet, to follow the track of our Milton sublime Should not draw thee from musings of earthly estate; Th y Verse may yet reconcile Man to his fate,And cheer with some pleasures this perilous clime.
It may teach us the language of Pity to move, It may bid Generosity swell in the Soul; Yet the Passion it kindles it cannot controul,Every Line is an added incentive to Love.
For her response to this poem, see ‘Laura, to Arno’, below, pp. 186–7. Prior to this, Boaden, as ‘Arno’, had written a poem ‘To Laura Maria’, printed in the
Oracle on 23 November 1792, that suggests a meeting between the two had taken place and that expresses his disappointment at not fi nding a new poem consequent to it: ‘What meet, and not one ardent line / To call thy beauty, wit, divine!’ His poem assures her that ‘thou art all that sober mind / To fancied Laura e’er assign’d’; and though the poem hints at an erotic assignation – it is dated ‘Th ursday Morning’ – it concludes with a vow of friendship.
‘Laura, to Arno’1. Laura, to Arno: Original headnote: ‘Th e reciprocal Praise of such Writers must be dearly
cherished – Th e World owes to the Interchange some of the loveliest Song it has ever dwelt upon enamour’d’. Th is poem is a reply to ‘Arno, to Laura Harassed by Melancholy Dreams’ (see above) and matches its metrical pattern of iambic hexameters in envelope-rhyme quatrains (ABBA).
‘To Mrs. Hanway, on the Death of her Lovely and Accomplished Daughter’
1. Mrs. Hanway: Mary Ann Hanway (c. 1755–c. 1824), author of Journey to the Highlands of Scotland (1775) and the novels Elinor, or Th e World As It Is (1798) and Andrew Stuart, or Th e Northern Wanderer (1800). Robinson was a close friend of the Hanways; Mrs Hanway’s husband, Hanway Hanway, was a friend of Robinson’s husband and served as witness to their wedding.
402 Notes to pages 186–7
Ode to the Harp of the Late Accomplished and Amiable Louisa Hanway
1. Ode to the Harp … Louisa Hanway: Promotional excerpts of the poem appeared in the Oracle on 15 January 1793 and in Town and Country Magazine ( January 1793), p. 40. On 31 December 1792 an ‘Elegy, to the Memory of Miss Louisa Hanway’, by Mrs Whit-tell, appeared in the Oracle and may have inspired Robinson’s more ambitious poem.
‘A Fragment, Supposed to be Written near the Temple’1. A Fragment … Louis the Sixteenth: Robinson’s poem is followed in the Oracle immedi-
ately by an article on the king’s execution. ‘Th e most inconsistent policy ever exhibited in the world, is the putting of Louis XVI to death by the Republicans of France. If they had studied twenty years to affi rm the Monarchies of Europe they could not have pitched upon one better calculated for the perpetuation of Kingly Power. In enormous wicked-ness there is always enormous folly. Such must be the sentiment even of Republicans.’ Louis XVI was tried by the revolutionary government, the National Convention, who found him guilty of treason and executed him by guillotine on 21 January 1793.
2. Pandimonium: or ‘Pandemonium,’ Milton’s coinage for ‘place of all devils’; in Paradise Lost it is a great palace constructed by the fallen angels. Of the fi ve main printings, only the European Magazine and Scots Magazine versions read ‘Pandemonium’; Robinson seems to have preferred to spell it ‘Pandimonium’ and thus obviates a pun on demon and demos that might have suited her purposes.
3. Ca ira: ‘Ça ira’ was a popular French revolutionary song with calls for violent overthrow of the aristocracy.
4. Angels weep to hear: Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, II.ii.122, and possibly a Mil-tonic echo: Paradise Lost, I.620.
‘Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation’1. Marie Antoinette’s … Temple: Robinson took great interest in the fate of Marie Antoinette
aft er the French royal family was arrested. In 1791, she published Impartial Refl ections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France; by A Friend to Humanity (London: John Bell, 1791); her essay concludes: ‘There is not a doubt that all good men, whatever their political sentiments may be, feel deeply interested in the fate of the captive Queen. Every impartial eye has a tear for her suff erings and looks forward with eager solicitude to a Decision, that, it is to be hoped, for the honour of human nature, will add dignity to the French nation, and stamp immortal celebrity on the wisdom, virtue, and judg-ment of the National Assembly!’ (pp. 30–1). Robinson also defends the Queen on the principal charges of fl eeing the country: ‘That the Queen of France should consent to accompany her husband on his late fl ight, was more than reasonable, it was natural; duty claimed her acquiescence, and common sense must justify the propriety of her obedience. Was it consistent with the character of a Wife, a Mother, or a Woman, to refuse what virtue, nature, and aff ection dictated to her feelings? Th e question will not admit of an argument; the fact speaks for itself; and the deed is sanctioned by all the laws of God and humanity. Whatever degree of criminality may be imputed to the event, certainly the Queen was not the aggressor; it was the criterion of conjugal virtue, to share the fate and follow the fortunes of a man
Notes to pages 187–93 403
who adored her to enthusiasm, and to whom she was united by every bond human and divine’ (pp. 25–6).
Modern Manners1. HORACE JUVENAL: Robinson’s pseudonym here is a claim to satirical legitimacy in
the vein of Dryden and Pope; she identifi es herself with the two great Roman satirists in an attempt to counter the attacks on her and the Della Cruscan poets by William Giff ord (1756–1826) in his blistering satire Th e Baviad (1791). As Dryden explains in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), Horace’s (65–8 bc) general approach is to mock vice and folly out of moral concern but to do so with mild playfulness and not with venomous rage. Juvenal (ad c. 60–c. 140), however, is more vitriolic and much darker, and he aims more aggressively at reforming vice and folly. Pre-sumably Robinson means to employ both styles. Th e epigraph is from Canto II, l. 91–2.
2. ‘grey goose quill’: Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’, l. 249.3. pasquinades: lampoons.4. Dunciad: Pope’s Dunciad appeared in three versions, in 1728, 1735 and 1743.5. Lane: William Lane (c. 1745–1814) founded the Minerva Press and a large circulat-
ing library in 1790; he became a successful publisher of Gothic and sentimental fi ction, including Maria Elizabeth Robinson’s novel, Th e Shrine of Bertha (1794); and, in 1813, Lane republished Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon.
6. Bruce: James Bruce (1730–94), Scottish travel writer whose adventures in Africa were greeted with scepticism upon his return to London in 1774; he published Travels to Dis-cover the Source of the Nile in 1790.
7. Cook: Captain James Cook (1728–79), explorer famous for his circumnavigation of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii.
8. Munchausen: Although Munchausen was a real person, Robinson refers to the famously fi ctionalized version of his travels, Th e Surprising Adventures of Baron Mun-chausen, by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736–94), which appeared in London in 1785.
9. Dullness: inspired by Dryden’s ‘Macfl ecknoe’, Pope makes Dulness the goddess of the Dunciad.
10. Pye: Henry James Pye (1745–1813), Oxford-educated poet, classicist and Member of Parliament, was appointed Poet Laureate in 1790, succeeding Th omas Warton and earn-ing the scorn of liberals; he was himself succeeded by Southey.
11. Erskine’s: Th omas Erskine (1750–1823), barrister and statesman, advocated, in 1792, on behalf of Th omas Paine (1737–1809), who was charged with sedition for the publica-tion of Th e Rights of Man.
12. Du T—: Louis Dutens (1730–1812), French writer, scholar and expatriate; he lived in London during the 1780s and ’90s and wrote about fashionable English society in his Memoirs of a Traveller in Retirement (1806).
13. R—d: Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond (1735–1806), colonel, statesman and brother to the fashionable Lennox sisters; he moved in the social circle of the Duchess of Devonshire and had a relationship with Lady Elizabeth Foster (see note 15 below).
14. St—p—n—n: Stephenson, reference untraced.15. F—st—r: Lady Elizabeth Foster, later, Duchess of Devonshire (1759–1824), socialite,
mistress of the Duke of Richmond (see note 13 above) and the Duke of Devonshire; known as ‘Bess’, she was painted by Reynolds in 1787; she married the Duke when Geor-giana died in 1806.
404 Notes to pages 193–201
16. Blanchard: Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753–1809), famous for his balloon fl ights.17. T—p—m’s: Edward Topham (1751–1820), poet, playwright and co-founder of the
World.18. Pindar: Dr John Wolcot (1738–1819), who wrote as ‘Peter Pindar’, was the leading
Whig satirist of the 1790s and a friend of Robinson. He frequently attacked Prime Min-ister William Pitt in satirical verse.
