Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Paula Byrne

‘Though Mrs Robinson is by no means an Aiken or a More, she sometimes expresses herself decently enough on her subject’ (Anna Aikin and Hannah More were the most admired ‘bluestocking’ poets of the age).¹²

      The volume includes thirty-two ballads, odes, elegies, and epistles. For the most part, they consist of pastorals (‘Ye Shepherds who sport on the plain, / Drop a tear at my sorrowful tale’) and moral effusions (pious outbursts addressed to Wisdom, Charity, Virtue, and so forth) that are typical of later eighteenth-century poetry at its most routine. But a handful of the poems show signs of future promise: there are, for instance, some brief character sketches in which one may see the seeds of the future novelist’s voice.

      Several of the poems were modelled on the work of Anna Aikin (later Barbauld): ‘The Linnet’s Petition’, for example, was an imitation of her ‘The Mouse’s Petition’. Women’s poetry of the period was often written in the form of verse letters. Mary’s ‘Epistle to a Friend’ is written with a lightness of touch and warmth of feeling:

      Permit me dearest girl to send

      The warmest wishes of a friend

      Who scorns deceit, or art,

      Who dedicates her verse to you,

      And every praise so much your due,

      Flows genuine from her heart.¹³

      One is left wondering about the identity of the friend, especially as the following poem is an elegy ‘On the Death of a Friend’, which ends ‘May you be number’d with the pure and blest, / And Emma’s spirit be Maria’s guard.’ We know hardly anything about Mary’s female companionship of these early years, beyond a passing reference in the Memoirs to her close friendship with a talented, witty, and literary-minded woman called Catherine Parry. In Mary’s last years, by contrast, she was sustained by a large circle of intellectually accomplished women. The only one of these early poems with a clearly identifiable biographical subject is an elegy on the death of the ‘generous’ Lord Lyttelton, whose poems were among the first that Mary loved. Needless to say, it makes no mention of the younger Lord Lyttelton.

      The one poem in the collection that has real merit, and that deserves to be anthologized, is a ‘Letter to a Friend on leaving Town’. The virtue of a simple country life as against the vice of indulgence in the city was a common poetic theme in the period, but here there is a real sense of Mary writing from experience:

      Gladly I leave the town, and all its care,

      For sweet retirement, and fresh wholsome air,

      Leave op’ra, park, the masquerade, and play,

      In solitary groves to pass the day.

      Adieu, gay throng, luxurious vain parade,

      Sweet peace invites me to the rural shade,

      No more the Mall, can captivate my heart,

      No more can Ranelagh, one joy impart.

      Without regret I leave the splendid ball,

      And the inchanting shades of gay Vauxhall,

      Far from the giddy circle now I fly,

      Such joys no more, can please my sicken’d eye.

      Although Mary adopts the conventional pose of condemning fashionable London life, all her poetic energy belongs to that life – her heart is still captivated by Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Yet she also has the maturity to see their dangers. At the centre of the poem is a telling portrait of the society belle who loses her looks, and thus the interest of the gentlemen of fashion, but remains addicted to the treadmill of the social calendar:

      Beaux without number, daily round her swarm,

      And each with fulsome flatt’ry try’s to charm.

      Till, like the rose, which blooms but for an hour,

      Her face grown common, loses all its power.

      Each idle coxcomb leaves the wretched fair,

      Alone to languish, and alone despair,

      To cards, and dice, the slighted maiden flies,

      And every fashionable vice apply’s,

      Scandal and coffee, pass the morn away,

      At night a rout, an opera, or a play;

      Thus glide their life, partly through inclination,

      Yet more, because it is the reigning fashion.

      Thus giddy pleasures they alone pursue,

      Merely because, they’ve nothing else to do;

      Whatever can afford their hearts delight,

      No matter if the thing be wrong, or right;

      They will pursue it, tho’ they be undone,

      They see their ruin, – yet still they venture on.¹⁴

      This poem – an accomplished piece of work for a 17-year-old girl – was almost certainly written when Mary was moving in the fashionable circles of London society. It is at one level an anxious imagining of her own future fate. But seeing it in print, she must have wished she was back gliding her life away in the world of ‘scandal and coffee’ rather than languishing in the Fleet surrounded by women whose good looks had been worn down by penury.

      Mary knew that her own beauty was fragile. She wrote in the Memoirs of how during her ‘captivity’ in prison her health was ‘considerably impaired’. She declined, however, to ‘enter into a tedious detail of vulgar sorrows, of vulgar scenes’.¹⁵ At this point in the original manuscript of the Memoirs several lines are heavily crossed out. It is impossible to decipher the words beneath the inking over, but there just might be a reference to pregnancy. It is therefore striking that the malicious but well-informed John King wrote in his Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite: ‘the Husband took refuge in the Fleet, immured within whose gloomy Walls they pined out Fifteen Months in Abstemiousness and Contrition, where her constrained Constancy gave birth to a Female Babe, distorted and crippled from the tight contracted fantastic Dress of her conceited Mother’.¹⁶ Since ‘Fifteen Months’ is an exactly correct detail, we cannot immediately dismiss King’s other piece of information about this period: his startling claim that Mary had a baby while in prison. ‘Distorted and crippled’ is certainly not a description of the lovely little Maria Elizabeth. Could it then be that the deleted passage in the Memoirs referred to a miscarriage or an infant death?

      Imprisonment for debt was known as ‘captivity’, and this gave Mary the title for a new poem, much her longest work to date. Written in an overblown style, it is a plea on behalf of the wives and children of imprisoned debtors:

      The greedy Creditor, whose flinty breast

      The iron hand of Avarice hath press’d,

      Who never own’d Humanity’s soft claim,

      Self-interest and Revenge his only aim,

      Unmov’d, can hear the Parent’s heart-felt sigh,

      Unmov’d, can hear the helpless Infant’s cry.

      Nor age, nor sex, his rigid breast can melt,

      Unfeeling for the pangs, he never felt.¹⁷

      ‘Captivity’ was published in the autumn of 1777, just over a year after the Robinsons’ release from the Fleet. It was accompanied by a poetic tale of marital infidelity called ‘Celadon and Lydia’, into which Mary presumably poured some of her anger over Robinson’s philandering. This second volume of poetry was more