Foremother poet: Mary Leapor (1722-46): satirical melancholy; wry, warm, affectionate, a housekeeper, held in high regard

An eighteenth century print of a girl feeding a bird

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve another foremother poet blog, one which I hope will now prompt me to read a literary biographical study, Richard Greene, Mary Leapor, a Study in 18th Century Women’s Poetry. I’ve had it for years and this is long overdue.

Mary Leapor was the daughter of a gardener, self-educated (discouraged by her mother from writing), said to be “a cook-maid in a gentleman’s family at Brackley (probably Weston Hall, owned by the Sitwell family); like Mary Chandler she is (in effect) said to have been disabled (“extremely swarthy, and quite emaciated, with a long crane-neck, and a short body”). Her poems circulated and attraction the attention of Bridget Freemantle (Artemisa), the daughter of a Rector of Hinton; the became friends and Freemantle assisted Mary to circulate her poems, and organized a subscription to publish her poetry, sent her play and samples to London. She was proud but uncomfortable, had worried rather that if her father were to die, she’d end up “naked and defenseless,” and longed to be able to build a subsistence income for herself. Alas, in “poor health,” she died of measles at age 24. Isaac Browne, Samuel Richardson and Christopher Smart were among those who were responsible for the printing of an extensive volume, which was liked and a substantial selection printed in the 1755 Poems for Eminent Ladies. I find her satiric and wryly melancholy tone very appealing, her reversals of conventions, an identity, a personality emerges.

I first came across Mary Leapor in Donna Landry’s book, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring class women’s poetry in Britain, 1739-96, and I was struck by how she felt marginalized — this in a class system where this should have been taken for granted. Also that she said she learned by reading, her mentors were people in books because there was no way she could reach such people otherwise; when I wrote my translation of Vittoria Colonna, I wrote that I was mentored by the poets and critics who had studied poetry like hers. I too had no one to speak to. Then the accusations that she was “repugnant,” and her satiric pastoral responses. The poems are skilled, alive with life, innovative, says Bill Overton (who wrote one of the best books ever written on Anthony Trollope’s art). She fits very much into the image of 18th century woman poet, especially her friendship poetry. She is a feminist in her Essay on a Woman, where the injustice of her lot is the result of the social order not women themselves.

Here’s how it opens:

Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flow’r,
Too soft for business and too weak for pow’r:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;
Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
‘Tis wealth alone inspires ev’ry grace,

I have not forgot my promise to keep these blogs shorter. So I refer the interested reader to the Eighteenth Century Archive (to which I add a few essays I have read), where many of her poems are printed, there’s a link to a facsimile of the contemporary book, books and essays are cited.

A contemporary photo of Weston Hall

This is what she wrote when her play was returned to her: to me it is so touching how her play is a living thing, how she feels it was not respected (because she felt herself not respected); how she wanted to protect it.

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret.

Welcome , dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither hast thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?

But now I’ll keep you here secure:
No more you view the smoaky Sky:
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.

The long country house poem she wrote as Ursula (one of the pastoral-classical-romance pseudonyms she used; another was Mira); is a burlesque on the house she served in (and doubtless had limited space in), which she called Crumble Hall (one source said it was Edgecote Hall but I could find no further information about the asssertion). Presumably it could’ve needed fixing.

From Crumble Hall:

We sing once more, obedient to her Call,
Once more we sing; and ’tis of Crumble-Hall;
That Crumble-Hall , whose hospitable Door
Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor;
Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires,
Were known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires …
Of this rude Palace might a Poet sing
From cold December to returning Spring …
Tell how the Building spreads on either Hand,
And two grim Giants o’er the Portals stand;
Whose grisled Beards are neither comb’d nor shorn,
But look severe, and horribly adorn …

Then step within—there stands a goodly Row
Of oaken Pillars—where a gallant Show
Of mimic Pears and carv’d Pomgranates twine,
With the plump Clusters of the spreading Vine …
From hence we turn to more familiar Rooms;
Whose Hangings ne’er were wrought in Grecian Looms:
Yet the soft Stools, and eke the lazy Chair,
To Sleep invite the Weary, and the Fair.

Shall we proceed?—Yes, if you’ll break the Wall:
If not, return, and tread once more the Hall.
Up ten Stone Steps now please to drag your Toes,
And a brick Passage will succeed to those.
Here the strong Doors were aptly fram’d to hold
Sir Wary ‘s Person, and Sir Wary ‘s Gold.
Here Biron sleeps, with Books encircled round;
And him you’d guess a Student most profound.
Not so—in Form the dusty Volumes stand:
There’s few that wear the Mark of Biron ‘s Hand …

Would you go farther?—Stay a little then:
Back thro’ the Passage—down the Steps again;
Thro’ yon dark Room—Be careful how you tread
Up these steep Stairs—or you may break your Head.
These Rooms are furnish’d amiably, and full:
Old Shoes, and Sheep-ticks bred in Stacks of Wool;
Grey Dobbin ‘s Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow;
Wheel-spokes—the Irons of a tatter’d Plough.

No farther—Yes, a little higher, pray:
At yon small Door you’ll find the Beams of Day,
While the hot Leads return the scorching Ray.
Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish’d Eye:
Meads, Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie.
From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl’d,
And drags down Mira to the nether World.

Thus far the Palace—Yet there still remain
Unsung the Gardens, and the menial Train.

[In “her” kitchen]

O’er-stuff’d with Beef, with Cabbage much too full,
And Dumpling too (fit Emblem of his Skull!)
With Mouth wide open, but with closing Eyes
Unwieldy Roger on the Table lies.
His able Lungs discharge a rattling Sound:
Prince barks, Spot howls, and the tall Roofs rebound.
Him Urs’la views; and, with dejected Eyes,
“Ah! Roger , Ah!” the mournful Maiden cries:
“Is wretched Urs’la then your Care no more,
That, while I sigh, thus you can sleep and snore?
Ingrateful Roger ! wilt thou leave me now?
I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart,
Because I know my Roger will have Part.”

Thus she—But now her Dish-kettle began
To boil and blubber with the foaming Bran.
The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties …

Strange Sounds and Forms shall teaze the gloomy Green;
And Fairy-Elves by Urs’la shall be seen:
Their new-built Parlour shall with Echoes ring:
And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing.

An amazing fantasia.

Here we find her quite like Shakespeare in one of his sonnets, making fun of the stereotypes of beauty so often uttered so banally, except here she is talking of illness and disability in such a way as I feel she must herself have known some of this: she also captures the absurdity of male idealized aggression (it’s) against women.

The Headache

Aurelia, when your zeal makes known
Each woman’s failing but your own,
How charming Silvia’s teeth decay,
And Celia’s hair is turning grey;
Yet Celia gay has sparkling eyes,
But (to your comfort) is not wise:
Methinks you take a world of pains
To tell us Celia has no brains.

Now you wise folk, who make such a pother
About the wit of one another,
With pleasure would your brains resign,
Did all your noddles ache like mine.

Not cuckolds half my anguish know,
When budding horns begin to grow;
Nor battered skull of wrestling Dick,
Who late was drubbed at single-stick;
Nor wretches that in fevers fry,
Not Sappho when her cap’s awry,
E’er felt such torturing pangs as I;
Not forehead of Sir Jeffrey Strife,
When smiling Cynthio kissed his wife.

Not lovesick Marcia’s languid eyes,
Who for her simpering Corin dies,
So sleepy look or dimly shine,
As these dejected eyes of mine:
Not Claudia’s brow such wrinkles made
At sight of Cynthia’s new brocade.

Just so, Aurelia, you complain
Of vapours, rheums, and gouty pain;
Yet I am patient, so should you,
For cramps and headaches are our due:
We suffer justly for our crimes,
For scandal you, and I for rhymes;
Yet we (as hardened wretches do)
Still the enchanting vice pursue;
Our reformation ne’er begin,
But fondly hug the darling sin.

Yet there’s a might difference too
Between the fate of me and you;
Though you with tottering age shall bow,
And wrinkles scar your lovely brow,
Your busy tongue may still proclaim
The faults of every sinful dame:
You still may prattle nor give o’er,
When wretched I must sin no more.
The sprightly Nine must leave me then,
This trembling hand resign its pen:
No matron ever sweetly sung,
Apollo only courts the young.
Then who would not (Aurelia, pray)
Enjoy his favours while they may?
Nor cramps nor headaches shall prevail:
I’ll still write on, and you shall rail.

Her epitaph or Mira’s Will

Imprimis — My departed Shade I trust
To Heav’n — My Body to the silent Dust;
My Name to publick Censure I submit,
To be dispos’d of as the World thinks fit;
My Vice and Folly let Oblivion close,
The World already is o’erstock’d with those;
My Wit I give, as Misers give their Store,
To those who think they had enough before.
Bestow my Patience to compose the Lives
Of slighted Virgins and neglected Wives;
To modish Lovers I resign my Truth,
My cool Reflexion to unthinking Youth;
And some Good-nature give (‘tis my Desire)
To surly Husbands, as their Needs require;
And first discharge my Funeral — and then
To the Small poets I bequeath my Pen.
Let a small Sprig (true Emblem of my Rhyme)
Of blasted Laurel on my Hearse recline;
Let some grave Wight, that struggles for Renown,
By chanting Dirges through a Market-Town,
With gentle Step precede the solemn Train;
A broken Flute upon his Arm shall lean.
Six comick Poets may the Corse surround,
And All Free-holders; if they can be found:
Then follow next the melancholy Throng,
As shrewd instructors, who themselves are wrong.
The Virtuoso, rich in Sun-dry’d Weeds,
The Politician, whom no Mortal heeds,
The silent Lawyer, chamber’d all the Day,
And the stern Soldier that receives no Pay.
But stay — the Mourners shou’d be first our Care,
Let the freed Prentice lead the Miser’s Heir;
Let the young relict wipe her mournful Eye,
And widow’d Husbands o’er their Garlick cry.
All this let my Executors fulfil,
And rest assur’d that this is Mira’s Will;
Who was, when she these Legacies design’d,
In Body healthy, and compos’d in Mind.

