'An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.' - Matthew Prior

‘If weary’d with the great Affairs,

Which Britain trusts to Harley’s Cares,

Thou, humble Statesman, may’st descend,

Thy Mind one Moment to unbend.’

 

‘An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.’

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

 




Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford
and Mortimer. Detail from portrait
after John Richardson,1804
(Parliament of the United Kingdom).

In 1712, British politics was in the grip of competing factions, all bitterly struggling to direct the future of the country: not altogether unlike today. Back then, the question was all to do with who should succeed the ailing Queen Anne (whom some of you might have recently made acquaintance with through Olivia Colman’s Oscar winning-portrayal in the film The Favourite). Questions of religion intermingled with those of politics, with some seeking to continue the bloodline of the Stuart family by inviting Anne’s Catholic half-brother James Edward Stuart to be king after her, whilst others wanted to secure the monarchy for the Queen’s Protestant Hanoverian cousins. The competing interests of the two main political parties, Whigs and Tories, led to the formation of social clubs including the Kit-Cat Club (most probably named after the owner of the establishment where they met and nothing to do with chocolate bars), and the Tory Brothers’ Club (so-called because the members called each other ‘Brothers’: women were not admitted as members). Back then, the post of ‘Prime Minister’ didn’t really exist yet, but the broadly equivalent role of Lord Treasurer was held by Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Having started out as a Whig, Harley later shifted to the Tory side but appears to have remained committed to acting in the best interests of his country and monarch. He is very far from being an unproblematic figure though: he masterminded and was Governor of the South Sea Company, which was set up with the aim of reducing British national debt via the transportation and trade of people as slaves across the Atlantic (for more info on this, see John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay, 2004).

 

This was not the reason why he wasn’t ever admitted to join the Tory Brothers’ Club though: they actually seem to have just though he was powerful enough already. But that didn’t stop them inviting him to join a meeting in 1712, and rather than sending a tired little RSVP the invitation was written in verse by one of the leading British poet of the day, Matthew Prior. This was not altogether an unusual choice – poems would often be written and circulated between friends in manuscript form, and the later Scriblerus Club sent multiple verse invitations to Harley. Prior’s invitation begins with the practicalities, stating when and where the meeting is to take place, followed by the object of the evening:

 

‘Our Weekly Friends To-morrow meet

At Matthew’s Palace, in Duke-street;

To try for once, if They can ine

On Bacon-Ham, and Mutton-chine:’

 

Then, having tempted Harley with talk of food, the poem suggests that if he is ‘weary’d with the great Affairs’ of statesmanship, he ‘may’st descend, / Thy Mind one Moment to unbend’. It’s an eighteenth-century way of asking him to leave work at the office to come and chill for a bit. The poem then becomes even more deferential, as Harley is invited so that he might ‘see Thy Servant from his Soul / Crown with Thy Health the sprightly Bowl’ – in other words, Prior is proposing to toast him in his presence. This, Prior goes on to claim, would be the most ‘Honor’ that ‘e’er [his] House / Receiv’d’.

 

You can find this poem:

https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/pmp18-w0940.shtml

(a fantastic website with heaps of eighteenth-century poems all superbly curated and free to all!)

 

You can find more about eighteenth-century British club culture, Robert Harley, and the Succession Crisis in these excellent books:

 

Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London: Harper Collins, 2012)

 

Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club (London: Harper Collins, 2008, repr. 2009)

 

Sources used in writing this blogpost:

 

John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004)

'The Woman of Colour: A Tale' (1808) - Anon

‘…this was evidently meant to mortify your Olivia; it was blending her with the poor negro slaves of the West Indies! It was meant to show her, that, in Mrs. Merton’s idea, there was no distinction between us—you will believe that I could not be wounded at being classed with my brethren!’

The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808)

Anon

This week, I want to tell you about a recent new favourite of mine, something I hadn’t even heard of until just last year. When I finally read it, I was sorry I hadn’t found it sooner because it’s absolutely tremendous! Published anonymously in 1808, The Woman of Colour is a romance novel that resists cliché, and that has much to teach us about eighteenth-century society and issues surrounding diversity and inclusivity.