19. W—t: Benjamin West (1738–1820), American painter and co-founder, with Reynolds, of the Royal Academy; as ‘Peter Pindar’ Wolcot satirized West as ‘George’s idol’ in his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians (1782–6).
20. L—’s: James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale; Wolcot attacked him in ‘A Commiserating Epistle to Lord Lonsdale’ (1791); Lonsdale retaliated by bringing libel charges against Wolcot that were later dismissed; undeterred, Wolcot responded with ‘Ode to Lord Lonsdale’ (1792).
21. B—s—ll’s: James Boswell (1740–95); as ‘Peter Pindar’, Wolcot satirized Boswell’s hyper-bolic adoration of Samuel Johnson in his poem Bozzy and Piozzi (1786).
22. Golconda’s starry mischiefs: Golconda, a ruined city in India famous for its fabled dia-mond mines.
23. Millard claims … Hilligsberg: Marie-Louise Hilligsberg and Marie Millard were acclaimed French dancers on the London opera stage; see J. Milhous, G. Dideriksen and R. D. Hume, Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Volume Two: Th e Pan-theon Opera and its Aft ermath, 1789–1795 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 198.
24. Q—: William Douglas, fourth Duke of Queensberry (1724–1810), friend of the Prince of Wales, was a patron of the opera.
25. Hobart’s: probably the wife of George Hobart (1731–1804), who had been for a time manager of the King’s Th eatre; he became third Earl of Buckinghamshire in 1793. Robinson mentions him in the Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 177. ‘Peter Pindar’ wrote an ode that jokingly refers to Mrs Hobart causing a ruckus over a seat in a box at the opera (Th e Works of Peter Pindar (London: John Walker, 1794), vol. 2, p. 120). Th e same incident is described in C. Price, J. Milhous and R. D. Hume, Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Cen-tury London: Th e King’s Th eatre, Haymarket (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 137. Robinson seems generally to refer to Mrs Hobart’s attempts to draw attention to herself with her fan.
26. ‘Beaux, banish … coaches drive’: Pope, Th e Rape of the Lock, I.102.27. **: untraced.28. ***: ‘prince’.29. H—a M—e: Hannah More (1745–1833), playwright and poet; as a girl, Robinson
attended a boarding school run by the More sisters.30. ‘their own amusement’: Peter Pindar’s Lousiad, II.90.31. Rovidino: opera singer of the 1790s.32. Banks: Joseph Banks (1743–1820), noted English naturalist.33. Damer: Anne Seymour Damer (1749–1828), English actress and sculptor; see A.
Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: Th e Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 91–124.
34. H—gs: Anna Maria Appolonia Hastings (1749–1837), second wife of the then contro-versial governor of India Warren Hastings (1732–1818).
35. Ar—r: Lady Sarah Archer (1741–1801), like the Duchess of Devonshire a notorious gambler; see Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 186; and C. McCreery, Th e Satirical
Notes to pages 201–4 405
Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 196–8.
36. V—: Eva Maria Veigel (1724–1822), Viennese dancer and widow of David Garrick. 37. Dovey’s di’monds: cheap ornaments.38. Bailey’s bloom: cosmetics.39. four in hand: an expression for driving two pairs of horses, i.e., a coach-and-four.40. ‘To catch … they rise’: Pope, Essay on Man, I.14 (slightly misquoted).41. ‘thrice-feather’d’: from George Colman’s (‘the Elder’, 1732–94) prologue to Garrick’s
farce Th e Bon Ton, or High Life above Stairs (1775).42. Inchbald’s moral play’s: Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), former actress and prolifi c
playwright; when this poem appeared, Inchbald’s most recent play was Th e Next Door Neighbours (1791). Her most famous play, Every One Has His Fault, would appear later in 1793.
43. Humphries and Johnson: Richard Humphries (c. 1760–1827) and Tom Johnson (1750–97) were renowned boxers.
44. In Hanger’s bludgeon, or Fi—z—t’s eyes: Colonel George Hanger (1751–1824), notori-ous rake and friend to both Tarleton and the Prince of Wales; Maria Anne Fitzherbert (1755–1837), morganatic wife of the Prince of Wales, from 1785 to 1795, when he mar-ried Caroline of Brunswick.
45. Fox: Charles James Fox (1749–1806), Whig statesman, notorious libertine and chief opponent of Prime Minister Pitt; he had been romantically involved with Robinson dur-ing the early 1780s.
46. Christie: Th omas Christie (1761–96), founder, with Joseph Johnson, of the Analytical Review, a radical and reformist journal. Giff ord would later found the Anti-Jacobin in 1797 in opposition to its politics.
47. Otway … Chatterton: see notes 5–6 to Ainsi va le Monde, above, p. 389.48. Tempora mutantur: times change (Latin).49. ‘tant mieux’: so much the better (French).50. ‘Puff s … billet doux’: Pope, Th e Rape of the Lock, I.138. Th e ‘polish’d maid’ of l. 100 is
Belinda, Pope’s heroine.51. Marlb’rough: John Churchill, fi rst Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), soldier and
general, had become a Whig hero since Joseph Addison celebrated his military prowess at the Battle of Blenheim in his poem Th e Campaign (1705).
52. ‘to keep the world in awe’: perhaps quoted from Swift ’s sermon ‘On the Testimony of Conscience’ (1744); the phrase also appears in Susannah Dobson’s translation of Saint-Pelaie’s Th e Literary History of the Troubadours (London: T. Cadell, 1779), p. 47 (see note 4 to ‘Petrarch to Laura’, above, p. 395).
53. C—d! – to H—t: Anne, Duchess of Cumberland (1742–1808), sister-in-law to the Prince of Wales; Lady Elizabeth Harcourt (1739–1811), wife of William Harcourt, third Earl Harcourt.
54. Devon’s heart: the Duchess of Devonshire.55. crotchet fr om a quaver: in music, a crotchet is a quarter note, a quaver is an eighth note.56. ‘Flora’s Toilette’: Th e Toilet of Flora (1772), a book of recipes for cosmetics by French
naturalist and physician Pierre Joseph Buchoz (1731–1807).57. ‘Road to Ruin’: the title of a 1792 play by English dramatist Th omas Holcroft (1745–
1809).58. ‘the Rights of Women’: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the pioneering
feminist tract by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97).
406 Notes to pages 204–8
59. fete champetres: fashionable garden parties (French).60. queen Bess’s age: the Elizabethan period.61. M—h’s: monarch’s, that is, Louis XVI.
‘Stanzas Supposed to be Written near a Tree’1. Stanzas … Colonel Bosville: Original headnote: ‘Recovered from a severe Indisposition,
the fi rst Feelings have been beyond Herself – She embalms the Memory of a lamented Hero, and aids with an Independent Muse the Cause of her Country’. Th e Scots Magazine for August 1793 reported that Bosville ‘married, but a short time before his departure, a lady of the name of Wilson, whom he has left pregnant’ and, and aft er remarking on his 6'4" height, that he ‘was shot through the mouth, the bullet having passed over the head of the Hon. Capt. Fitzroy, who was standing within a foot of him’.
As for the ‘severe Indisposition’, on 17 August 1793, under the heading ‘MRS. ROB-INSON’S ACCIDENT’, the Oracle reported the following: ‘It has been noticed that this elegant Writer has lately lost a Parent. – To relieve her mind from the natural pres-sure of such a misfortune, she has passed some time at Cobbam. / Th e fi xed malady of this Lady prevents her walking; she is always carried by one of her servants to the carriage. We think it was last Tuesday, that when he was thus bringing her in his arms to the coach, on the instant the fl ight of stone steps at the door of the house, with the spirit of Arthur’s Uncle in them, suddenly gave way. / He fell, and Lady of course. – Mrs. Robinson has been very severely cut upon the head, and a contusion somewhat alarming is discovered. – We have, however, hopes that fever may be kept down, and not even temporary delir-ium cloud one of the most brilliant understandings in the world. About so conspicuous an ornament of letters the anxiety is general.’
‘Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith’1. Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith … Dunkirk: Charlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806), Eng-
lish novelist and one of the leading poets of the day, particularly known for reviving the sonnet. Her son Charles lost his leg in combat while serving under the Duke of York at the Siege of Dunkirk. Th is poem prompted a response by ‘Th emira’ (a Mrs Whittell, daughter of Sir Egerton Leigh – identifi ed in the Oracle for 17 October 1793), ‘Sonnet to Oberon, Occasioned by a Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, in the Oracle of the 17th September’, which appeared in the Oracle on 20 September 1793. Th is poem reminds one that the previous Oberon poems – particularly ‘Invocation’ – are poems that ‘could sooth a weeping Mother’s woe’, l. 1.