Another blog in appreciation (Tom Clark) where you can find comments in the form of appreciative verse about her. I love his choice of image to evoke her

Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot, In a Park

Ellen

Foremother poet: Mary Chandler (1687-1745): a disabled and by choice unmarried poet, milliner, shopkeeper

The better known women writers across the century

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a long while since I wrote a foremother poet blog and so I am happy to contribute this one, though I don’t have the extensive or full printed sources I like to have before writing one of these.

Mary Chandler (1687-1745) was one of a growing number of women poets of the 18th century who were working women, not pseudo-gentry, not gentlewomen. It’s usually put (and was at the time) that because she “had a crooked spine,” she did not marry but instead opened a milliner’s shop in Bath (nearby the Pump Room where Elizabeth Montagu and her friends, in history called the Bluestockings would sometimes meet). From Chandler’s poems she seems not unhappy (a number of friendship poems of great warmth), and the most famous is her long comic (and successful) “Description of Bath.”

However, it’s also said (remember what Virgil said about Rumor) that under the “care” of George Cheyne (famous physician who recommended dieting and exercise), she became anorexic (a girl who wanted “out” or was continually
made to feel her body was unacceptable). Let us hope not, and I doubt this because there are records to show she stayed in business successfully for 35 years before that. Her life and publications are told in detail in Roger Lonsdale’s excellent anthology, Eighteenth Century Women Poets, pp 151-52.

Her epitaph (18th century poets would write their own ironic epitaphs) does harp again on her looks. It does not begin with her life and success but rather “Here lies a true maid, deformed and old …” Is not it terrible a woman should endlessly judge herself as an object a man might want to go to bed with? Like the comic Horatian “True Tale,” her epitaph does have a combination of wry self-acceptance and stalwart Horatian ideals of being content with what you can manage to wrest from life: “Her book and her pen had her moments of leisure” is apt line expressing this idea.

Here is a central online source for her life, poetry and criticism about her: Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive. Out of all these I feature her A True Tale:

To Mrs. J-S.

Written at her Request

Why, Madam, must I tell this idle tale?
You want to laugh. Then do so, if you will.
Thus take it, as it was, the best I can;
And laugh at me, but not my little man:
For he was very good, and clean, and civil,
And, though his taste was odd, you own not evil.
You know one loves an apple, one an onion;
One man’s a Papist, one is a Socinian:
We differ in our taste, as in opinion.
Not often reason guides us; more, caprice,
Or accident, or fancy: so in this.
His person pleased, and honest was his fame;
Tis true there was no music in his name,
But, had I changed for A the letter U,
It would sound grand, and musically too,
And would have made a figure. At my shop
I saw him first, and thought he’d eat me up.
I stared, and wondered who this man could be,
So full of complaisance, and all to me:
But when he’d bought his gloves, and said his say.
He made his civil scrape, and went away.
I never dreamed I e’er should see him more,
Glad when he turned his back, and shut the door.
But when his wond’rous message he declared,
I never in my life was half so scared!
Fourscore long miles, to buy a crooked wife!
Old too! I thought the oddest thing in life;
And said, ‘Sir, you’re in jest, and very free;
But, pray, how came you, Sir, to think of me?’
This civil answer I’ll suppose was true:
‘That he had both our happiness in view.
He sought me as one formed to make a friend,
To help life glide more smoothly near its end,
To aid his virtue, and direct his purse,
For he was much too well to want a nurse.’

He made no high-flown compliment but this:
‘He thought to’ve found my person more amiss.
No fortune hoped; and,’ which is stranger yet,
‘Expected to have bought me off in debt!
And offered me my Wish, which he had read,
For ‘twas my Wish that put me in his head.’
Far distant from my thoughts a husband, when
Those simple lines dropped, honest, from my pen.

Much more, he spake, but I have half forgot:
I went to bed, but could not sleep a jot.
A thing so unexpected, and so new!
Of so great consequence. So generous too!
I own it made me pause for half that night:
Then waked, and soon recovered from my fright;
Resolved, and put an end to the affair:
So great a change, thus late, I could not bear;
And answered thus: ‘No, good Sir, for my life,
I cannot now obey, nor be a wife.
At fifty-four, when hoary age has shed
Its winter’s snow, and whitened o’er my head,
Love is a language foreign to my tongue:
I could have learned it once, when I was young,
But now quite other things my wish employs:
Peace, liberty, and sun, to gild my days.
I dare not put to sea so near my home,
Nor want a gale to waft me to my tomb.
The smoke of Hymen’s lamp may cloud the skies
And adverse winds from different quarters rise.
I want no heaps of gold; I hate all dress,
And equipage. The cow provides my mess.
‘Tis true, a chariot’s a convenient thing;
But then perhaps, Sir, you may hold the string.
I’d rather walk alone my own slow pace,
Than drive with six, unless I choose the place.
Imprisoned in a coach, I should repine:
The chaise I hire, I drive and call it mine.
And, when I will, I ramble, or retire
To my own room, own bed, my garden, fire;
Take up my book, or trifle with my pen;
And, when I’m weary, lay them down again:
No questions asked; no master in the spleen
I would not change my state to be a queen.

Another beautiful poem on how much friendship meant to her:

A Poem on Friendship.

Written in 1729. [*from The Description of Bath* (1736)]

Friendship! the heav’nly Theme I sing;
Source of the truest Joy;
From Sense such Pleasures never spring,
Still new, that never cloy.

‘Tis sacred Friendship gilds our Days,
And smooths Life’s ruffled Stream:
Uniting Joys will Joys increase,
And sharing lessen Pain.

‘Tis pure as the etherial Flame,
That lights the Lamps above;
Pure, as the Infant’s Thought, from Blame;
Or, as his Mother’s Love.

From kind Benevolence it flows,
And rises on Esteem.
‘Tis false Pretence, that Int’rest shews,
And fleeting as a Dream.

The Wretch, to Sense and Self confin’d,
Knows not the dear Delight;
For gen’rous Friendship wings the Mind,
To reach an Angel’s Height.

Amidst the Crowd each Kindred Mind,
True Worth superior spies:
Tho’ hid, the modest Veil behind,
From less discerning Eyes.

From whose Discourse Instruction flows,
But Satire dares not wound.
Their guiltless Voice no Flatt’ry knows,
But scorns delusive Sound.

While Truth divine inspires each Tongue,
The Soul bright Knowledge gains.
Such Adam ask’d, and Gabriel sung,
In heav’nly Milton’s Strains.

Such the Companions of your Hours,
And such your lov’d Employ;
Who would indulge your noblest Pow’rs,
But know no guilty Joy.

And thus as swift-wing’d Time brings on
Death, nearer to our View;
Tun’d to sweet Harmony our Souls,
We take a short Adieu.

Till the last Trump’s delightful Sound
Shall wake our sleeping Clay; [hmm…]
Then swift, to find our Fellow-souls,
As Light, we haste away.

I speculate that Mary Chandler belonged to one of several circles of “learned” and unmarried women at the time whom Emma Donogue has identified as conforming to patterns we may call lesbian spinsterhood. See also my Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts, the Erotics of Female Landscape; and Lesbian aesthetics: an aspect of women’s art. We need not of course reify any rigid categories to enjoy this woman’s art, but rather see her as a proto-feminist avante la lettre and rejoice for her that she enjoyed her life, fulfilled her gifts, and can speak to our eyes today.

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain by Richard Samuel, 1779. The sitters are (standing, left to right): Elizabeth Carter, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Sheridan, Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox; (seated, left to right): Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith — there was a strong tendency in 18th century portraiture of women artists to idealize them in classical garb

For other 18th century working class women poets, see my blogs on Mary Leapor; Mary Whateley Darwell; Mary Collier; Elizabeth Hands.

And don’t miss a treasure of a book: Donna Landry’s The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-class women’s poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.; a wonderful literary study (filled with close readings of other women’s poems and all sorts of historical and autobiographical details): Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edd. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, and Elizabeth Eger’s Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings, an art book chock-a-block with pictures of the people and their surroundings.

18th century image of a milliner’s shop in the US

Ellen

My review of the Cambridge edition of the works of Anne Finch

Said to be a portrait (miniature) of Anne Finch; the portrait resembles in features a miniature of her father …

Friends and readers,

Here is the second paper that connects to the EC/ASECS meeting this year which I didn’t go to. It is a review-essay which I worked on and off for 2 years or so, and was published in the Intelligencer that was published just before the meeting, NS Volume 35, No 2, September 2022, pp 25-35. It’s obviously too long and complicated for a blog, so here too go over to academia.edu to read it:

Editing the Writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Digital photo from Northamptonshire MS

Ellen

Jane Austen and Anne Finch in Manuscript and Manuscript Culture today

Amanda Vickery expatiating on a group of 18th century letters and what they reveal

Dear Friends and Readers,

Last May I announced that I would be going (once again) to the East Central region meeting of the American 18th century Society and that a proposal for a paper I was going to write over the summer had been accepted. Well I did write said paper this past August, but as bad luck would have it — and my own inabilities in the area of driving and traveling — I was prevented from going. This is not the first time this has happened since Jim died. See my Jane Austen and the Arts blog, the paper Ekphrastic Patterns in Austen

So this evening I’m going to share the paper that came to be called Jane Austen and Anne Finch in Manuscript and Manuscript Culture Today.

It’s on academia.edu under Conference Presentations as too long to put into a blog.