Attributed to Jean-Étienne Liotard,
Portrait of a young woman, c. 1790s
(Saint Louis Art Museum)

There has long been a completely inaccurate assumption in popular culture that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society was almost totally populated with white people. Fortunately, this notion is finally beginning to be challenged, not least through a more accurate, representative approach to casting in TV dramas and films (albeit dented by insidious suggestions that this kind of casting is for “political correctness” rather than because the absence of a variety of skin-tone in eighteenth and nineteenth century society is just plain wrong). The other trap of popular belief is to assume eighteenth-century roles for black people must either be slaves or servants – whilst there were sadly very many people of colour who were enslaved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is also very wrong to assume that people of colour were always and only victims of labour exploitation. In The Woman of Colour, a mixed-race heiress recently orphaned by the death of her white slave-owner father sets sail for England. Her name is Olivia Fairfield and her plan is to follow her beloved father’s last request and marry the younger of her two cousins, Mr. Augustus Merton. On the boat journey she meets an attractive single gentleman and his elderly mother, and you might be thinking that this is all starting to sound quite Austenian – it absolutely is of course, but it doesn’t turn out at all the way you might be expecting it to.

Once ashore and introduced to her uncle and his family, Miss Fairfield becomes the target of the social snobbery of her older cousin’s wife, Mrs Merton, something that would also be quite Austenian were it not for the fact that Mrs Merton’s campaign of snide and malevolence is barbed with the most obnoxious racism. That Miss Fairfield is able to rise above Mrs Merton’s wilful offensiveness is only a further indication that she is a heroine in the truest and best sense of the word. Attempts by Mrs Merton to categorise her ‘with the poor negro slave of the West Indies’ for example, fail simply because a presumption that this would be insulting relies upon a perception of race-based inferiority– something that Miss Fairfield roundly and quite rightly rejects when she describes these people living in slavery as her ‘brethren’.

As the novel progresses, it continues to blend romance with a humanitarian assertion of the rights of all people to equality and freedom. Olivia Fairfield gets married (no, I’m not going to tell you who to), but things don’t always go to plan, and it all wraps up with a final outcome that perhaps shouldn’t be as unexpected as it is. Throughout, Olivia Fairfield is a witty, intelligent, affectionate young woman, deeply committed to liberating and improving the lives of people living in slavery. We don’t know who wrote this book – perhaps we never will. In Lyndon B. Dominique’s introduction to his superb edition of the text, he theorises that it might have been authored by one of two sisters whose lives partially reflect that of the novel’s heroine – but there is no absolute proof. Whoever it was, though, the novel’s biting insight into the experience of being the target of racist abuse, together with the comparatively unusual presentation of a genuinely independent woman who does not consider marriage to be the only means of achieving happiness, must surely make it extremely likely that the author of this extraordinary work was, like its title, a woman of colour.

Happy Reading everyone!

You can find this novel here:

The Woman of Colour: A Tale, ed. by Lyndon J. Dominique (Broadview Press, 2007)

(available at most good bookstores – if they haven’t got a copy, they should be able to order it in).

'A Nocturnal Reverie' - Anne Finch

‘In such a Night let Me abroad remain,
Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again;
Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew'd.
Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd.

‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (published 1713)

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1661-1720)

 

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea.
Portrait by Peter Cross, c. 1690,
(National Portrait Gallery, London). 

A quick search online will soon tell you that Anne Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ is very far from being unknown. The most basic of surveys will rapidly uncover various readings of the text and historical material relating to Finch herself. I have chosen this poem to look at this week not because it hasn’t been written about much, but rather because of its essentially cathartic quality, and for its sense of finding peace in a chaotic, troubled world.