2. Gallant Boy: Smith likely saw Robinson’s tribute, using this phrase in an October 1793 letter: ‘My gallant Boy lost his leg on the 6th before Dunkirk’ (quoted in L. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (New York: Palgrave, 1998), p. 201).
‘Refl ections, which with a Power so Pleasing’1. ‘nostra miseria, magna es’: through our suff ering you are great (Latin); quoted pos-
sibly from Swift ’s pamphlet A Short View of the State of Ireland (1727), but also famously attributed to the actor Diphilus speaking to Pompey the Great. See R. Seager, Pompey the Great (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 96. 1794 and 1806 give the follow-ing epigraph: ‘“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace
Notes to pages 208–11 407
from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time.” / Shakespear’s Macbeth [V.v.19–28]’. Th is poem closes the second volume of the 1806 Poetical Works.
‘Sonnet to a Sigh’1. Sonnet to a Sigh: Original headnote: ‘As delicate and tender as Sensibility and the fi nest
Poetry can combine to make it’.
‘Sonnet to Lesbia’1. Lesbia: literally, ‘girl from Lesbos’, with a reference to Sappho; but also a name used by
Roman lyric poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 bc) for his inconstant lover.
‘Julia to Arno’1. Julia to Arno: Original headnote: ‘A most elegant Compliment from a Mind, which,
for liberality and generous Esteem, has been seldom equalled, any more than the Muse which inspires it’. For Boaden as ‘Arno’, see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396.
‘Lines to Maria, Written on her Birth-Day’1. Lines to Maria … 1793: Original headnote: ‘We cannot consent to withhold, for even
one day, a testimony of maternal goodness, so beautiful in sentiment and composi-tion, from the lovely Maid who is its subject’.
‘Julia to Arno’1. Julia to Arno: Robinson’s previous ‘Julia to Arno’ poem – ‘Arno! where steals thy dulcet
lay?’ – prompted a response, published 24 October 1793 in the Oracle. Th is poem, ‘Arno to Julia’, expresses great despair at the war – ‘See Nations tempested by rav’ning rage!’ – and questions the necessity of such great violence and subsequent suff ering. Robinson’s 1794 version of the poem includes the fourth quatrain of ‘Arno to Julia’ as an epigraph: ‘So fast the countless tribes of falling worth / Sink to the eternal sleep of dusty death, / Th at one vast slaughter choaks the breast of earth, / And the air thickens with departing breath’.
In the Oracle, the poem appeared with the following headnote: ‘Such rational senti-ments of pure freedom, conveyed with so much moral embellishment and pathetic verse, are indeed honorable to the heart and the head of a Poet’. For Boaden as ‘Arno’, see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396.
‘Sonnet, in the Manner of Metastasio’1. Metastasio: see note 5 to ‘To Anna Matilda’, above, p. 384. Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Son-
nets (5th edn, 1789) contains a translation from ‘the thirteenth cantata of Metastasio’. An English translation of Metastasio’s poems by Philip Bacebridge Homer (1765–1838) was published in 1790.
408 Notes to pages 211–18
‘Stanzas to Fate’1. Stanzas to Fate: Original headnote: ‘A beautiful Horatian Ode, in which the signs of the
tender Passion are presented with the fi nest power of Poetry. “Th ey best can paint them who can feel them most”.’ Quote paraphrased from Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 366. A Horatian ode has uniform stanzas, a complex metrical pattern, and tends toward the per-sonal. Th e 1794 table of contents identifi es this poem as ‘Stanzas to Fate, in the Manner of Sappho’, but the poem itself appears with the title ‘Stanzas to Fate’.
2. cease to live … to Love: Pope, ‘Sappho to Phaon’ l. 259. 1794 and 1806 have quotation marks around this phrase.
‘Myra’1. envious fate: 1806 has this phrase in quotation marks; it appears in dozens of seventeeth-
and eighteenth-century poems.
‘Sight’1. JOHN TAYLOR, Esq.: Th is poem appeared in the volume with the following dedica-
tion: ‘TO / JOHN TAYLOR, Esq. / SIR, / Your acknowledged professional skill in the subject of the following Poem, would alone mark the propriety of inscribing it to you; had I not a still more powerful reason, for doing myself that honour. / You will not accuse me of fl attery, when I declare, that I feel infi nite pleasure, in paying a just, though small tribute, to One whose friendship I am proud to enjoy, as proceeding from a pen-etrating and enlightened mind! / I am an enemy to Dedications in general, because they are too frequently calculated to feed the Vanity of High Rank, or to serve as passports to the short-lived and degrading approbation of the Ignorant, Yet, with an unconquerable enthusiasm, I shall ever pay voluntary homage to the first of all distinc-tions, – the Aristocracy of Genius! / With these sentiments, I have the honour of subscribing myself, / SIR, / Your most obedient humble Servant, / MARY ROBINSON / St. James’s Place, / June 21, 1793.’ Taylor (1757–1832) trained and served as occulist to the king, as his grandfather did, but became a drama critic and editor of the Morning Post. Many of Robinson’s letters to Taylor survive.
2. lowing herds: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, l. 2.3. drinks the poison of the murd’rous eye: see Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 122.
‘Th e Cavern of Woe’1. Glozing: a Miltonic expression applied to Satan’s fl attery in Paradise Lost, III.93,
IX.549.
‘Solitude’1. Roses, red and white: Th is detail indicates that the poem is set during the Wars of the
Roses (1455–87), English civil wars between the dynastic houses of Lancaster (represented by a red rose) and York (by a white rose). See ‘Bosworth Field’, below, pp. 279–82.
2. ‘the child of Hell’: Matthew 23:15; Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.i.271.
Notes to pages 219–34 409
‘Ode to Rapture’1. Ode to Rapture: Original headnote: ‘Th e Muse of Collins gave to the Passions their
favourite instruments of Sound – that of our lovely Poet has exhibited the fi nest eff ects of Nature’s Pencil, when she gave the evanescent blush to Sensibility’. Th e odes (1746) of English poet William Collins (1721–59) are a major infl uence on Robinson’s odes in terms of lyrical form and the prevalence of allegory.
2. Bliss goes … Ode to Indiff erence: Greville’s poem ‘A Prayer for Indiff erence’ (1759) was hugely popular, inspiring responses by Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Yearsley; see J. McGann, Th e Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 50–4.
‘Ode to Genius’1 Ode to Genius: Original headnote: ‘Every Stanza exemplifi es the power which is here
invoked – no fi ctitious creation of the brain, but the informing mind of beauty’.2. Arcadia’s: a region in Peloponnesian Greece, mythical birthplace of Zeus, and in poetry
a secluded classical paradise.3. Pindus: a mountain range in northern Greece.4. Parnassian heights: a mountain in central Greece, the mythical home of the Muses
and sacred to Apollo, god of poetry.5. Heliconian wave: waters of the springs on Mount Helicon, in Greece, sacred to the
Muses and thus the source of poetic inspiration.6. Pierian fountains: another metaphor for poetic inspiration; in book V of the Metamor-
phoses, Ovid tells the story of the Pierides, the daughters of Pierus, who unsuccessfully challenge the Heliconian Muses to a singing contest to prove their springs are the more inspirational.
‘Stanzas’1. Stanzas: Original headnote: ‘Stanzas so beautiful, even the confi ned limits we this day
can allow, shall not forbid us to give to the Readers of the Oracle’. 2. Absence lessens … Moral Maxims: François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–
80), French aristocrat and writer, best known for his Refl exions ou sentences et maximes morales, fi rst appearing in 1665 and in several subsequent editions. Robinson quotes from a 1749 translation of Moral Maxims (London: A. Millar).
Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France1. Monody … Queen of France: Th e volume is prefaced with the following ‘Advertisement’:
‘Mrs. Robinson is extremely happy in having an opportunity of embellishing this Poem with so fi ne a Resemblance of the Queen of France, taken fr om a Portrait by the Mar-chioness De Marnesia, whose exquisitely beautiful Paintings are so much admired, and so justly celebrated’.
Charlotte Antoinette de Bressay, Marchioness of Lezay-Marnesia (d. 1794), wife of Claude François Adrien, Marquis de Lezay-Marnesia (1735–1800), statesman, poet and contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Th e Marchioness was a writer and painter who fl ed Revolutionary France and died in London. Th e engraved frontispiece by de Mar-
410 Notes to pages 235–40
nesia is a sombre picture of the doomed queen. Marie Antoinette was tried for treason and executed in October 1793. Robinson’s Monody appeared in December.