I know that central to the fun of delivering a paper is conveying to living people one’s work, seeing their responses on their faces and the conversation afterwards. I’ve had a sort of substitute. A good friend, Rory O’Farrell, read the paper and this is part of the conversation we had via email letters:

Your Anne Finch paper was interesting. I quite agree with the necessity of reverting to the original documents wherever possible. In the case of the Calendar of medieval documents I was recently using, I examined some of the online images of specific documents in the calendar, and noted minor occasional omissions on the part of the preparer of the calendar (done pre 1950), often on partially legible or earlier erased entries. It occurs to me that, with modern lighting (ultra-violet and or infra red) and modern high resolution cameras, that document should be re-assessed, as some of the 1950 indecipherable comments/entries might easily resolve using such modern equipment and add a little to the story therein set out.

Thank you on the Anne Finch paper. I don’t know what people might have discussed; but one is the distance between the electronic facsimile and the actual manuscript. I’m willing to say little is lost because it’s so hard to reach real manuscripts, but modern publications or editions of these ms’s (like the one published by Cambridge of AF, or these new Cambridge volumes of Austen ms’s) won’t do — for the reasons I outline. Thank you for this.

Then the other day in one of my classes on Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset and Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife and The Choir (Barsetshire Then and Now), I brought into class my very ancient-looking and battered 1867 pirated American copy of The Last Chronicle, which contains almost all George Housman Thomas’s original illustrations. They asked me had I ever seen a manuscript of Trollope’s and what did it look like? did he make many corrections? I said I had never seen any of Trollope’s manuscripts, only read descriptions of them, and it would seem that we mostly have fair copies his wife created from his working papers; those more immediate copies we have show he did change his plans as to who would be central or a secondary character, and the manuscript of the 4 volume version of The Duke’s Children (now at Yale) showed many revisions as he cut it down. But in general from what we can see, it would seem that Trollope trained himself to write quickly a copy that would not be all that changed the next day and then add on to that at the rate of 250 new words a day.

But over my life I had seen many manuscripts from early modern women (Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara), and worked specifically with Anne Murray, Lady Halkett (17th century Scots royalist spy), editions of the journals and letters of Fanny Burney (I wrote reviews) and seen the manuscripts or manuscript facsimiles of all the work of Anne Finch and much of Jane Austen. I told them about some of what is in this paper, and much to my surprise they asked questions about manuscripts authors left. I told them the story of Walter Scott’s manuscripts and how around the time of the Regency period, attitudes towards manuscripts changed: before then, writers tended to destroy them. They were in effect devoured in the printing process. After, they were documents whereby you could trace the original intentions of the author, get near to the author in the most close way possible.

Thinking about this, the people’s interest in manuscripts should not have surprised me. It’s part of this change of attitude begun in the 19th century and going stronger than ever so that we have exhibits in museums of artists’ first and continuing sketches, stages in the process, leading towards the final great item seen as the finished work.

A later 20th century edition of the Wellesley manuscript

The Sanditon manuscript

It was great fun doing this paper as it was many of the others I’ve done over the years, most recently, A Woman and Her Box: Space and Identity in Austen. While the early ones are on my website, since Jim’s death I’ve put a number of those on academia.edu and all since his death there (conference papers; reviews).

It is sad not to have gone as these were people whom I’ve regarded as genuine friends, but I know my ability to drive continues to diminish:  I cannot drive in the night was part of the reason I decided not to go. The aggressive and dictatorial social and political world of the US grows more restrictive and punitive: I don’t know that I could get through the computer machines in airports where there are so few hired employees to help people and customs is overtly hostile: I have actually been pulled over 3 times by TSA people who act as silent tyrants. So I will have to go less and less. With inflation, the cost begins to bite into my income and savings more.

It is an ill wind that does nobody any good: I am looking forward to more sheerly pleasurable reading, projects where I would not produce a paper (Italian studies, Anglo-Indian studies) and eventually a book-length study (at long last) of the Poldark and Outlander romance fiction and films.

Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) walking back from vase gazing in Inverness, Halloween time (Outlander S1, E1)

Our first look at Ross Poldark (Robin Ellis) as by coach he rides towards Nampara, Cornwall (Poldark 1:1)

Ellen

Studying Manuscripts: from Anne Finch to Jane Austen

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve not given up or put away my review of the new Cambridge Finch volume altogether. I’ve been reading (for example) Gillian Wright’s Producing Women’s Poery, 1600-1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print: a study of women’s poetry as the texts appear in the manuscripts across this era.  I’m going to contribute the following talk/paper (maybe 15-20 minutes worth) at the coming EC/ASECS conference (in person! at Winterthur museum, Wilmington, Delaware) for a panel called Material Matters, meant to concentrate on the material phenomena surrounding or part of texts (including the lodging the poet writes in):

“From Beginning to End of the Long 18th Century: Anne Finch’s poetry in manuscripts and Austen’s unfinished and finished fiction in manuscripts (for a panel called Material Matters)

At the opening (so to speak) of the era, that is, the later 17th century, and the close, the early 19th, we can now study most of two writers’ manuscripts in recent edited editions from Cambridge. I will argue there is much to be learned from reading these two women’s manuscripts in both the printed forms, if one can get hold of the ms in some form other form (facsimile, digitalized), or (as it were) raw (the ms itself in a rare book room). The attitude of mind of the authors to the work, her perceived status, the attitudes towards her of those living directly around her come out. Dating, visible processes seen on the pages, emerge from behind the curtain of formal publication. I will also show that over this long haul little changed in women’s status (here both in effect high elite) and how that shapes the works I discuss too.

This talk/paper also comes out of the work for the review I did for The Intelligencer of the Cambridge Edition of Austen’s Later Manuscripts (Everything Else); for that one I also read the Juvenilia in manuscripts volume. I studied older manuscripts, pre-18th century, and more recent ones, individuals and miscellanies.

Amanda Vickery expatiating to the viewers over a manuscript book of letters (At Home with the Georgians)

That is, if I can get there and find ways to and from the inn to the conference sessions at the museum it’s to be held in. For some this would be nothing. For me, it’s a lot to get past. I get lost, it’s a long way, and I can no longer drive in the dark.

Ellen

A poem as a gift Christmas, 1716 into 1717: Anne Finch to Lady Selena Finch Shirley,”How is it in this chilling time …”

A double stock flower (tagetes patula?)

Dear friends and readers,

After all I have something for Christmas this year: it’s a beautiful poem that Anne Finch wrote and sent to Lady Selena Finch Shirley (1681-1762), a graceful compliment also meant for Lady Selena’s daughter, also called Selena.

Finch says looking upon the flower in its ripe prime (paradoxically during winter) reminds her of the time when she “That beauteous maid wou’d view/The green house where I liv’d retired;” that is, between 1700 and 1703 when Anne lived at Wye Shirley Finch would come to visit her in a green house or garden near Wye. This was when Finch was enduring the aftermath or getting over one of her intermittent depressive breakdowns, this one partly brought on by the anxiety over the flight of the Stuart court, Heneage’s attempted flight with them, and his arrest, bail, and threatened trial for Jacobitism, and a conviction of treason. In the event he was freed and left to live quietly (no office for him of course).

Here is Wye, now a college in Kent, where Anne wrote some of her most beautiful poetry, much of it melancholy and personal

This time included the first years of Lady Selena’s life with her husband, Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers (1650-1717); married to him in 1699, she went on to have ten children. She was a daughter of George (and Jane?) Finch; thus a relative of the Finches (whom Cameron located living at Wye College in the early 1700’s). One woman recovering from mental distress and trouble, and the other incessantly pregnant, they made a pair together. Now fate or destiny has made Selena a widow and placed her in the country, and made Anne a Countess too, most unexpectedly also placing her in town (both the result of the inheritance by Heneage of the earldom when his nephew, Charles, died so young), in town where she is in need of the rejuvenating presence of her friend.

This is apparently an image of Lady Selena Finch Shirley when young

Writing the poem and imagining the flower brings together in Anne’s mind the two women’s minds together, makes them alive to one another through the medium of these words in a verse epistle. These are sentiments Anne expressed in her In Praise of the Invention of writing Letters).

Gentle reader, you must read it aloud slowly, savoring the tones of this renewal of friendship at a distance between the two friends

How is it in this chilling time,
When frost and snows the season claim,
This flow’ring plant is in its prime,
Which of July assumes the name?

But since we poets speech bestow,
And form what dialogues we please,
With animals or plants that grow,
And make them answer us with ease.

Tell me (said I) prolifick stock,
Which do’st these fragrant treasures bring,
What is it can such stores unlock,
At Christmas as outvie the spring?

Thus ask’d, the flower of tinctur’d bloome,
Soon blush’t into a deeper dye,
Cast stronger odours round the room,
And sweetly breath’d out this reply.

Tis true, all plants of my nice sort
Have not such license to appear,
But wait till Phoebus keeps his court,
In the hot circle of the year.

Whilst I a brighter influence own,
Than is imparted from the skies;
Nor take my blossoms thus full blown,
From summer, but Selena’s eyes.

Her cheering smile, her modest air,
Did me to this perfection charm;
For nothing droops when near the fair,
But all is lively, all is warm.

That beauteous maid wou’d often view
The green house where I liv’d retired,* *Wye
Who did such early graces shew,
That I to suit them was inspired.

Sometimes a sprig from me, I thought,
Might happily adorn her hair,
Or pardon me if ’twas a fault,
Might rest upon her bosom bare.

My soft perfumes for her design’d,
I ev’n from Zephyrus withdrew;
Unless when that obliging wind
Wou’d shed them round her as he flew.

Delighted when by me she stood,
I wish’d for some transforming art.
For had I then been flesh and blood,
I should have told her all my heart.

