Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Paula Byrne

accepted the explanation that Meribah gave for her addiction to drink: she was grief-stricken by the death of her husband and was the victim of a bullying, disciplinarian father, a stern-speaking silver-bearded Anabaptist who wandered round the girls’ schoolroom wearing nothing but a loose flowing robe which made him look like a necromancer. Mary noticed that the presence of the father always made the daughter reach for the bottle.

      Meribah Lorrington’s ‘state of confirmed intoxication’ even during teaching hours led to the demise of the Chelsea school. Some time later, Mary discovered a drunken beggar woman at dusk in the street. She gave her money, then, to her surprise, the woman said, ‘Sweet girl, you are still the angel I ever knew you.’ Their eyes met and Mary was horrified to discover that it was her old teacher. She took her home, gave her fresh clothes, and asked her where she lived. Meribah refused to say, but promised she would call again in a few days. She never did. Years later, Mary learned that her brilliant but flawed mentor had died a drunk in the Chelsea workhouse.

      Mary describes herself in her Memoirs as well developed for her age, tall and slender. At the age of 10, she says, she looked 13. During her fourteen-month period boarding at the Lorrington Academy, she visited her mother every Sunday. One afternoon over tea she had a marriage proposal from a friend of her father’s. Hester was a little surprised; she asked her visitor how old he thought her daughter was. ‘About sixteen,’ he replied. Hester informed him that Mary was still only 12. He found this hard to believe, given that she was such a well-developed girl both physically and intellectually, but he was prepared to wait – he was a captain in the Navy, just off on a two-year voyage. He had great prospects for the future and hoped that Mary might still be unattached on his return. Just a few months later he perished at sea.

      In this version of Mary’s first encounter with male desire, she is the innocent: a child, albeit with the body of a woman. The first ‘biography’ of her, published at the height of her public fame in 1784, tells a very different story. The Memoirs of Perdita is a source that must be treated with great caution, since – as will be seen – it was written with both a political and a pornographic agenda. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the book’s anonymous author had a very well-informed source. The ‘editor’ claimed in his introduction that ‘the circumstances of her life were communicated by one who has for several years been her confidant, and to whose pen she has been indebted for much news paper panegyric’ – a description that very much suggests Henry Bate of the Morning Herald, a key figure in Mary’s story. According to the ‘editor’ of The Memoirs of Perdita, ‘the following history may with propriety be said to be dictated by herself: many of the mere private transactions were indisputably furnished by her; nor could they possibly originate from any other source’.²⁴ In some instances this is true: The Memoirs of Perdita published personal information about Mary’s life that was not previously in the public domain. In other instances, however, these supposed memoirs can safely be assumed to offer nothing more than malicious fantasy.

      According to The Memoirs of Perdita, Mary’s first love affair occurred soon after the Darbys moved to London. Her father supposedly brought home a handsome young midshipman called Henry, who was allowed ‘private interviews’ and ‘little rambles’ with Mary. They went boating together on the Thames. On one occasion, they stopped for refreshments at Richmond. The only room the landlord had available in which to serve them with a glass of wine and a biscuit happened to be a bedchamber – which had crimson curtains that matched the ‘natural blush’ to which Mary was excited by the sight of the bed. The young midshipman duly took her hand and sat her with him on the white counterpane. ‘Perdita’s blushes returned – and Henry kissed them away – She fell into his arms – then sunk down together on the bed. – The irresistible impulse of nature, in a moment carried them into those regions of ecstatic bliss, where sense and thought lie dissolved in the rapture of mutual enjoyment.’²⁵

      The affair supposedly lasted for some time, until the ‘jovial tar’ was summoned back to his ship, never to be seen again. In all probability, ‘Henry’ is pure invention, perhaps spun at second hand from some passing remark about the sailor’s proposal. After all, given that Nicholas Darby was estranged from his family, he was not there to introduce a midshipman into the household. But it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the young Mary – steeped as she was in poetry and romance – might have had some kind of sexual awakening in her early teens.

      Mary was moved to a more orthodox boarding school in Battersea, run by a less colourful but nevertheless ‘lively, sensible and accomplished woman’ named Mrs Leigh.²⁶ Nicholas Darby then stopped sending money for his children’s education. The resolute Hester took matters into her own hands and set up her own dame school in Little Chelsea. The teenage Mary became a teacher of English language, responsible for prose and verse compositions during the week and the reading of ‘sacred and moral lessons, on saints’-days and Sunday evenings’.²⁷ Readers of her Memoirs would have been at best amused at the idea of one of the most notorious women of the age presenting herself as a teacher of morals and religion. Mary also had responsibility for supervising the pupils’ wardrobes, and making sure that they were properly dressed and undressed by the servants.

      In 1770, Nicholas Darby ran into more problems. Just as he had a thousand pounds’ worth of seal skins ready for market, a British military officer arrived at his Labrador fishery and confiscated all his produce and tackle on the grounds that he was illegally employing Frenchmen and using French rather than British equipment. He was left marooned. He eventually made it back to London and asked the Board of Trade for compensation, claiming that he did not know that his Canadian crew were actually French subjects. The Board of Trade passed the buck, saying it had no jurisdiction in the case. Nicholas had a moral victory when the Court of King’s Bench awarded him £650 damages against the Lieutenant who had seized the goods, but the money was uncollectible. In the circumstances, one might have expected him to be grateful for his estranged wife’s initiative in establishing a school. But he was a proud man: ‘he considered his name as disgraced, his conjugal reputation tarnished, by the public mode which his wife had adopted for revealing to the world her unprotected situation’.²⁸ He lived openly with his mistress, but could not abide seeing his wife publicly revealed as someone akin to an impoverished widow or spinster. He demanded that the school be closed immediately. It had lasted for less than a year.

      Hester and her children moved to Marylebone. Like Chelsea, this was an expanding village on the edge of London, but it had a less rural feel and was fast being recognized as an integral part of the metropolis. Mary reverted from teacher to pupil, finishing her education at Oxford House, situated near the top of Marylebone High Street, bordering on Marylebone Gardens. Nicholas Darby and his mistress Elenor settled in the more fashionable and gentrified Green Street, off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, a district that was becoming increasingly popular with merchants and rich shopkeepers as well as the gentry.

      Mary must have been acutely conscious of the differences in lifestyle between her mother and her father. She sometimes accompanied her father on walks in the fields nearby, where he confessed that he rather regretted his ‘fatal attachment’ to his mistress – they had now been together so long and been through so much that it was impossible to dissolve the relationship. On one of their walks, they called on the Earl of Northington, a handsome young rake and politician, whose father had been one of the sponsors of Darby’s Labrador schemes. They were very well received, with Mary being presented as the goddaughter of the older Northington (now deceased). In later years, she did not deny rumours that she might have been the old Lord’s illegitimate daughter. The young Lord, meanwhile, treated her with ‘the most flattering and gratifying civility’.²⁹

      When Nicholas returned to America, Hester moved her children to Southampton Buildings in Chancery Lane. This was lawyers’ territory, backing onto Lincoln’s Inn. She had placed herself under the protection of Samuel Cox, a lawyer. Perhaps