2. True dignity … Book II: from Th e Minstrel; or, Th e Progress of Genius (1774), book 2, ll. 100–3, by James Beattie (1735–1803), Scottish poet and philosopher. 1806 omits the epigraph.
3. noblest work of God: Pope, Essay on Man, IV.248.4. mazy plan: Pope, Essay on Man, I.6.
‘To Zephyrus’1. To Zephyrus … 1793: Original headnote: ‘Th is Poem, the communication of which did
us so much honour, was unaccountably mislaid. It is now presented to the public admi-ration. / Aloof from all general terms of beautiful, or sweet, or strong terms of every-day compliment, Poetry like the present demands far diff erent praise. We are bound to shew how and wherein it excells the tasteful trifl ing of verse. / Th ere is here original thought, and a wide diff usion of attributes. Th e employment of Zephyrus is moral as well as innocent – he does more than trim the buds of Spring; he breathes upon the victim of Tyranny, and defeats the noxious vapours of his dungeon.’
2. Eolian string: An eolian harp was a common household instrument whose strings, when placed in a window casement, would respond to the wind.
‘Ode for the New Year’1. Ode for the New Year: On Th ursday, 2 January 1794, the Oracle printed ‘Ode for the New
Year, 1794’ by Poet Laureate Henry James Pye; like Robinson’s ode, Pye’s addresses the fact that the year begins with the nation at war, but Pye’s is more defi antly patriotic, in its praise of his country’s monarch and his ‘ready navies’, and in its pointed hostility to the French, ‘the harpy race’, whose ‘ruthless arm of savage license’ will succumb to ‘the sacred reign of freedom and of law’. Pye’s ode, thus, appearing in the Oracle, may have inspired hers and may explain why she sent hers to the Morning Post instead.
‘Elegiac Ode to the Memory of my Lamented Father’1. my Lamented Father: Nicholas Darby (c. 1720–85), Robinson’s estranged father, sep-
arated from her mother in 1769, aft er having left the family for a business venture in Labrador. He appears to have kept in intermittent touch with Robinson. A skilled cap-tain, he served in the British Navy during the Siege of Gibraltar in 1783 and commanded a ship for the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great. See Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 102–10.
‘To the Memory of my Beloved Brother’1. Beloved Brother: 1801 gives a footnote here: ‘John Darby, Esq. then President of the Brit-
ish Factory at Leghorn’. John was Robinson’s eldest brother; he had a mercantile business in Leghorn; frequently invited by her brother, Robinson considered moving there but her doctor discouraged her. See Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 21; vol. 2, pp. 97–8.
Notes to pages 240–57 411
‘Th e Maniac’1. Th e Maniac: ‘Th e Maniac’ is something of a watershed poem for Robinson and for
Romantic poetry in general. In the Memoirs, Maria Elizabeth Robinson gives a fascinat-ing account of the poem’s inception and composition:
As an example of the facility and rapidity with which she composed, the following anecdote may be given. Returning one evening from the bath, she beheld, a few paces before her chair, an elderly man, hurried along by a crowd of people, by whom he was pelted with mud and stones. His meek and unresisting deportment exciting her atten-tion, she inquired what were his off ences, and learned with pity and surprise that he was an unfortunate maniac, known only by the appellation of ‘mad Jemmy.’ Th e situ-ation of this miserable Being seized her imagination and became the subject of her attention: she would wait whole hours for the appearance of the poor maniac, and, whatever were her occupations, the voice of mad Jemmy was sure to allure her to the window. She would gaze upon his venerable but emaciated countenance with sensa-tions of awe almost reverential, while the barbarous persecutions of the thoughtless crowd never failed to agonise her feelings.
One night aft er bathing, having suff ered from her disorder more than usual pain, she swallowed, by order of her physician, near eighty drops of laudanum. Having slept for some hours, she awoke, and calling her daughter, desired her to take a pen and write what she should dictate. Miss Robinson, supposing that a request so unusual might proceed from the delirium excited by the opium, endeavoured in vain to dis-suade her mother from her purpose. Th e spirit of inspiration was not to be subdued, and she repeated, throughout, the admirable poem of ‘Th e Maniac,’ much faster than it could be committed to paper.
She lay, while dictating, with her eyes closed, apparently in the stupor which opium frequently produces, repeating like a person talking in her sleep. Th is aff ecting performance, produced in circumstances so singular, does no less credit to the genius than to the heart of the author.
On the ensuing morning Mrs. Robinson had only a confused idea of what had past, nor could be convinced of the fact till the manuscript was produced. She declared that she had been dreaming of mad Jemmy throughout the night, but was perfectly unconscious of having been awake while she composed the poem, or of the circumstances narrated by her daughter. (Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 129–32)
Th e similarities between this account and Coleridge’s preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ in 1816 are remarkable, especially given the fact that Coleridge allowed Robinson to read his poem in manuscript at least sixteen years before he published it. See ‘Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’ (Volume 2, pp. 195–7). See also M. J. Levy, ‘Coleridge, Mary Robin-son, and “Kubla Khan”’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 77 ( January 1992), pp. 159–66.
‘To Julius’1. JULIUS: 1806 gives an identifying footnote: ‘James Boaden, Esq. A. M. author of “Fon-
tainville Forest,” a tragedy; “Th e Secret Tribunal,” &c.’. See note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396.
412 Notes to pages 259–62
‘Th e Recantation. To Love’1. Golconda’s mines: see note 22 to Modern Manners, above, p. 405.2. austral: southern.
‘Anacreontic. To Cupid’1. Anacreontic: poetic form named aft er the Greek poet Anacreon (563–478 bc) to
describe a lyric poem that celebrates erotic love and pleasure. English poet Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), as Samuel Johnson notes in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, did much to revive the popular conception of Anacreontic poetry that Robinson employs.
‘Anselmo, the Hermit of the Alps’1. Of all affl iction … Pope: ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, ll. 189–90. 1806 omits the epigraph.
‘Ode to Night’1. ‘Ebon Tow’r’: possibly quoted from Sir William Jones’s frequently republished narrative
poem Th e Enchanted Fruit; or Th e Hindu Wife (1784), but Jones uses it to describe an Indian woman’s neck.
‘Bosworth Field’1. Battle of Bosworth: Th is battle, fought 22 August 1485, inaugurated the Tudor dynasty
and is depicted in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
‘Stanzas Inscribed to a Friend, when Confi ned by Severe Indisposition’
1. Stanzas … March, 1793: On 26 January 1793, the Oracle reported that Tarleton ‘has been confi ned for some days past, with a rheumatic fever, of which he still continues much indisposed’.
‘To Lisardo, on his Recovering from a Long Indisposition’1. Long Indisposition: 1806 gives a footnote here: ‘During which the Author nursed seven
months incessantly’. Gristwood writes that Tarleton’s recovery was slow and that ‘he was still reported as convalescent even in July’, Perdita, p. 266.
2. Lisardo’s: common character name in Spanish opera.3. ‘For sweet Discourses in our Time to come’: Romeo and Juliet, III.v.53.
‘Th e Adieu to Fancy’1. to the Same: ‘Lisardo’ (Tarleton) of the previous poem.
Notes to pages 263–85 413
‘Stanzas to the Author of a Celebrated Tragedy’1. Stanzas … Celebrated Tragedy: Possibly addressed to Edward Jerningham (1737–1812),
poet and playwright associated with the Della Cruscans and friend of the Prince of Wales; his tragedy Th e Siege of Berwick, fi rst performed November 1793, is one of a small number of original tragedies to appear on the London stage between 1790 and 1794.
‘To the Same’1. To the Same: Th is poem and the following two poems follow in 1794 ‘To ——,’ which
appeared originally as ‘Julia to ——’, above, p. 195.
‘Th e Snake and the Linnet’1. Th e Snake … A Fable: 1806 adds ‘Inscribed to her who will remember it’ and gives an
epigraph: ‘Self-pamper’d ignorance, in fancied state, / Frowns on the humbler dignity of worth! / Th ro’ life’s short summer, miserably great; / And, born illustrious – shames the pride of birth!’
‘Evening Meditations on St. Anne’s Hill’1. Fox: see note 45 to Modern Manners, above, p. 406.2. Runny Mead: Runnymede, a meadow along the Th ames, where, in 1215, King John
signed the Magna Carta.3. Edward IV: Edward IV (1442–83).4. Shore: Elizabeth ‘Jane’ Shore (c. 1445–c. 1527), the most notorious of the mistresses
of Edward IV. Nicholas Rowe’s Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) continued to be popular throughout the eighteenth century.