Yet I to Flora softly pray’d,
To hasten my disclosing day;
Who doating on the fairer maid,
For her does now my buds display.

But from a strange reverse of fate,
She to the country, I the town, *Anne in town
Have sadly been remov’d of late,
And neither to advantage shown.

Then let none blame you, if my flower
Beneath your roof is faded seen,
But know that such enlivening power
Is only granted to fifteen.

I for Selena shall repine,
And when some noble youths you see,
Bow their dejected heads like mine,
Think in our passions we agree.

What farther answer cou’d be made,
Or father question could I try?
Then let her come, and cheer our shade,
Or men and plants in town must die.

On this fourth of January 2022, two days before twelfth night.

Melissa Scott Miller, A Dusting of Snow at Islington Gardens, 21st century (don’t miss the cat)

Ellen

Anne Finch’s friendship poetry: those sent to friends & family where the recipient was not a poet herself

Laura Knight, Two Girls on a Cliff (Cornwall), a foremother artist, again quiet female friendship is not a topic readily found in all eras

Eph — What freindship is, Ardelia shew?
Ard — Tis to love, as I love you.
Eph — This account so short, (tho’ kind)
Suites not my enquiring mind.
Therefore farther now repeat.
What is freindship, when compleat?
Ard — ‘Tis to share all joy, and greif,
‘Tis to lend all due releif,
From the tongue, the heart, the hand,
‘Tis to morgage [sic] house, and land,
For a freind, be sold a slave,
‘Tis to dye upon a Grave,
If a freind therein do lye.
Eph — This, indeed, tho’ carry’d high,
This, tho’ more then ‘ere was done,
Underneath the roling [sic] Sun,
This, has all been said before,
Can Ardelia, say no more?
Ard — Words indeed, no more can shew,
But ’tis to love, as I love you.
— Anne Finch to her beloved sister-in-law, Francis Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth

Dear friends and readers,

I should probably have framed my previous blog with one of the insights in Paula Backscheider’s study of 18th century poetry by women in the context of poetry “through the ages:” she suggests and (I think) demonstrates that friendship poems are used different by women from men. Men often use these politically, to situate themselves publicly. For women they create counter-universes with the friend in which they can explore possibilities, pleasures, identities together.

This is a companion blog to the previous on Anne Finch’s friendship poems to good friends who were also poets, and to her predecessors. Now we come to friendships where the women were not poets, but were willing to enter Anne’s poetic world with her, so, to start, e.g, Catherine Cavendish Tufton (Arminda) and Francis Finch Thynne (Ephelia), two of her closest dearest women friends. The number of poems doesn’t tell us much as there is but one to, e.g., her cousin, Elizabeth Haslewood (d. 1733) who becomes Lady Hatton, daughter of her mother’s brother, Sir William, whom Anne grew up with and with whom she remained close. Elizabeth married Christopher Viscount Hatton.  The list here contains one women who was a reluctant participant. To begin,

“Ephelia” was not the powerful caustic still anonymous female poet, “Ephelia” and glamorous aristocrat that Maureen Mulvihill wants her to be. The last time I looked Ephelia’s identity was still officially not known.  Finch’s Ephelia was Heneage’s sister, Finch’s sister-in-law, Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth, wife to Heneage’s close friend, companion and support, Thomas Thynne, Lord Weymouth.  Utresia (see below) is Anne’s niece , Lady Weymouth’s daughter, called in the poems also Lady Worseley. Lad Worseley was dragged (so to speak) into a close relationship she apparently was made uncomfortable by. The three poems to Lady Worseley’s mother are deeply felt and include one of Anne’s very best poems, the outstanding:

1) MS Folger, 6-11, “Me, dear Ephelia, me, in vain you court,” Ardelia’s answer to Ephelia, who had invited Her to come to her in Town–reflecting on the Coquetterie & detracting humour of the Age,” as brilliant as that of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, both of which find an ultimate source in Boileau’s Satire III (itself an imitation of Horace’s Satire I, ix). I believe Frances Thynne is also depicted in

2) MS Folger 22, “What freindship is, Ardelia shew?” “Freindship Between Ephelia and Ardelia”. Frances Finch was the muse of the poems addressed to Ephelia because all her life, she played the role of consoler, strengthener: she knew intimately the sources of her “sister’s” psychological problems and we see yet more of their relationship in

3) MS Wellesley 100, “Absence in love effects the same,” “Untitled: These verses were inserted in a letter to the Right Hon: ble the Lady Vicountess Weymouth written from Lewston the next day after my parting with her at Long Leat,” copied out with an apparently frank letter, which, alas, was destroyed. We can say though that unlike Francis’s daughter (see directly below), Francis stayed a satisfyingly long time (over night). It’s a melancholy song written upon awakening after parting from a friend.  Cf earlier brief or one stanza version, presented as translation from a French libertine epigram, found in Ms Folger

Ephelia was not Dorothy Ogle either (as surmised by Myra Reynolds), Finch’s beloved step-sister who died young, whom Finch addresses as “Teresa,”

1) MS’s: F-H 283, 18-25; Folger 206-8, “Hither, Ardelia I your Stepps Pursue,” “Some Reflections in a Dialogue between Teresa and Ardelia on the 2d and 3d Verses of the 73d Psalm,” a Biblical paraphrase, in tone and content bearing a strong resemblance to an important as yet unattributed autographical poem,

2) No MS (!), 1701 Gilden Miscellany, pp 288-93, “All flie th’unhappy, and I all wou’d flie,” “The Retirement” are addressed. Dorothy had lived with Anne their sometimes lonely orphaned childhoods in Northamptonshire among the Haslewoods (an affectionate but large household), and with the litigious formidable grandmother Kingsmill in Sidmouth.

Joseph Farrington, The Oak Tree (18th century engraving): See Anne’s “Fair Tree” (scroll down for podcast)

A third close associate and one from her younger years, Elizabeth Haslewood, Lady Hatton (see above). Mock heroic in a delicate way and like “The White Mouses Petition” in the vein of Madame Deshouliers. The poem mentions at least three of Elizabeth’s four sons, and evinces comfortable intimacy

1) MS Wellesley, pp 93995. “Where is the trust in human things,” To the Hon ble Mrs H—n [in Heneage’s hand, pasted over ample space, original heading censured]. Anne identifies with the mouse in both poems, but as that was a custom (in Madame Deshouliers and aristocratic circles), one should not over-read.

Eventually, much to her distress, embarrassment, and irritation, Lady Worseley, another Frances Thynne (it is hard to distinguish these people as individuals since they themselves chose names which placed them as a member of a kinship system of aristocrats), married to Robert Worseley by 1690, found herself chosen by Anne Finch in the way Anne chose Frances Thynne Seymour, the daughter of a beloved friend, Grace Strode into whom Anne wanted to pour her innermost feelings. The poetry to Utresia contains much beauty but also the most painful lines left by Ardelia. There are three poems, which suggest that at first Utresia decided that to accept letters would be the best way to handle the relationship, but eventually found Anne’s intensity too much and then Anne seems to have been unable to accept Lady Worseley’s rejection of her intensity.

1) MS Folger unnumbered page -275, “If from some lonely and obscure recesse,” “To the Honourable The Lady Worsley at Long-leate who had most obligingly desired my Corresponding with her by Letters.” It ends on extravagant praise of Lord Weymouth, Lady Worseley’s father (Heneage’s brother-in-law); Finch imagines them walking together. Longleat itself the focus of what he created. This is a deeply moving poem with much beautiful landscape, but (as is not uncommon), Anne may not have not seen clearly enough the person she wanted to make her companion soul; it may be that Lady Worseley was forced to accept this because not to do would be to reject the praise of her father.

2) Ms Wellesley, pp 77-78. “From the sweet pleasure of a rural seat,” A Letter to the Hon: ble Lady Worseley at Long-Leat, Lewston August the 10th 1704. This is one of those poems in MS Wellesley whose date makes it much earlier than the rest of the poems in the Ms Wellesley; at the same time, it is accompanied by a letter from “Ann Finch” to her niece saying that her mother, Lady Weymouth so easily excused the verses Anne wrote upon waking (see above), she will excuse these. She stopped writing because a messenger who was to carry the poem was about to leave. It seems the visit of mother and daughter over-excited Anne and she showed an intensity or kind of emotionsthat disquieted the daughter.  In her letter she is not aware of this. The last or next poem shows Utresia determined to keep a distance between herself and her poetic aunt.

3) MS Portland 19, pp 304-7, “The long long expected hour is come,” , “On a Short Visit inscrib’d to My Lady Worsley,” copied out in Anne’s own hand, for she needed to write this, wanted it saved but could not apply to anyone else to write it down. Utresia (here also called Celia) had found it hard to put Anne off, Anne would not take a hint, and when Utresia finally showed up, Anne’s behavior was so overwhelming, she had to get away from her. McGovern quotes someone who visiting Anne in London in later years and finding her “ill,” or “melancholic, wrote that she found Lady Winchilsea very amusing. Not everyone can dismiss or frame a melancholy woman as someone who makes jokes.

Several other women across Anne’s life meant a great deal to her personally so that she could feel free to write candid poetry:  Catherine Cavendish, who married Thomas Tufton, Earl of Thanet; both spouses were friends of Heneage and Anne, and married only a few months after they did; the Tuftons (or Earl and Lady Thanet) took in the Finches (Colonel and Mrs Finch) at their estate of Hothfield in Kent when the Finches fled London. Catherine Cavendish is Arminda, and they were life-long confiding friends; to Arminda, Anne wrote but one poem, but an important beautiful one, deeply grateful, openly vulnerable:

1) MS Folger, pp 220-27, “Give me, oh! indulgent Fate,” “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat, Inscribed To the Right Honorable Catharine Countess of THANET, mention’d in the Poem, under the name of ARMINDA.”