The poem is essentially one huge sentence, all describing an imaginary night spent savouring the beauties of the natural world:

‘In such a Night, when every louder Wind

Is to its distant Cavern safe confin’d;’
(lines 1-2)

The reference to every ‘Wind’ being held within a ‘Cavern’ is an allusion to the cave of the wind god Aeolus in classical Greek mythology; instead of violent winds ‘only gentle Zephyr fans his Wings’. Meanwhile, the nightingale (represented by ‘lonely Philomel’) either softly sings, or from the vantage of ‘some Tree’ she raises her melodic voice to guide ‘the Wand’rer right’ (lines 4-6). The night is mostly clear, since the ‘passing Clouds give place’, or else only ‘thinly vail the Heav’ns’ (lines 7 & 8). The viewer’s gaze returns to earth via a reflection ‘in some River, overhung with Green’ of the ‘waving Moon’ (lines 9 & 10). The riverside grass is now ‘freshen’d’ by the moist night air and the ‘cool Banks’ of the river now ‘invite’ the wanderer to rest (lines 11 & 12). Within this tranquil oasis, various country flowers bloom including the ‘Woodbind, and the Bramble-Rose’ alongside the ‘sleepy Cowslip’ and the ‘Foxglove’ (lines 13-16).

The personification begun with the idea of the Cowslip being ‘sleepy’ is now continued through the likening of the ‘scatter’d Glow-worms’ to ‘trivial Beauties’ in society who must ‘watch their Hour to shine’; the inference is that only the most ‘perfect Charms’ can withstand the unforgiving light of day, and the whole thing is turned into a clever compliment to Finch’s friend the Countess of Salisbury whom, she writes ‘stands the Test of every Light’. It’s an unusual detour in a poem that focuses primarily upon nighttime as beautiful, and thus offers the possibility that some of the appeal of the night is owing to the limitations it imposes upon visual perception.

Now, sweet ‘Odours’ can wander ‘uninterrupted’ through the air, and shadows are softened because they offer less contrast within the ‘darken’d Goves’. This is a world of shadows now, where the ‘lengthen’d Shade’ or shadow of an ambling horse becomes an object of ‘fear’ until the sound of ‘torn up Forage in his Teeth’ is heard (lines 29-32). From this momentary glimpse of the fearfulness of the dark, Finch returns us swiftly to the peacefulness of twilight as sheep and cows eat, and birds call in a ‘shortliv’d Jubilee’ of tranquillity enjoyed ‘whilst Tyrant-man does sleep’ (lines 33-38). Sharing in this idyllic, untroubled condition Finch identifies this nocturne as a space in which to experience ‘a sedate Content’ that nonetheless does not inhibit the ‘silent Musings’ that prompt ‘the Mind to seek / Something, too high for Syllables to speak’ (lines 39-42). By becoming immersed within the natural world, a sense of sublimity is achieved and the wanderer’s soul is finally, for a moment, ‘free’. ‘In such a Night,’ Finch writes, ‘let Me abroad remain, / Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again’ (lines 47-48).

Happy Reading everyone!

Other poems by Anne Finch can be found here:

http://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o4784-w0860.shtml

(A superb and totally free database of eighteenth-century poetry – there’s a beautifully presented copy of Finch’s poem here, as well as hundreds of other eighteenth-century poems throughout the site.)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anne-finch#about

(Poetry Foundation online: great free resource!!)

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Selected Poems, ed. by Denys Thompson (Carcanet Press Ltd, 2003)

(this is pretty much what it says on the tin: selected poems by Anne Finch)

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

 – The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

(both are available from numerous book shops online and on the high street, and both are truly excellent volumes! There are plenty of economical priced second-hand copies of this available online too)

You can find out more about Anne Finch here:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Finch,_Countess_of_Winchilsea
(Wikipedia – usually a good starting point, and it’s free!)

Barbara McGovern, ‘Finch, Anne, countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9426 [accessed 16 July 2015]

(sadly, this resource is accessible by subscription only)

Resources used in the composition of this blogpost:

 

Claire Pickard, Literary Jacobitism: The Writings of Jane Barker, Mary Caesar and Anne Fich, DPhil Thesis (Oxford, 2006) https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:85514fc9-6f0c-4992-ae8c-2666dc1f7ede/download_file?safe_filename=602157226_Redacted.pdf&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Thesis

Katherine M. Quinsey, ‘Nature, Gender, and Genre in Anne Finch’s Poetry: “A Nocturnal Reverie”’, Lumen, 26 (2007), 63-77

https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/lumen/2007-v26-lumen0255/1012061ar.pdf