5. peerless bride: Elizabeth Woodville (1437–92), Queen consort of Edward IV. 6. Wolsey: Th omas, Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1471–1530), Catholic cardinal and confi dant of
King Henry VIII, held great secular and clerical power in England until the controversy over the king’s desire to annul his marriage resulted in Wolsey’s downfall.
7. be awhile forgot: Th e grammar here makes the sense diffi cult to discern: it seems to mean ‘for while forget …’.
‘Stanzas to a Friend, who Desired to Have my Portrait’1. Stanzas … Portrait: Th is is the fi nal poem in the 1794 Poems.2. ourselves to know: possibly a reference to Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–4): ‘Know then thy-
self, presume not God to scan’, II.1; ‘And all our Knowledge is, ourselves to know’, IV.398.
‘Ode for the 18th of January’1. Ode … 1794: Th is poem appears in the Oracle in a column with the heading ‘Th e Queen’s
Birthday’, the implied occasion of the ode, with the following headnote: ‘Of the periodi-cal tributes of the venal Muse, no one can entertain sentiments more contemptuous than our own. What follows is the verse of a Daughter of Liberty, and the tender compli-
414 Notes to pages 286–98
ment elicited by the private worth of the Throne will be felt and valued as proceeding declaredly from opinions that are popular. / Th e Ode is – as all composition should be – regular: there can be no diffi culty, and consequently slender praise in desultory com-position – but, indeed, with some few exceptions, and those resulting from a mistaken notion that they were imitating Pindar, all our best writers have written with the regu-lar returns of Stanza.’
‘Stanzas Written at the Shrine of Bertha’1. Stanzas Written at the Shrine of Bertha: Maria Elizabeth Robinson adds a note: ‘Th e
Authoress is indebted to her Mother for all the Poetry in these volumes not marked with inverted commas’. Th ose that are so marked are quotations from other poets. Th is poem appears in a letter written by the heroine, Laura Fitz-Owen, describing her pleasure at visiting the gothic resting place of the book’s title: she writes, ‘I experienced a perfect serenity of mind, and my sense of dread was subdued by the tranquillity around me. My soul glowed with poetical inspiration, I enjoyed a melancholy solace, more gratifying to my mind than the liveliest scenes could have bestowed’ (vol. 1, p. 69). All of the discrete poems in the novel are presented as poetical eff usions of the heroine, and some of them are excerpts from such poems by Robinson as ‘Ode to the Nightingale’ and ‘Petrarch to Laura’. Th ough a second edition appeared, the novel did not sell well and received very little commendatory press. See Davenport, Th e Prince’s Mistress, p. 181, Byrne, Perdita, p. 301.
‘Stanzas’1. Oracle and Public Advertiser: Th e Oracle merged with the Public Advertiser on Saturday,
1 March 1794.
‘Epilogue, by Mrs. M. Robinson’1. Fontainville Forest: Fountainville Forest, A Play, in Five Acts by James Boaden was staged
at Covent Garden in 1794 and published the same year (London: Hookham and Car-penter). Popular with audiences but dismissed by critics, it is an adaptation of the Gothic novel Th e Romance of the Forest (1791) by Ann Radcliff e (1764–1823), to whom Robin-son pays tribute. For Boaden, see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396.
2. half critic, and half wit: Boaden’s play had been ‘critically vilifi ed’; see M. Gamer, Roman-ticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 131–2.
3. Romances: a term applied to stories with medieval settings, such as Radcliff e’s novel.4. ‘had been brutes’: from the play Venice Preserv’d, or a Plot Discover’d (1682), I.i.336, by
Th omas Otway (1652–85).
‘Lines to the Rev. J. Whitehouse’1. Rev. J. Whitehouse: Revd John Whitehouse (1756–1824), poet and rector of Orling-
bury, Kent; he wrote an ‘Elegiac Ode to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (1792) and published Odes, Moral and Descriptive in 1794.
Notes to pages 298–311 415
2. enthusiast’s: Th e Gentleman’s Magazine provides a footnote here explaining that the following personifi cations are each subjects of Whitehouse’s odes: the enthusiast (l. 41), ambition (l. 45), war (l. 49), horror (l. 53), beauty (l. 59) and truth (l. 60).
3. Pindaric Gray: Th omas Gray (1716–71), who wrote ‘Th e Bard. A Pindaric Ode’ (1757) and ‘Th e Progress of Poesy. A Pindaric Ode’ (1757). Gray matriculated as an under-graduate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and eventually spent most of his adult life as a don there (the ‘loft y spires’ of the Cambridge architecture).
‘To Liberty’1. To Liberty: Publisher Daniel Stuart (1766–1846) purchased the Morning Post in January
1795, hiring Robinson immediately to contribute regularly. Stuart famously would also employ Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Charles Lamb – writers who, like Robin-son, shared Stuart’s moderate but liberal-leaning politics. See W. Hindle, Th e Morning Post, 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper (London: Routledge, 1937), pp. 65–104; R. S. Woof, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’, Studies in Bibli-ography, 15 (1962), pp. 149–89; Pascoe, Romantic Th eatricality, pp. 163–83; J. Hawley, ‘Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited’, in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds), British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Poli-tics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 62–75.
Th e Morning Post reprinted this poem a year later to promote the publication of Rob-inson’s Angelina; it appeared with the following headnote: ‘Th e following has had the particular Praise of the Margravine of Anspach; and few Ladies have a better Taste’. Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach (1750–1828), previously Lady Craven, writer and socialite, was the subject of some controversy, having had an extra-marital aff air with the man, Charles Alexander, Margrave of Anspach, who became, in 1791, her husband. Robinson’s last stage role was a breeches part in Craven’s 1781 play Th e Miniature Picture (Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 6).
2. SONNET I: Robinson clearly began conceiving of a long poem on liberty as early as 1795; here, it seems to have been originally a sonnet sequence. See ‘To Philanthropy’ below, p. 316. Both sonnets develop themes Robinson would revisit in longer blank-verse poems that would become ‘Th e Progress of Liberty’, published in 1801. She would interpolate these sonnets in her novel Angelina instead of continuing the sequence.
‘St. James’s Street’1. St. James’s Street … 1795: 18 January was the Queen’s birthday; see ‘Ode for the 18th of
January’, above, pp. 298–300. Th is poem also later appeared – without attribution – in La Belle Assemblée; being Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine ( July 1820), p. 33, titled ‘St. James’s Street, in 1820’.
‘To Philanthropy’1. SONNET II: see note 2 ‘To Liberty’, above.
416 Notes to pages 312–16
‘January, 1795’1. Weddings Royal: Aft er years of philandering, begun with Robinson, the Prince of Wales,
to the delight of the king and of the royal-wedding-loving English, had agreed to marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick (1768–1821), later Queen Caroline. See Gristwood, Perdita, pp. 284–5. Th e wedding took place on 8 April 1795 at St James’s Palace.
‘To the Author of Th e Secret Tribunal’1. To … Secret Tribunal: Original headnote: ‘For the elegant compliment which follows,
the person addressed begs thus publicly to acknowledge his gratitude. / He is under no diffi culty himself to divine the Author; and those who know her will see, without surprise, an instance of exquisite poetry and generous friendship fl owing from Mrs. Robinson.’ Th e Secret Tribunal (1795) is a Gothic drama by James Boaden (see note 1 to ‘Laura Maria to Arno’, above, p. 396). Given their history of poetic correspondence, Robinson appropriately signs the poem ‘Julia’.
‘Th e Storm’1. Th e Storm: Robinson revised this poem extensively as ‘Th e Negro Girl’ (see Volume 2,
pp. 166–9) for her volume Lyrical Tales (1800).
‘Sonnet to Sympathy’1. ‘sprinkle patience’: from Robinson’s ‘Sonnet. To My Beloved Daughter’ (1791), above, pp.
147–8.
Sappho and Phaon1. legitimate sonnet: In the eighteenth century, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet was
called ‘legitimate’, while the English or Shakespearean variation was called ‘illegitimate’ or simply called a quatorzain (14-line poem). Th e sonnet by Milton that Robinson presents is an example of the legitimate sonnet. Th e controversy to which Robinson refers is largely in consequence of the success of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) and her Elegiac Sonnets (1784), which eff ectively revived the form aft er a century of disuse and disfavour. See D. Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Son-net Claim’, European Romantic Review, 6 (1995), pp. 98–127.
2. humbler eff usion: Robinson gives Milton’s Sonnet I, generally referred to as ‘To the Night-ingale’, which fi rst appeared in the 1645 Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times. Milton wrote his fi rst sonnets in deliberate imitation of such Italian poets as Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Della Casa and Pietro Bembo. Milton avoided the example of other English poets such as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Wil-liam Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney in favour of the more diffi cult rhyme scheme of the Italian sonnet, which, as Robinson points out, was considered the ‘legitimate sonnet’. Five of the ten sonnets in the 1645 volume are actually in the Italian language; signifi -cantly the fi rst in the series is in English.