Of the next generation, another close friend to Anne Finch was Cleone, or Mrs Grace Strode Thynne, wife of Henry Thynne (Theanor, died 1708), son of Francis and Thomas Thynne, Lord and Lady Weymouth. Henry was then Heneage’s nephew so Cleone was daughter-in-law to Anne’s best friend, and, eventually, mother to Anne’s beloved Lady Hertford. Henry died fairly young, and Mrs Grace did not continue to live with her in-laws but returned to the Strode family home in Leweston; nevertheless, she and Anne remained close, to which relationship three poems by Anne testify.

1) “Sooner I’d praise a Cloud which Light beguiles,” To the Painter of an ill-drawn Picture of CLEONE,” no MS (!), the only source text the 1713 Miscellany, pp 176-78. Very lovely in parts, with strong praise in words which suggest these contemporaries were “sympathizing” friends, written possibly around the time of the couple’s marriage (1695),

2) “THINK not a partial fondness sway’d my mind,” An Epistle to the honourable Mrs. THYNNE, persuading her to have a Statue made of her youngest Daughter, now Lady BROOKE. No MS; found in a 1714 Steele Miscellany; and in 1717 Pope’s Own Miscellany, from which the copy on my website is taken. Finch defends herself for having appeared to favor Mary (“Maria”) over Francis Thynne (“Aspasia”) I suggest 1704-5.

3) One of Anne’s comic (happy) masterpieces, “How plain dear Madam was the Want of Sight,” After drawing a twelf cake at the Hon ble Mrs Thynne’s (dated in MS Additional 4457: “To the Hon ble Mrs Thynne after twelfth Day 1715 By Lady Winchilsea”, Ms Wellesley 91-92 (copy text althought one of the lines is softened in comparison with Ms Additional text)

For full details about the occasion, the cards, the people there, click on The Birthday at Winter Solstice

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Mary of Modena (Urania) was one of Anne’s real and dream figures: Mary of Modena seems to have functioned in Finch’s life as a luminous icon of beauty, divinity, poetry of language. Perhaps she was also in Anne’s mind a mentor-substitute for the mother whom Anne never had. Perhaps one of the sources of Anne’s passionate Jacobitism was this imagined relationship. Two poems. One very early, after James II fell from power, one of Anne’s brief masterpieces. The second includes the presence of Anne Tufton (Salisbury or Lamira; see below) who tries to mitigate Anne’s over-reaction and on whose advice the elegy to the queen is brought to an end:

1) MS’s: F-H 283, 7*; Folger 17, “She Sigh’d, but soon it mixt with common air“. Never printed.

2) Ms Wellesley, pp 68-71, “Dark was the shade where only cou’d be seen,” “On the Death of the Queen”

Mary of Modena, depicted with a James III

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Returning to Anne’s circles in later life, one is tempted to say these are less important women to Anne because they came later or were of a younger age. Not so apparently in the case of Anne Tufton (see above, Lamira and below “Salisbury”): Catherine Cavendish Tufton, Lady Thanet had two daughters. These relationships may have been substitutes for the biological daughters Anne never had: To Anne Tufton, Lamira, the first of which seems to me uncomfortably coy; the second perhaps Anne’s greatest poem. She is also mentioned in Anne’s poem on the death of Mary of Modena:

1) Ms Wellesley, 92-93, “With all respect and humble duty,”, The white mouses petition to Lamira the Right Hon: ble the Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury. This relationship matured into

2) No MS, 1713 Miscellany, pp 292-94, “In such a Night, when every louder Wind”, “A Nocturnal Reverie”

A tawny owl — part of a beautiful tribute and analysis of Anne’s poem by Carol Rumens in the Guardian for this year!

Mrs Arabella Marrow was an unmarried daughter of Samuel and Lady Marrow, of Berkwell, Warwickshire; she was one of Mrs Grace Strode Thynne’s closest companions. Date: Lady Marrow died October 19, 1714. A “letter” shows how much Anne knew and was up-to-date on Jacobite and Hanoverian politics.

1) Ms Wellesley, p 55v.“For can our correspondence please,”, “A Letter to Mrs Arrabella Marow: [A prose opening: The favour of such an agreeable & most obliging letter as I recieved . . .] In MS Additional 4457 it is subscribed “London, October 18 1715.” A strongly Jacobite poem. Lady Marrow already dead.

2) MS Additional 4457, p 56v “Their piety th’Egyptians show’d by Art,” “To Mrs Arabella Marrow upon the Death of Lady Marrow”. A witty epigram whose modest idea is intended to console her friend for her loss of her mother.

A double stock flower (tagetes patula?)

Anne did not forget people. Lady Selena Finch Shirley (1681-1762), married to Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers (1650-1717) in 1699.  Lady Selena lived at Wye College in the early 1700s (Cameron found this out): she was a daughter of George (and Jane?) Finch whom Cameron found living at Wye College in the early 1700’s; she had ten children by Robert Shirley before he died in 1717. She died 1762. In the second poem Finch says looking upon the flower in its ripe prime reminds her of the time when she “That beauteous maid wou’d view/The green house where I liv’d retired;” that is, between 1700 and 1703 when Anne lived at Wye Shirley Finch would come to visit her in a green house or garden near Wye; now destiny has led her young friend to the country and Anne placed in town where Anne can no longer feel rejuvenated by her friend’s presence as once she was. It is a compliment to Lady Selena’s daughter, also called Selena (See Complete Poems, Vol 2, pp 484-85).

The first may be explained this way: Statira was best known to 17th century women readers as presented in La Calprenede’s Cassandra. Finch had used this romance before in poetry found in MS Folger: see the homoerotic, “An Epistle from Alexander to Ephestion in his Sicknesse” Statira is a formidable heroine in LaCalprenede’s book, a sort of Amazon; it’s an ambiguous compliment (for she is not chaste), but perhaps Finch was thinking of her friend having had ten children.  During the time the women were close Lady Selena must’ve been almost continually pregnant.  And now she is or is near widowhood.

1) Ms Wellesley, “Such was Statira, when young Ammon woo’d,” Upon Lady Selena Shirly’s picture drawn by Mr Dagar.

2) 1717 Pope’s Own Miscellany “How is it in this chilling time,” “On a double Stock July-flower, full blown in January, presented to me by the Countess of FERRERS” By the right honourable the Lady WINCHELSEA, pp. 126ff

Lady Catherine Jones (Clorinda, d 1740), third daughter to Richard Jones, Viscount, first Earl of Ranelagh. Her name occurs very late in Anne’s poetry and only once but there is suggestive evidence they knew each other for a long time. Anne uses the name Clorinda in other poems but these are about secular beauty, and one may refer to Anne herself. What’s significant here is she served Mary Beatrice as Chamber-keeper, and was a patron of Mary Astell who dedicated two religious treatises to her. Lady Catherine corresponded with Swift twice but to her contemporaries it was probably more important that her family moved in high circles (she once dined with George I, 1717); she seems never to have married. The poem below is devotional, poetry as praying:  perhaps Lady Catherine was especially religious. The poem occurs in series of such poems, and I think it was meant to be set to music; it’s not meant to be read, but sung as a series of visions:

1) Ms Wellesley, 134-35 “Alleluja Sollemn Strain,” An Ode Written upon Christmas Eve in the year 1714 Upon these Words[:] And again they Said Alleluia Inscribed To the Rt: Hon ble the Lady Catherine Jones

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Last the daughters and granddaughters of friends and relatives:

To the younger Catherine Tufton, Serena, born 1692, Anne Tufton’s sister:

1) MS Folger, 298-9, “To write in verse has been my pleasing choice,” “To the Rt. Honble the Lady Tufton Upon Adressing to me the first Letter that Ever she Writt at the Age of–”

2) MS Folger, pp 242-44, “‘Tis fitt Serena shou’d be sung,”, “A Poem For the Birth Day of the Right Honorable the Lady Catherine Tufton. Occasion’d by the sight of some Verses upon that Subject For the preceding Year compos’d by no Eminent Hand” — also for a child.

The first poem in the MS Wellesley, to or on Lady Carteret, yet another daughter of the family, Francis Worseley, Lady Carteret, Utresia’s daughter, so granddaughter to Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth:

1) Ms Wellesley, p 49  “Quoth the Swains who got in at the late Masquerade”, “On Lady Cartret drest like a shepherdess at Count Volira’s ball”

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So I’ve identified as friends or people Anne Finch both cared about and wrote deeply felt poems for: Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth; Dorothy Ogle; Elisabeth Haslewood, Lady Hatton; Frances Thynne, Lady Worsley; Mrs Grace Strode Thynne; Mary of Modena; Anne Tufton, Lady Salisbury; Arabella Marrow; Lady Selena Finch Shirley, Countess of Ferrers; Lady Catherine Jones; Catherine Tufton; Francis Worseley, Lady Carteret.

Anne writes to and about male friends too, some poets, some not, but often with irony and never with the open earnestness and fullness of heart she does to her women friends. Several of these poems to women are more deeply felt than those by her to Heneage. Eventually I may try to write a blog about the poems to male friends and poets.

Ellen

Anne Finch: what lengths of time & a newly discovered poem

Thus even in sleep conscience’s anxiety/pounds the heart awake — Christa Wolf, translating Aeschylus, Cassandra (p 216)

Dear friends and readers,

Today I returned for a third time to my project to read carefully, review and evaluate and then write a comprehensive accurate review of the new Cambridge edition of Anne Finch’s poetry. What strikes me most is “what lengths of time” I have been about this project: beginning sometime in April and then writing on June 30, 2020 on a first phase — that’s a year and six months ago — ; having had to put it down because of press of other work, and starting again, probably in August, and writing up my findings on September 20, 2020 — that’s three months later –; and now here I find, astonishingly, another whole year and six months have passed again, as I once again begin.

