Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Paula Byrne

attention: it was inscribed ‘by Permission, to her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire’. The dedication described the Duchess as ‘the friendly Patroness of the Unhappy’ author and ended by ‘repeating my Thanks to you, for the unmerited favors your Grace has bestowed upon, Madam, Your Grace’s most obliged and most devoted servant, MARIA ROBINSON’.

      Georgiana Spencer was Mary’s exact contemporary in age, but came from a very different background: born into one of England’s most illustrious aristocratic families in 1757, she became Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of Chatsworth – one of the greatest houses in England – in the summer of 1774, just before the Robinsons went on the run from their creditors. She was already cutting a spectacular figure in London society. Someone mentioned to Mary that Georgiana was an ‘admirer and patroness of literature’. Mary arranged for her little brother George, an extremely handsome boy, to deliver to the Duchess a neatly bound copy of her first collection of poems. She also enclosed a note ‘apologizing for their defects, and pleading my age as the only excuse for their inaccuracy’.¹⁸ Georgiana admitted George and asked particulars about the author, as Mary no doubt expected. Georgiana was touched by the plight of the young mother sharing her husband’s captivity. She invited Mary to Devonshire House, her magnificent town residence in Piccadilly, the very next day. Robinson urged her to accept the invitation and she duly went, dressed modestly in a plain brown satin gown.

      Mary was mesmerized by the Duchess’s look and manner: ‘mildness and sensibility beamed in her eyes, and irradiated her countenance’. Georgiana listened to her story and expressed surprise at seeing such a young person experiencing ‘such vicissitude of fortune’. With ‘a tear of gentle sympathy’, she gave her some money. She asked Mary to visit again, and to bring her daughter with her. Mary made many visits to her new friend – the two women both beautiful and cultivated, but in such contrasting circumstances. Mary described the Duchess as ‘the best of women’, ‘my admired patroness, my liberal and affectionate friend’.¹⁹ They would continue to be closely acquainted for many years. Georgiana loved to hear the particulars of Mary’s sorrows: her father’s desertion, her poverty, her unfaithful husband, her troubles as a young mother, her captivity. She shed tears of pity as she heard the story. Inspired by the Duchess’s patronage, Mary finished the poem that put her reflections on prison life into heroic couplets.

      Mary remained unwaveringly loyal to those who helped her. She loved the Duchess and years later paid tribute in verse to her great qualities. She was particularly gratified by her friendship at a time when numerous female companions of happier days had deserted her. It was with the latter in mind that she wrote in her Memoirs of how ‘From that hour I have never felt the affection for my own sex which perhaps some women feel.’ She added with uncharacteristic bitterness: ‘Indeed I have almost uniformly found my own sex my most inveterate enemies … my bosom has often ached with the pang inflicted by their envy, slander, and malevolence.’²⁰ This outburst is, however, belied by the female friendships that she forged and sustained throughout her life.

      As spouse of a debtor, she was free to come and go, but the visits to Georgiana were the only time she ever left the Fleet. While she was away from the prison being entertained in the splendour of Devonshire House, Robinson took the opportunity to do some entertaining of his own: Albanesi procured prostitutes for him and brought them into the prison. If the Memoirs are to be believed, after a while Mary was humiliated even further when her husband took to sleeping with prostitutes while she and little Maria Elizabeth were in the very next room. When she confronted him, he brazenly denied the charges.

      Despite Albanesi’s supposed responsibility for Tom’s infidelities, the Italian engraver and his glamorous Roman wife became the Robinsons’ closest friends among their fellow detainees. The wife, Angelina, was formerly mistress to a prince and subsequently the lover of the Imperial Ambassador, Count de Belgeioso. Unlike Mary, she chose not to share her husband’s captivity, but she paid frequent visits, dressed to the nines and comporting herself like a duchess. She was a fascinating older woman, in her thirties, a ‘striking sample of beauty and of profligacy’ who gave Mary an insight into the life of a courtesan. She always insisted on visiting Mary when she came to see Albanesi, and she would ridicule the teenage bride for her ‘romantic domestic attachment’. She told Mary that she was wasting her beauty and her youth; she ‘pictured, in all the glow of fanciful scenery, the splendid life into which I might enter, if I would but know my own power, and break the fetters of matrimonial restriction’.²¹ She suggested that Mary should place herself under the protection of rake and celebrated horseman, Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke – she had already told him about Mary and his lordship was ready to offer his services.

      Mary blamed Angelina for trying to persuade her into a life of dishonour. Both the Albanesis filled her young head with tales of ‘the world of gallantry’. Despite the disapproval of the couple expressed years later in the Memoirs, Mary was obviously enthralled by the way in which they offered a window into another world – a world that she had briefly tasted and must have longed to return to. Albanesi sang and played various musical instruments with easy accomplishment. And he told good jokes: Mary would herself become a notable wit.

      On 3 August 1776, Robinson was discharged from the Fleet. He had managed to set aside some of his debts and give fresh bonds and securities for others. Mary wrote to her ‘lovely patroness’ with the news – she was at Chatsworth – and received a congratulatory letter in return. At the first possible opportunity, Mary headed for Vauxhall: ‘I had frequently found occasion to observe a mournful contrast when I had quitted the elegant apartment of Devonshire-house to enter the dark galleries of a prison; but the sensation which I felt on hearing the music and beholding the gay throng, during this first visit in public, after so long a seclusion, was indescribable.’²²

^*Sometimes called Mary and sometimes Maria (both by her mother and herself) – I will call her Maria Elizabeth throughout, to distinguish her from her mother.

       CHAPTER 6 Drury Lane

      The invitation to meet the new actresses was whispered as though they were meditating to exhibit something monstrous and extraordinary … She had engaged in a profession which vulgar minds, though they are amused by its labours, frequently condemn with unpitying asperity. She was engaging, discreet, sensible, and accomplished: but she was an actress, and therefore deemed an unfit associate for the wives and daughters of the proud, the opulent, and the unenlightened.

      Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter

      Though Mary was thrilled to be back on the social scene at Vauxhall, the Robinsons had no means of sustaining their expensive lifestyle. Tom was still up to his ears in debt; he had failed to complete his legal apprenticeship and his father refused to aid him. Mary’s poems were not going to make her serious money, so once again she turned her mind to the theatre. This time she was not going to let her husband or her mother stop her. Now that he needed the money, Tom’s scruples about the profession swiftly evaporated.

The Robinsons took lodgings with a confectioner in Old Bond Street, near to London’s main shopping thoroughfare. Walking one day in St James’s Park with her husband, Mary met the actor William Brereton, who was soon to marry her school friend, the actress Priscilla Hopkins.^* He joined them for dinner. He had seen Mary’s rehearsals with Garrick and was enthusiastic when she told him that she was thinking of reactivating her stage career. Some time later, when the Robinsons had moved to ‘a more quiet situation’ in the form of ‘a very neat and comfortable suite of apartments in Newman-street’,¹ Brereton appeared unexpectedly one morning