Notes to pages 317–21 417
3. Doctor Johnson: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), English poet, critic, editor, journalist and lexicographer. Robinson cites Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), where he wryly defi nes the sonnet as ‘a small poem’ and then sonneteer as ‘a small poet’. English poet Anna Seward (1747–1809), in the preface to her Original Sonnets (1799), defends the form from Johnson’s dismissal on the grounds of ‘splenetic aversion’ and claims it as ‘the best vehicle for a single detached thought, and elevated, or a tender sen-timent, and for succinct description’ (Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased fr om Horace (London: G. Sael, 1799), p. vi. Responding to the popularity of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, in a letter, Seward writes: ‘Boileau says that “Apollo, tired with votaries who assumed the name of poet, on the slight pretence of tagging fl imsy rhymes, invented the strict, the rigorous sonnet as a test of skill;” – but it was the legitimate son-net which Boileau meant, not that facile form of verse which Mrs Smith has taken, three elegiac stanzas closing with a couplet. Petrarch’s, and Milton’s, and Warton’s sonnets are legitimate’ (Letters of Anna Seward: Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1811), vol. 2, p. 162–3.
4. ‘Th e little poems … modulation’: Robinson quotes Smith’s preface to the 1786 third edition of Elegiac Sonnets; ‘Mr. Hayley’: William Hayley (1745–1820), English poet, biographer, critic and patron to Smith and, later, William Blake. Inspired by Smith, Hay-ley published a volume of Poems: Consisting of Odes, Sonnets, Songs, and Occasional Verses (1786). Robinson also cites Kendall’s 1793 volume; see note 1 to ‘Echo to Him Who Complains’, above, p. 394.
5. Cowper: William Cowper (1731–1800), English poet, hymnodist and translator of the Illiad and the Odyssey into English blank verse. Robinson quotes – not a sonnet – but a passage (ll. 493–504) from Table Talk (1782), a long satirical poem on politics, religion, literature and morality presented as a playful dialogue. Th is passage follows a discussion on liberty and morality that gives these lines particular political import, in their origi-nal context of the American War for Independence and here, in 1796. Cowper’s poem is a curious one for Robinson to cite here, conservative as it seems to be regarding the dangers of unchecked liberty, the need for national moral reform and the evangelical imperative of poetic fame. Moreover, the poem casts doubt on metrical skill, criticizing Pope for making poetry ‘a mere mechanic art’ (l. 655). Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq., 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1787), vol. 1.
6. Waller: Edmund Waller (1606–1687), English lyric poet and statesman.7. Eloisa to Abelard: Pope’s poem (1717), the most frequently cited work in Robinson’s
poetry.8. Spencer: Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99), English poet; Robinson refers to Th e Faerie
Queene (1590, 1596), not Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti (1595).9. Collins: see note 1 to ‘Ode to Rapture’, above, p. 410.10. Ovid and Pope: Pope translated the poetic epistle ‘Sappho to Phaon’ from Ovid’s
Heroides as a young man; scholars today question Ovid’s authorship of the poem, some believing it to be written later by an imitator. Th e epistle in question was discovered in the fi ft eenth century and was generally believed to be Ovid’s until questions about its authenticity were raised in the nineteenth century. See J. Knox (ed.), Heroides: Select Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 12–14. Nonetheless, Pope’s translation, despite Robinson’s attempts below to present Ovidian Latin, is her primary source for Sappho and Phaon. Pope’s translation of ‘Sappho to Phaon’ was fi rst published in 1712 but was included in Pope’s works throughout the eighteenth century.
418 Notes to pages 321–4
11. the tenth muse: Th e Greek Anthology (fi rst century bc), compiled by Meleager of Gadara, includes an epigram attributed to Plato that calls Sappho the tenth muse.
12. Lesbos: Robinson’s source for Sappho’s biography and likely her poetry as well is the work of Francis Fawkes (1721–77), English poet and translator. A second edition of Fawkes’s Works of Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Musæus was published 1789; and Fawkes’s ‘Life of Sappho’ and his translations reappeared in 1795, during which time Robinson was working on Sappho and Phaon; see vol. 13 of A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London: John & Arthur Arch), pp. 203–8. Joseph Addison also discusses Sappho’s life in Spectator, 223 (15 November 1711) and in 233 (27 November 1711). Robinson likely consulted both Fawkes and Addison.
13. story of Antiochus: Th is story is summarized by Addison in Spectator, 229 (22 November 1711); it comes from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius: Addison writes, ‘I wonder, that not one of the Criticks or Editors, through whose Hands this Ode has passed, has taken Occasion from it to mention a Circumstance related by Plutarch. Th at Author in the famous Story of Antiochus, who fell in Love with Stratonice, his Mother-in-law, and (not daring to discover his Passion) pretended to be confi ned to his Bed by Sickness, tells us, that Erasistratus, the Physician, found out the Nature of his Distemper by those Symp-toms of Love which he had learnt from Sappho’s Writings.’
14. the Sapphic: In Greek poetry the Sapphic stanza, imitated in Latin by Catullus and Horace, is a quatrain with three eleven-syllable lines followed by a fi ve-syllable line.
15. ‘Happy the man … care’: Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’, purportedly written at the age of twelve. P. Fussell, in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. edn (New York: Random House, 1979), also gives Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’ as an example of an English adaptation of the Sapphic stanza (p. 137).
16. Addison was … perused them: ‘I do not know, by the Character that is given of her Works, whether it is not for the Benefi t of Mankind that they are lost. Th ey were fi lled with such bewitching Tenderness and Rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a Reading.’ Spectator, 223 (15 November 1711).
17. Rhodope: a beautiful Greek courtesan; in Spectator, 233 (27 November 1711), Addison, translating from a Greek story, reports that Sappho advised her brother Charaxus to commit suicide upon falling in love with Rhodope; when she betrayed him as expected, he leapt from Leucada and perished in the ocean (see Robinson’s note below). Sappho’s praise of her brother is mentioned in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, II.10.24 (second century bc); a French translation appeared in 1791. Herodotus mentions a poem in which Sap-pho scolds her brother for his relationship with Rhodope (Histories, book 2, ch. 135).
18. eulogy of the Grecian Poetess: Robinson next quotes Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–95), French writer and aristocrat. Aft er studying philosophy and theology with the Jesuits he earned the title abbé, or secular cleric. He was an expert in numismatics but it was his 1788 Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce that earned him popular success. His account of Sappho, which Robinson quotes with some variants, appears in vol. 2, ch. 3, of his Travels of Anacharsis the Younger (1790–1), English translation by William Beaumont. In 1793 Revolutionary authorities arrested Barthélemy as an aristocrat and confi scated his wealth. Robinson’s quote is found in London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1790, vol. 2, pp. 63–5. Th e 1796 edition is shrunk from seven to four volumes.
19. Barthelemi says … Anacharsis the Younger: Barthélemy’s description of Leucata appears in vol. 3, ch. 36. Robinson’s quotation appears to be a paraphrase. See also Spectator, 233 (27 November 1711).
20. Love taught … Pope: ‘Sappho to Phaon’, ll. 7–8; Pope’s translation, from Ovid, ll. 7–8.
Notes to pages 325–8 419
21. tuneful numbers: harmonious and skilful poetic metre, versifi cation.22. coæval: as old as.23. Cypress: a symbol of mourning.24. Philosophy: probably Stoicism.25. Æolian harp: see note 2 to ‘To Zephyrus’, above, p. 411.26. Philomel: see note 2 to ‘To Him Who Will Understand It’, above, p. 381.27. cassia: fragrant shrub-like plant mentioned in Virgil’s Eclogues and in Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses.28. porphyry: hard purple stone quarried in Egypt.29. Phoenicia’s vine: ancient kingdom on the coast of Syria and Lebanon, north-west of Pal-
estine, famous for trading.30. Nereides: sea-nymph daughters of Nereus, with whom they lived at the bottom of the
Aegean Sea.31. Circe’s cave: In the Odyssey, Circe is an enchantress (who lives in a large house not a cave);
she seduces Odysseus and transforms his sailors into pigs. Fawkes’s translation of Apol-lonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, about Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, refers several times to Circe’s cave; this appears in same volume of A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, cited above, as Fawkes’s translations of Sappho.