You will say this must be procrastination, and yes it is partly that. I am intimidated; I am referred to in the volumes in a sublimely impersonal condescending way, and I’ve been snubbed by this editor, perhaps unconsciously.  I cannot say she recognized me, though it was in a zoom where I spoke and I cannot believe she does not remember my name as she mentioned my work quite a number of times throughout the first volume, at one point taking out paragraphs to argue with my view, and I’m cited as a key source in both volumes. So I am working to be utterly accurate and when I disagree (which I will) want to make my case in a way that she will not be able to dismiss me (or others who agree with me), especially on some of the unattributed poetry.

But it also has been that it was not until this June (2021) that I actually got my hands on Volume 2. That is when I began work again, and produced two lists of Finch’s poem, each representing work done individually and comparatively. I went over manuscript cultural studies, caught up on all the new studies of Finch that had been written about since I reviewed the Hinnant-McGovern edition of the Wellesley ms, and wrote a couple of papers for 18th century conferences.

Gentle reader, I began with Anne Finch so long ago: really it was 1980, shortly after I finished my dissertation. I took up two women when I moved to Virginia: Charlotte Smith and Anne Finch, two 18th century English poets whose poetry I loved. Then after I spent some years translating Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, I studied Finch as a translator in 1993-94, then I tried writing a Life but put it on the Net unfinished in 2004 as I On Myself Can Live because I learned of McGovern’s biography, and understood I didn’t have the connections, money, social wherewithal to do it right. Then I got involved with a musical quartet, Apollo’s Muse, 2001 I wrote again a shorter Later Life. What lengths of time.

Well now I will not give over. I have promised myself not to volunteer for any more papers, or any more reviews until I’ve finished writing this and sending it to the editor of the 18th century Intelligencer. I will not take too many courses; I’ve done a lot of the basic work towards the courses I will be teaching for the coming winter, spring and summer — I can read more of course and will. But I will weave Anne Finch in. I’ll work on Austen slowly and continuously but as for a blog (I’m reading Sheila Johnson Kindred’s Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: the Life and Letter of Fanny Palmer Austen as a central text to review here)

What I want to do tonight beyond marking this date for myself is add another poem by Anne Finch and sum up my findings thus far concisely.

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A photograph of a singing nightingale

Yes a new poem definitely by Anne Finch has been found, which is not on my website; I’m sorry I cannot add it there, but I can describe it here and tell where it may be found — beyond the New Complete Poems. Vol 2, pp 215-16, with annotations pp 458-64. It is another bird poem, a fable, and about song: titled “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo,” it was found by Gillian Wright in another of the Northamptonshire Record Office’s manuscripts, MS 258, deposited there as part of the Finch archive in 1930, by the Earl of Nottinghamshire and Winchilea. Like the other unattributed poems I found in other ms’s, it is part of a row or list of poems, all known to be by Anne Finch. The 8 page manuscript is described, its history told, the other four poems in the ms, all by Anne Finch for sure, cited; the text of “The Nightingale and the Cuckoo quoted as it appears in the manuscript and then interpreted by Wright, all in her “The Bird and the Poet: Self-Representation and the Early Editing of Anne Finch’s poetry,” in The Review of English Studies, New Series, 64:264 (2013):246-66

“The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” is not a neglected masterpiece.  It’s a wry tale or fable, a little awkward towards the end, and Finch uses imagery and ideas found in her poetry elsewhere.  “The Musicians of the Wood” had long provided music for young men to “mollify their loves” without payment. It was “nois’d in every tree” that “Men resolv’d at last” to “pension” “the sweetest Voice.” Now this winner, the Nightingale (so she or he thinks) would no longer be hungry, “When Barns lock’d up the Grain.” The Nightingale, though, was assuming “merit Awards can raise,” but “not a Cuckoo left untry’d/Her Title to the Bays,” and in the end the “few” who understood the beauty of the Nightingale’s song “their Thoughts conceal’d,/Nor wou’d oppose the Crow’d.” The moral is “real Wits” who “contend with an ill-judging Age/Thus do You all your Labours spend” uselessly:

In vain, You wou’d sublimely write
An Epigram, a Punn;
A foul Burlesque gives more Delight,
King Charles’s days are done.

I agree with Keith that Wright’s idea in her essay that this unprinted poem was meant as a gift to Heneage, to thank him for being her amanuensis, is not convincing, and find Wright’s elaborate reading of the poem in the context of print publication over-reading though she does show how reluctant Anne Finch was to print anything that could be construed into mockery. But equally Keith’s invented narrative, concluding, based on speculation (as she often does) about the relationship between Anne and her nephew, the heir, and between “The Nightingale & Cuckoo,” and the four other poems, that it was meant for Charles Finch, as a way of complimenting him as “real wit,” seems to me slightly off.

Keith has decided that Charles Finch wrote “The First Edilium of Bion English’d by the Right Honourable the Earl of Winchilsea,” partly on the basis of her idea he was a fine serious learned poet, and seriously encouraged Anne Finch to write poetry, to publish her work, for which she was earnestly grateful. We had three poems by her where she directly and indirectly addresses Charles. It seems we now have a fourth. On the translation of Bion James Woolley and John Irwin Fischer have decided (as have I) it is by Anne Finch.

The first poem we know of that was written to Charles Finch, who became fourth Earl of Winchilsea, was in response to his return to the UK from Holland in spring 1703 to take up his position as apparent heir to the Winchilsea estates. It seems to me she doesn’t know him very well as yet but is of course taking a hopeful view, and lavishing praise on him. It is an intendedly beautiful ode, and reads like a poem intended for circulation, impersonal (unlike the third, below), “NOW blow, ye Southern winds, with full release,” An Invocation to the southern Winds inscrib’d to the right honourable CHARLES Earl of WINCHELSEA, at his Arrival in LONDON, after having been long detained on the coast of HOLLAND. By the honourable Mrs. FINCH. There is no ms, and it first appears many years after in Pope’s Own Miscellany, 1717, long after Charles himself had died.

The second is an apology for “trying his patience” with reading aloud some of her tragedy, Aristomenes, here called “a tedious Play.” She pleads her loneliness at “Godmersham … Not sure to be endur’d, without the Muses.” She begs his pardon rather abjectly, and promises this play or poem read aloud will be the last time she does this. On Charles’s behalf it is apparent that she also tried to read aloud one of her plays to Pope over a dinner and it went down very badly (see below).

The third poem about Charles Finch is an exquisitely beautiful landscape poem which includes a reference to a curious story (not fully printed until 1903 by Myra Reynolds) where Finch refers to a superstitious story that attributed the death of Heneage’s father’s second wife and his eldest son to the Earl’s decision to take down a grove of oak. It was the death of this eldest son (Heneage’s older brother) which led to Charles Finch inheriting the property. Finch might have thought he would take this reference as a comical reference as the rest of her poem is an ambiguous compliment to him for replacing the old mullioned windows at Eastwell with clear glass and planting a new garden that mends all the faults (in taste) that “in the Old was found” (presumably one of the reasons the old Earl pulled it down). In her notes to this poem Myra Reynolds registers discomfort over the tactlessness of retelling the family history. At the time in the house was the old Earl’s young widow, with her four children, and the old earl’s oldest son’s widow, with her son, Charles Finch, destined to be heir. In one note I came across it seems the two women sometimes fought over who owned what furniture. (Shades of Spoils of Poynton, only much worse because more than one widow of very different ages, and a new wife to the new heir, Charles Finch.)

I do not disagree it is possible this fable was intended for Charles Finch; if so, and if we pay attention to what Anne’s epilogue to Aristomenes suggests, and the queasy feel of her ambiguous compliments to Finch (which Myra Reynolds were responsible for leaving lines out in the printed version), and the tradition of fables to which “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” belong, we have our explanation for why it was never printed or re-copied out. There is a description of Charles Finch which suggests he was a rather ordinary but generous young man who enjoyed crude jokes. This is quoted in John Irwin Fisher’s essay “In pitying to the emptying town:”  “He loves jests and puns, and that low sort of wit” (p 294). Charles Finch wrote no serious verse that we know of.  Fischer says except for Anne Finch (so beholden to this young man), no one ever “accused Charles Finch of versifying” and no manuscript of verse in his handwriting or anyone else’s attributing a poem to him survives (p 295). Keith prints none of his letters nor does she quote from any and I have not myself been able to read any.

But I have read several of the fables in the tradition of the Nightingale in competition with birds who sing poorly, or plainly, or not at all (the hawk, the owl, the cuckoo) and those who present a contest where the moral is either against the prideful assumption you will be admired (often the nightingale in this role) or more than half mocks the judge.  The version that is the closest source for this new poem is, as Keith suggests in her notes, L’Estrange’s 414, “An Ass Made a Judge of Music,” 1692 text, reprinted 1704, pp 386-387. I agree the bird fable might have been written with Charles in mind, but not as a way of making him into a serious wit. Rather he was the kind of person who likes epigrams, puns, and burlesques. The solution to why it was never printed is that again someone decided Finch had been tactless and worried lest the poem be misinterpreted as implying Swift’s Charles Finch would have liked burlesque and therefore seen as an insult. I suggest she never forgot that he was bored at her play (as apparently was Pope whose comment about being given a headache by being asked to listen to a play read aloud, where he includes Lady Winchilsea at the table is probably to her Aristomenes). But I doubt she meant an outright insult; it was more in the vein of uncomfortable teasing.

I find that Keith idealizes a number of the people connected to Anne Finch or simplifies them psychologically — she never so much as brings out the considerable tensions between Anne and her husband we find here and there in Anne’s more personal poems. So I suggest that Anne Finch had been made uncomfortable by the nephew’s lack of real appreciation of her poetry — by the time of her reading her play aloud (or parts of it), each of them knew the other was far from sincere in the veneer of politeness and mutual admiration kept up. Yes he urged her to print, but apparently this was a trope among several of her friends and associates. The poem to Charles urging his return home was not published until way after his death.  We should remember she brought no dowry, had had no children. I assume the marriage was tolerated because of her aristocratic heritage and because at the time it would have been thought highly unlikely Heneage would inherit (he was the fourth son). When it became apparent that Charles would have no children, that is when Heneage and Anne moved back into Eastwell because it was seen that Heneage might, now not so unexpectedly by that time, become the heir.

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Visit to the Composing Room (or typesetting) of the printing house/establishment of Clément Pomteux

I sum up my findings thus far this way: This new edition is an edition of the manuscripts and first printed book, so an addition to book history and those interested in the world of manuscript circulation before print took full hold in the 18th century. The team are apparently attempting to give the scholarly reader as close an experience of the four primary sources as is humanly possible in a book format. They also reprint or print for the first time those few poems where the attribution to Anne Finch is undeniable in a format which also imitates the way the text appears in the source as closely as one can do in a book meant to be read.

From the same series as above: attributed to Léonard Defrance (1784)

There is also a conscious attempt to avoid giving a poem a personal or autobiographical motive if this will bring out clearly Finch’s lifelong battle with depression, social anxiety, and troubled existence with Heneage as a non-juror. If you know her poetry from elsewhere and have read some of the considerable secondary material (criticism) that has come out on this poetry, you will recognize the attempt to erase a major complex emotional terrain across her oeuvre that, together with any observation of the traumas she endured with difficulty (as an orphaned child, an intellectual learned woman without a considerable dowry, and, as it turned out, childless woman), would go a long way towards explaining persuasively how all the poems relate to one another. See, for just one example, Vol 1, pp l-li (50-51) where these aspects of her personality are omitted all together, and the silence over the distressing personal content in the two poems Finch partly obliterated but could not get herself to destroy (Vol 1, pp 3-6, 408-13). (Another memo to self: I must find in Keith’s own book and/or essays where she explicitly vows not to present Finch as a weak woman or victim because, as a feminist, she dislikes such treatments of women. Such women are not good role models.)

A Song [for my Br. Les Finch: added]. Upon a Punch Bowl.

From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall come away,
To the Punch-bowl, by far more inviting;
To the Fopps, and the Beauxs [sic],
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here, what is truly delighting.

The half Globe ’tis in figure,
And wou’d itt were bigger;
Yett here’s the whole Universe floating,
Here’s Titles, and Places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doating.

‘Twas a World, like to this,
The hott Gracian did misse.
Of whom History’s keep such a pother,
To the bottom he sunk,
And when one he had drunk
Grew maudlin, and wept for another.

— Anne Finch, it is telling how she does not forget the importance of money & rank in her poetry; she & Heneage had some lean years; she also did not like the heavy drinking the male Finches indulged in at night, which, of course, she was helpless to stop …
Ellen

EC/ASECS virtually: Material Culture: Book history, Theater things, Natural History, & “My Journal of the Plague Year” (3)

Faye Castelow as Hellena, Joseph Millson as Willmore and Alexandra Gilbreath as Angellica Bianca in Aphra Behn’s The Rover RSC, 2016

Friends and readers,

My third and last blog on the EC/ASECs conference held last month, virtually. The first centered on the Thursday evening and first panel, Friday morning, where I gave my talk on “A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity.” the second blog included a long talk by the present Senior Curator of Education, Deborah Harper, on a history of collectors’ pianofortes, at the Winterthur Museum. For the the third I cover what papers I heard from Saturday morning until later afternoon. (Unfortunately I had to miss some; the titles of these are found on the website and not included here.) The conference ended with a spell-binding coda speech by Joanne Myers, of Gettysbury College near by, likening each phase of her time enduring the social isolation and closed schools of the pandemic to the phases of Daniel Defoe’s experience of a deadly epidemic in London in his famous partly fictionalized book.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We began with a book history panel. I heard two of the three papers or talks. Joseph Rudman explained and described the Editing Aphra Behn Website. He had a good deal of praise for E-ABIDA that website, E-APBIDA. He described what was in the site and how it was a useful tool as well as handy modern and extensively informed device. The general aim of this website is to explain the fine new Cambridge edition. Cambridge is publishing an 8 volume edition of Behn’s works at the same time. He offered strong praise for what the website is providing (there are 15 different editors), will apparently carry on doing for a while (as support for the edition) and suggested that it might stir others to do likewise.

One of the Burney diaries covering these court years

Elizabeth Powers’ presented her paper, “Books Do More Than Furnish a Room: Goethe and Burney in Their Father’s Library.” She chose these two authors because she felt they overlapped in time and despite showed how their different parentage and culture and their writing at the end of literary traditions produced a kind of public discourse which all who participate in this discourse can share in. Burney was secretive about her reading while Goethe was open. Burney was educated mostly at home; Goethe sent away to schools. But both kept journals and dramatized themselves differently in these. Burney shows herself embedded in her society; while Goethe is apart, he is interested in developing a style he will use later to legitimize what he writes down autobiographically. (My view is Burney is partly fictionalizing herself and doing it very effectively through the use of novelistic techniques.)

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Jonathan Groff as George III in Hamilton: nowhere as hilarious on video as when he is in person in front of an audience

Whole outfit

For “Theatre things” I again heard two of the three, these both thought-provoking papers. Jason Shaffer in his ““The Coat and The Cockade: Costuming Elements in Early Republican Drama” centered his talk on costume, and its importance, how an audience is led to suspend its disbelief while looking at outrageously amusing or dramatic clothes; they are delighted to believe in what they see. Then on stage familiar objects interact with a fantasy world built around these. He chose to discuss scenes where characters discuss their clothes. A costume endows an actor with the power of the character and theatrical realized dream vision. We also identify the actor as him or herself for real; that’s part of the thrill, and the familiarity. Mrs Siddons playing Lady Macbeth is both herself and Lady Macbeth. He mentioned how brilliant were the costumes in Hamilton; how they functioned as emblems of complex ideas made visceral. Watching theater on a computer at home loses the sense of audacity in the actor; bodies matter. Clothes too. Watching movies without others in the audience diminishes the thrill. He gave various examples of characters from the plays of the era on the English and American stages. Then how advertising pictures serve to reproduce our memories of, or create longing to join in, the live shared experience.

A contemporary cartoon of the Brunswick theater collapsing

Matt Kinservik in his “The Suppression of the Royalty Theatre Reconsidered” taught a somber moral. Basically the original patentees (ownership and control of these goes back to the early Restoration years, and their heirs (or those who had bought the patents and were present owners) allowed the group to build their theater and then insisted it be shut down. Matt named which people were involved, the hard and difficult work (negotiations) required, who went at first to support friends and/or associates and the various phases of hard work (including getting the materials) and then the advertising. And then the dismay when it was clear the law would be enforced, and how much money was lost when the audience so wanted more legitimate theater. The moral was the worst choice was opted for by those with the power to shut the others down: They let them build the house and then cracked down.

A famous travel book, described as a delightful classic, filled with description of flora and fauna

Unfortunately I missed two of the three papers on panel on natural history, in travel and other writing. I came in upon people discussing local birds.

The third talk, by Rodney Mader, was quite different, riveting even. His topic was Bartam’s Travels and Its baggage, a book written by a man who was a quaker scientist influenced by the romantics poets and Wordsworth’s Prelude. Mr Mader talked about a post-humanist perspective he found himself developing during the experience of trying to write about such a book and writer during this pandemic. He felt all the injustice (violence, lies) he was seeing going on around him — politically, economically, socially — estranged him from dealing with the material as it was presented by the people at the time. These were books compiled by people who dispossessed others, their methods were dependent on their power over others so the natural science was imposed. The man studying plants without regard to all that was going on around him was the son of an international merchant, a farmer who worked enslaved people. Wm Bartram himself found he could not drive or control the 6 enslaved people he was given; there is no evidence of what became of them (there were six including one pregnant woman).

Apparently, if you look at history on the Internet that includes Bartram, you can find the people involved in organizations he would have belonged to practiced, were for eugenics, and today present sign identifying themselves as for environmental conservation. An Alabama Heritage site from 2011 celebrates Bartram and other explorers and writers in botany; there is a photo of a Black ornithologist on their website.

The pièce de résistance of the whole conference turned out to be Joanne Myers’s concluding Presidential Address: “My Year of the Plague. She began by telling us she had long admired Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year and had taught it several times. She reread it this past year, and it helped calm her to read the incidents as her and her two daughter’s lives unfolded around them. She worked and taught from home, and taught her daughters too. She delivered a talk whose emotional trajectory followed that of Henry Foe (the chief character of Defoe’s Journal). Her tone was quiet, controlled, intense; she said she seemed to devour space and time in matter of fact prose. She saw the mistrust, the isolation, and sometimes people trying to help one another. At one point she said she was trying to provide service against the terrors’ dislocations. She teaches at Gettysburg herself so was surrounded by pro-Trump types and (I imagine) made the atmosphere everywhere outside her home more fraught. Defoe himself (in my view too) is a de-mystifier; it was noteworthy to her that Defoe remained a private man amid all he recorded.

Next year EC/ASECS hopes to meet for real or physically at the Winterthur museum in Delaware.