32. Scythia: ancient land in south-east Eurasia around the northern coast of the Black Sea33. Sex mihi … Ovid: ll. 61–4. Compare Pope’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’, ll. 69–78.34. Arva Phaon … Ætnæ: see Pope’s translation, l. 11: ‘Phaon to Etna’s scorching fi elds
retires’.35. Idalian: Idalium, ancient village in Cyprus associated with Aphrodite.36. Me calor … Ovid: see Pope, l. 12: ‘While I consume with more than Etna’s fi res’.37. Hybla’s: town in Sicily famous for its honey.38. a brighter goddess there: Th is rather oblique reference likely refers to the myth of Cupid
and Psyche. English classicist Th omas Taylor (1758–1835) published Th e Fable of Cupid and Psyche, a translation of the episode from Lucius Apuleius’s Th e Golden Ass (c. ad 180). In Th e Golden Ass, Venus is angry to learn that dwellers on the island of Cyprus have begun worshipping the mortal woman Psyche instead of her.
39. Syren band: Th e sirens were sea nymphs, part woman and part bird, who would sing and thus lure sailors to their deaths.
40. burnish’d helm: compare Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.191. Here and below, Robinson appropriately echoes Enobarbus’s poetic description of Cleopatra on her barge as Sap-pho imagines herself similarly envisioned.
41. Tritons: Th e son of Neptune, god of the sea, Triton had the head and torso of a man but the tail of a fi sh, like a merman.
42. myriads of Cupids round the prow: cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.202.43. opal shell: the Venus Anadyoneme motif, the image of a nude Venus riding a shell; cf.
Botticelli’s famous painting Th e Birth of Venus (c. 1482).44. Dolphins: In the Homeric ‘Hymn to Pythian Apollo’ the god takes the form of a dolphin
and brings sailors to Delphi to be his priests. His cult was known as Delphinios, from the Greek for ‘dolphin’. Robinson further alludes to Apollo, the god of poetry and of the sun, in ll. 11–12 below.
45. Vide Sappho’s Ode: Th is sonnet draws heavily upon Sappho’s famous ode, praised by Longinus in the treatise On the Sublime (ch. 10). Fawkes’s translation is as follows:
420 Notes to pages 329–40
More happy than the gods is heWho, soft -reclining, sits by thee;His ears thy pleasing talk beguiles,His eyes thy sweetly dimpled smiles.
Th is, this, alas! alarm’d my breast,And robb’d me of my golden rest:While gazing on thy charms I hung,My voice died faultering on my tongue.
With subtle fl ames my bosom glows,Quick through each vein the poison fl ows:Dark, dimming mists my eyes surround;My ears with hollow murmurs sound.
My limbs with dewy chillness freeze,On my whole frame pale trembling seize,And losing colour, sense and breath,I seem quite languishing in death.
A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London: John & Arthur Arch, 1795), vol. 13, p. 227.
46. zone divine: Venus’s zone, or girdle (bustier), which has the power to infl ame desire, as in book XIV of the Illiad.
47. Erebus: the off spring of Chaos, personifi cation of darkness.48. Pope … puella, vale: ll. 99–100; the two quoted lines (9, 11) are ll. 113–14 from Pope’s
‘Sappho to Phaon’.49. Lethe’s: one of several rivers in Hades, Lethe is river of forgetfulness.50. Erato’s hand: Erato is the muse of lyric and erotic poetry.51. Pope … illa tibi. Ovid: ll. 183–4; Robinson quotes l. 216 from Pope.
‘Stanzas by Mrs. Robinson’1. Stanzas by Mrs. Robinson: A shorter version called ‘Stanzas, on the World’ appeared later
in Walsingham (1797).
‘Tabitha Bramble Visits the Metropolis’1. Tabitha Bramble: In November 1797 Robinson and Coleridge were both contracted by
Daniel Stuart to contribute poetry to the Morning Post, which he had purchased in 1795 (S. Curran, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in C. S. Wilson and J. Haefner (eds), Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35, on p. 19). Robinson wanted a female persona for satire similar to Wolcot’s ‘Peter Pindar’ and clearly was inspired by Scot-tish poet Andrew Macdonald (c. 1755–90), who published occasional satirical pieces as ‘Matthew Bramble’ in newspapers during the 1780s. Robinson thus contributed a series of odes and a few songs with the signature ‘Tabitha Bramble’, the name of the shrewish spinster in Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker (1771). Smollett introduces her as
Notes to pages 340–6 421
‘a maiden of forty-fi ve, exceedingly starched, vain, and ridiculous’ (ed. S. Regan (Lon-don: Penguin, 2008), p. 12). She is the sister of Squire Matthew Bramble, who does not die in Smollett’s novel. It is instead the ghost of Macdonald as Matthew Bramble whom Robinson’s Tabitha sees at the end of this poem. Moreover, in Humphry Clinker, Tabitha Bramble does not remain a spinster and marries at the end.
In the Memoirs, Maria Elizabeth writes that Robinson ‘commenced a series of Satirical Odes, on local and temporary subjects, to which was affi xed the signature of “Tabitha Bramble”’. She goes on to say that ‘these lighter compositions’ were ‘considered by the author as unworthy of a place with her collected poems’ (vol. 2, p. 148). But Robin-son’s daughter confuses these ‘Tabitha Bramble’ odes with the other ‘Tabitha’, ‘Tabitha Bramble’, ‘T. B.’ poems Robinson would write during her time heading up the ‘poetical department’ of the Morning Post from December 1799 until her death. Th ese later poems associated with the pseudonym seem to show a more carefully constructed persona than do the ones from late 1797 and early 1798; the early ones seem hastily composed and were probably written for money – although more overtly political than most of her other poetry. Th e later ones show a more characteristic employment of the persona as a performance, and several of those reappeared under her own name in Lyrical Tales. See L. Vargo, ‘Tabitha Bramble and Lyrical Tales’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 37–53.
2. Ephesian: jolly; see Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.v.18.3. Andromache: Hector’s widow in the Illiad, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602)
and Racine’s Andromaque (1667). Robinson’s Tabitha is in mourning for the death of Macdonald as Matthew Bramble.
4. Lucretia: legendary Roman woman who was raped by Sextus Tarquinius (Tarquin) and who then committed suicide; the story is the subject of Shakespeare’s poem Th e Rape of Lucrece (1594) and a famous painting by Titian.
5. Velina’s tender tale: Velina, A Poetical Fragment (1782), a narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas by Macdonald.
6. Mona’s: personifi cation of Wales (Cambria).
‘A Simple Tale’1. swinish multitude: from Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France (1790).2. pig of lead: pigs were oblong blocks of lead found in Britain left by the Romans, sometimes
with Latin inscriptions to indicate that all minerals were the property of the emperor.3. save our Bacon: from Peter Pindar’s Lousiad, II.637.
‘Tabitha Bramble, to her Cousins in Scotland’1. Tabitha Bramble … Scotland: Original headnote: ‘Th e following is one of the most elegant
pieces of humour that ever appeared in print’.2. Pindar (Peter-nam’d): see note 18 to Modern Manners, above, p. 405.3. Matthew Bramble: Andrew Macdonald; see note 1 to ‘Tabitha Bramble Visits the
Metropolis’, above, pp. 421–2.4. the nineteenth of December: King George III proclaimed 19 December 1797 a day of
national thanksgiving for recent British naval victories, most recently the Battle of Camperdown (11 October) over the Dutch; the king processed ceremonially to St Paul’s Cathedral with Prime Minister Pitt, clergy, members of Parliament, naval offi cers and sailors.
422 Notes to pages 346–51
5. Swine: sarcastic reference to Burke’s phrase ‘swinish multitude’ from his Refl ections on the Revolution in France (1790).
6. ‘justly vain’: Pope, Th e Rape of the Lock, IV.123.7. Lord Mayor: the Lord Mayor of London at the time was John William Anderson (c.
1736–1813).8. Willy: Prime Minister Pitt. 9. Duncan’s well-earn’d glory: Admiral Adam Duncan (1731–1804) commanded the
British fl eet to victory at the Battle of Camperdown (11 October 1797) and was imme-diately raised to the title Viscount Duncan.
10. Burleigh: Lord Burleigh, a minister of state in Sheridan’s farce Th e Critic, or A Tragedy Rehearsed (1779), who appears on stage but does not speak.
11. Hertford’s: Francis Seymour, second Marquess of Hertford (1743–1882); see note 1 to ‘On Seeing the Countess of Yarmouth’, in Volume 2, p. 432, on his wife.
12. Besborough: Frederick Ponsonby, third Earl of Bessborough (1758–1844), husband to Harriet, Countess of Bessborough, sister to the Duchess of Devonshire.
13. Northumberland: Hugh Percy, second Duke of Northumberland (1742–1817), friend of the Prince of Wales and opponent of Pitt.