Ellen

EC/ASECS virtually: Material Culture: Austen then & now; women in the world; keyboards at the Winterthur Museum & Library (2)

An eighteenth-century mask

Friends and readers,

Another report on the papers and panels at another virtual conference, this one the fall EC/ASECS, to have been held at the Winterthur Museum, with the umbrella subject matter: “Material Culture.” Happily for each time slot there was only one panel, so I missed very little. On Thursday evening, we began our festivities online with Peter Staffel’s regularly held aural/oral experience. Excerpts from two comedies were dramatically read, and various poems. I read two sonnets by Charlotte Smith, and probably read with more feeling the first, No 51, because I thought of Jim and how I have dreamed of going to the Hebrides and got as far as Inverness and a drive around the northern edge of Scotland where across the way I saw the isle of Skye (or so I tell myself it was):

Supposed to have been written in the Hebrides:

ON this lone island, whose unfruitful breast
Feeds but the summer shepherd’s little flock,
With scanty herbage from the half cloth’d rock
Where osprays, cormorants and seamews rest;
E’en in a scene so desolate and rude
I could with thee for months and years be blest;
And, of thy tenderness and love possest,
Find all my world in this wild solitude!
When Summer suns these northern seas illume,
With thee admire the light’s reflected charms,
And when drear Winter spreads his cheerless gloom,
Still find Elysium in thy shelt’ring arms:
For thou to me canst sov’reign bliss impart,
Thy mind my empire—and my throne thy heart.

The next morning at 9 am we had our first panel, Jane Austen Then and Now, chaired by Linda Troost, and I read my paper “A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen”.

Next up was Elizabeth Nollen’s “Reading Radcliffe: the importance of the book in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. After the publisher had held onto the manuscript for six years, she wrote an angry letter, but he refused to return the manuscript unless she paid back what he had paid her brothers (£10); her family wouldn’t fork out the money. Nollen retold Udolpho in a way that emphasized its comforting and inspirational components. Her argument was Austen was re-writing Udolpho to make Radcliffe’s book into a bildingsroman. In Northanger Abbey we go with a heroine on a journey into womanhood. Henry and Eleanor Tilney, kind and unselfish friends, invite Catherine to back with them to their ancestral home. Ms Nollen (to my surprise) at the close of her paper inveighed against Catherine marrying Henry, finding in him much offensive man-splaining, seeing him as a man who will domineer over her. Catherine is exchanging one boss for another was her take, and that Catherine’s new future life is that of a dependent. (I feel that at the novel’s end, we are expected to feel how lucky Catherine is to have married such an intelligent, cordial, for the most part understanding man — and at the young age of 18, but of course it could be the narrator’s closing words are wholly ironic.)

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland escaping her friends and social duties by reading (paratexts from the ITV Northanger Abbey)

B. G. Betz’s “Pride and Prejudice and Its Sequels and Variations: a Gift to the Humanities.” She began by asserting that for Elizabeth Bennet is the favorite heroine of most readers, that Elizabeth and her novel provoke a passionate response in people. Why else the endless retellings of the E&D story? I’d say this is certainly so in the film adaptation Lost in Austen. (Here’s the plot of Pride and Prejudice to refresh your mind.) She then told us she travels around to libraries doing Library Hours (reading books to younger children) with the aim of getting more people reading, reading Jane Austen and also all the modernizations and adaptations, and appropriations of Austen books into written sequels, other (related?) romances, and many many movie adaptations. BG emphasis was “As long as I get them reading!” She probably is alive to Austen’s distinctive language and intelligent text, but what she aims out is to re-engage common readers with books, using Austen and romance. She went over several lists of sequel-writers (naming them, citing titles), told of which characters did chose this or that as central to the story line of a particular novel or series of novels, and the dates of publication. (I sometimes wonder if I miss out because I so rarely read sequels, and admit that the most recent Austen adaptations [heritage as well as appropriation] do not attract me because the film-makers seem no longer to assume the viewership includes a sizable population who have read Austen’s novels).

The morning’s second panel, Women in the World: Shaping Identity through Objects and Space included four papers. I can offer only the gist of three of them.
The chair, Andrea Fabrizio’s paper, ““Small Town Travel and Gossip: Earthly Obstacles and Spiritual Agency in The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont, was about a slender book, that because of my lack of knowledge of the topic and perspective, was difficult for me to follow. It’s short (only 50 pages) and vindicates a woman’s right to a spiritual choice. The general issue is one of control. A young woman’s father will not allow her to belong to a Bunyan-like church group, during their perpetual struggle, he dies and she is accused of murder (!) and then acquitted.

Ruth G. Garcia’s “‘Affect nothing above your rank’: Social Identity and the Material World in Conduct Books for Servants” focused on Edgeworth’s Belinda as a novel. Ms Garcia sees the novel as one which manifests and explores anxiety over servants sharing space with their employer (Belinda is Lady Delacour’s companion; another servant is insolent). The novel might seem to uphold conduct books which insist on controlling servants (in among other areas dress), but we are shown how servants have little right to live. Lady Delacour’s is a troubled marriage and accedes finally to Belinda’s influence. By contrast, Lady Anne Perceval is an exemplary character who is her husband’s partner. She cited Carolyn Steedman’s Labours Lost, an important book about women servants. (I have read essays which interpret this novel quite differently, seeing it as a lesbian text, as about a mother-daughter relationship.)

Xinyuan Qiu’s “Affection or Affectation: An Alternative Way of Reading Pamela Provided by Hogarth’s London Milkmaids” is described by its title: she used Hogarth’s satiric depictions of milkmaids (which do resemble the ways Richardson dresses Pamela) to argue that the text is salacious but not to satirize or critique it in the manner of Fielding but rather to argue that the milkmaid figure used erotically challenges traditional hierarchies.

A drawing by Hogarth featuring a milkmaid — this is a more chaste image than several of those examined

I could take in more of Elizabeth Porter’s ““Moving Against the Marriage Plot: London in Burney’s Cecilia because I have studied Burney’s Cecilia, as well as her journal writing (and of course read Evelina). This seemed to me a study of Cecilia as an instance of urban gothic used as a critique of the way this young woman is treated. As defined by Ms Porter, urban gothic, associated with the Victorian gothic, presents a state of disorientation in urban spaces; male authors tend to write this kind of gothic (I thought of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White and No Name.) It is a development out of Radcliffe (whom I remember Burney commenting upon in her journals). Cecilia ends in a psychic breakdown running around the London streets, near the novel’s close she experiences horror, imprisonment, living in darkness. In marriage laws and customs where women lose personhood in marriage, which provides a happy ending which seems more like succumbing. We are left with feelings of stress, strain, haunted regret, resignation.

I was able to attend to only one of the papers on the third afternoon panel, a miscellany of papers, “Susan Howard’s “‘Born within the Vortex of a Court’: Structural Methodologies and the Symbology of Possessions in Charlotte Papendiek’s Memoirs. This was a reading of Papendiek’s 1760s Memoir. Her father had been a servant in Queen Charlotte’s court, and Charlotte constructs a dual narrative telling about her private life as a child and grown woman at this court. Ms Howard read material realities as manifesting aspects of social realities. Things, and especially gifts, are emissaries between people. She discussed Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the queen and of this Assistant Keeper of the Queen’s wardrobe (as well as Queen’s reader). After her talk (during the discussion) Ms Howard talked about the problem of gauging how far what Papendiek wrote was literal truth, but suggested if it wasn’t, the journals are as valuable for telling us of the values, norms and general events at the court. (I feel the same holds true for Burney’s journals and diaries, which have recently been shown by, among others, Lorna Clark, to be often highly fictionalized.)

I came in at the end of Jessica Banner’s “Women behind the Work: Re-Thinking the Representation of Female Garment Workers in Eighteenth-Century London,” which was a study of the realities of the lives of female garment workers in 18th century London (methods of production, pay, who and where were they located?, their re-organization between the 1790s and 1815). There is a Liverpool directory, an alphabetical list of names.

The second day ended with an hour-long very enjoyable talk by Deborah Harper, Senior Curator of Education, Winterthur Museum and Library, working there for over 30 years. She took us on a tour of the keyboard instruments in the Dupont collection at the museum, focusing on 18th century elements and what seems to be one of the most cherished treasures of the collection, a 1907 Steinway owned and played upon by Mrs Ruth du Pont (nee Wales, 1889-1967); her husband, Henry Francis Dupont was the Dupont who developed the museum into the premier collection of American decorative art it is today. Although not mentioned by Ms Harper, his father, Henry Algernon du Pont, was a US senator for Delaware, a wealthy Republican businessman and politician who promptly lost his seat when senators were no longer appointed but elected. I wouldn’t presume to try to convey the rich detail and explanations in this talk (accompanied by interesting images). Ms Harper covered what are harpsichords, pianofortes, owners, collectors, specific histories of the different keyboards, how they fit into the culture of their specific place and era, stories of estates, individual players, where the keyboard has been and is today in the buildings. One group of people mentioned, the Lloyd family who owned Wye house and Wye plantation, owned large groups of enslaved people, among them Frederick Douglas.

The longest section revolved around the Steinway at present in a beautiful front room, and how it was loved and used by Ruth du Pont, who, Ms Harper said, loved musicals and Cole Porter songs. Ruth du Pont is described on the Winterthur website as “the Lady of the house,” “a social figure, talented musician, and hostess of four houses” and “devoted wife” and mother. “Photographs and documents from Winterthur’s vast archive document Mrs. du Pont’s life of hospitality, music, and travel.” I found elsewhere a full and franker life of high privilege than you might expect (with many photographs). She had to endure various tensions throughout her younger years (in each life some rain must fall), and later in life would go into angry tirades at FDR as “a traitor to his class.” So she would have resented my having social security to live upon? It also seems that her husband didn’t like the color of her piano; he wanted to paint it gray-green to match the 18th century colors of some of his collected furniture. When he decided against this (wisely, or was persuaded not to), he kept the piano from view for a long time (placing it for example in a concert hall for a time).

Used for Christmas concerts today

One of two blogs,
Ellen