14. Lord Robert Spencer: Robert Spencer (1747–1831), member of the King’s Privy Council and friend to the Prince of Wales, Fox and Tarleton.
15. Moira: the Earl of Moira, see note 1 to ‘Sappho – To the Earl of Moira’, in Volume 2, pp. 433–4.
16. Devonia: the Duchess of Devonshire; see note 1 to ‘Written on Richmond Hill’, above, p. 379.
[‘Your Gloves I Send’]1. [Your Gloves I Send]: Original headnote: ‘Th e following was lately sent by Mrs. Robin-
son to a Gentleman who had left a pair of gloves at her house’.2. Pratt: Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814), a close friend of Robinson, had been a clergy-
man, an actor and a bookseller, and was at this time a prolifi c writer. Pratt was part of a burgeoning literary circle of friends for Robinson that included, among others, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Porter. See ‘Lines, on Reading Mr. Pratt’s Vol-ume “Gleaning through England”’, in Volume 2, pp. 6–8.
3. lungs of leather: possibly quoted from frequently staged and widely reprinted comic opera Midas: A Burletta in Two Acts (1762) by Irish playwright Kane O’Hara (1712–82); Pratt had been an actor in Dublin around the time Midas was staged. 1801 gives quotation marks.
‘Ode Fourth. For New Year’s Day’1. Laureat: Henry James Pye (1745–1813), the (frequently ridiculed) Poet Laureate,
annually would pen a poem for the new year that would appear in most of the papers. 2. T—n: Tryon, presumably the Hon. Miss Tryon, Maid of Honour to the Queen, the sister
of William Tryon (1729–88), colonial governor of North Carolina. Peter Pindar, in his ‘Expostulation: or An Address to Miss Hannah More’ (1799), mentions a ‘Miss Tryon, Maid of Honour to the Queen’ (l. 33). An ‘Hon. Miss Tryon’ is listed as a subscriber to the novel Emma, or Th e Unfortunate Attachment (1773), attributed to Georgiana,
Notes to pages 351–6 423
Duchess of Devonshire (ed. J. D. Gross (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004)).
3. R—d’s: Richmond’s; see note 13 to Modern Manners, above, p. 404. Perhaps a stinging reference to the recent death (in 1796) of the Duchess of Richmond and to his well-known aff air with Bess Foster (see note 15 to Modern Manners, above, p. 404).
4. P—d’s: Portland’s; William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, third Duke of Portland (1738–1809), the previous Prime Minister and Pitt’s Home Secretary from 1794 to 1801.
5. O—w’s: Onslow’s; probably Th omas Onslow, second Earl of Onslow (1754–1827), a friend of the Prince of Wales; or, less likely, Sir Richard Onslow (1741–1817), a naval offi cer who had served valiantly earlier that year in the Battle of Camperdown against the Dutch.
6. A—r’s: Archer’s; Lady Sarah Archer, see note 35 to Modern Manners, above, pp. 405–6.7. Q—y’s: Queensberry’s; ironic reference to William Douglas, fourth Duke of Queens-
berry (1724–1810), formerly Lord of the Bedchamber to George III and a friend of the Prince of Wales.
8. W—d—m: William Windham (1750–1810), English statesman and Secretary of War under Prime Minister Pitt from 1794 to 1801.
9. P—tt: the Rt Hon. William Pitt (‘the Younger’) (1759–1806), statesman and Prime Minister of England from 1783 to 1801 (and again from 1804 to 1806).
‘A New Song, to an Old Tune’1. ***** ****: ‘Billy Pitt’, the Prime Minister (see note 9 to ‘Ode Fourth. For New Year’s Day’,
above).2. Derry down … down: a traditional refrain in popular English songs.3. pelf: money.4. Tr—y: Treasury. As Prime Minister, Pitt was also First Lord of the Treasury.5. P—d and W—m: Portland, Pitt’s Home Secretary; and Windham, Pitt’s Secretary of
War (see notes 4 and 8 to ‘Ode Fourth. For New Year’s Day’, above).6. drubbing the Dutch: Th e British Navy won a victory over the Dutch Batavian Republic,
a branch of the French Republic, at the Battle of Camperdown in October 1797, during the French Revolutionary wars.
7. invasions: In February 1797 a French force attempted to invade England via Wales but were captured, creating great alarm and inspiring frequent rumours of subsequent attempts; this inspired Coleridge’s 1798 Fears in Solitude volume.
8. virgin-boy: Pitt never married; perhaps a reference to rumours regarding Pitt’s sup-posed homosexuality.
‘Th e Sorrows of Memory’1. Th e Sorrows of Memory: also reprinted in the anthology Th e Lyre of Love, vol. 2.2. thee: Tarleton; Robinson and he had separated – painfully for her – in May 1797.3. doubly crown’d thee: Tarleton won his second election as MP for Liverpool in 1796.
424 Notes to pages 356–9
‘Ode Fift h’1. duke: the Duke of Portland, Home Secretary (see note 4 to ‘Ode Fourth. For New Year’s
Day’, above, p. 424), as suggested in l. 75. Th e poem is probably a response to the seces-sion of the Foxite Whigs from the House of Commons in 1797 aft er failed attempts to impeach Pitt, and to the generally repressive, Draconian atmosphere Pitt’s government created. In the fable, the Farmer seems to represent King George III, the Gander Pitt, the Eagle any of a number of Robinson’s Whig heroes, possibly Fox, who was the second son of Henry Fox, fi rst Baron Holland (1705–74) and thus of ‘lineage high’ (l. 26).
2. trump of Fame: see note 1 to ‘Ode to Vanity’, above, p. 390.3. Scotch Nightingale: probably Henry Dundas (1742–1811), later fi rst Viscount Melville,
a Scot, Pitt’s Secretary of State for War from 1794 to 1801.4. Sea Gull: possibly William Wyndham, Baron Grenville (1759–1834), Pitt’s Foreign
Secretary from 1791 to 1801 (and later Prime Minister); if Grenville, then the Sea Gull comparison would be ironic, given Grenville’s predilection for a land war on the Conti-nent, in opposition to Dundas, who advocated naval operations against the French. See B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 2006), pp. 82–8.
5. Portland stone: Jurassic-period limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorsetshire.
‘A New Song’1. T—y: Treasury.
‘Poetical Pictures. No. I. Th e Birth-Day of Liberty’1. Poetical Pictures … Liberty: Th e poems that would become in 1801 and 1806 the long
poem in two books Th e Progress of Liberty began in the Morning Post as a series of unsigned ‘Poetical Pictures’. Th e fi rst one, ‘Th e Birth-Day of Liberty’, appeared with the following editorial headnote, probably written by Robert Southey: ‘We have the pleas-ure of now laying before our readers the fi rst number of Poetical Pictures, of which we are promised the continuation. It is a fl attering circumstance to this Paper, that it should be selected for the publication of Lines in honour of Liberty; and it is still more fl attering that it should be selected by a person of so great a genius, and splendid imagination, as the Author of the following Lines.’
‘Poetical Pictures. No. II. Th e Progress of Liberty’1. Poetical Pictures … Liberty: Original headnote: ‘It is with much pleasure we lay before
our readers the Second Number of these beautiful poetical pieces. Th e description of the Court of Despotism would do honour to the pen of Milton’.
‘Poetical Pictures. No. III. Th e Horrors of Anarchy’1. Poetical Pictures … Anarchy: Th is poem fi rst appeared on 24 April with the following
headnote: ‘Th e following beautiful Piece is particularly interesting at this period, on account of the subject it treats’. Th e following day, however, it was reprinted in a corrected state: the headnote explains, ‘Th e following admirable Poem was printed so inaccurately
Notes to pages 361–9 425
in our Paper of yesterday, that we re-insert it in a correct state, at the particular request of many of our Poetical Readers’.
2. pendent world: Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.i.125.
‘Poetical Pictures. No. IV. Th e Vestal’1. Poetical Pictures … Vestal: Original headnote: ‘Th e following description of desponding
Love, and resigned Despair, is one of the most fanciful, accurate, and glowing Pictures of those Passions, that ever was laid before the Public. Th e passage respecting “Love’s pure Torch” is particularly beautiful.’
‘Poetical Pictures. No. V. Th e Monk’1. Poetical Pictures … Monk: Original headnote: ‘Th e following Piece traces out, with great
truth and genius, a Picture, which it would require the best of the Artists of Somerset House to execute. Th e alliance between Poetry and Painting never was more evident than in these lines.’ Somerset House is a magnifi cent building in London that housed several national societies, including the Royal Academy of Arts.
426 Notes to pages 369–72