'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).

'Saturday' - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

‘How am I changed! alas! how am I grown

A frightful spectre, to myself unknown!’

‘Saturday’ (published 1747)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu by Johnathan Richardson,
1725 (held at Sandon Hall, Stafford).

If you’ve never heard of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu then you’ve seriously been missing out – as well as being a talented poet and writer, she also played a key role in dispelling British suspicion of inoculation against small-pox and thus ultimately contributed to the preservation of countless lives. Although her father had wanted her to marry a wealthy heir called Clotworthy Skeffington, Lady Mary instead eloped with the lawyer and MP Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712. Later, she accompanied her husband during his appointment as ambassador to Constantinople at the heart of what was then the Ottoman Empire, and it was during her time here that she first learnt of the Turkish practice of inoculation. The subject was of particular importance to Montagu, for she had herself survived a potentially fatal case of small pox in 1715.

The poem I’ll be looking at today forms one of Montagu’s Six Town Eclogues, a series of short poems in which there is one for every day of the week except Sunday. The series was written around 1715-16 but was not officially published until 1747 (three of them were pirated by the publisher Edmund Curll in 1716, but ‘Saturday’ was not one of these). The poem is written from the perspective of a society lady whose beauty has been affected by small pox, and so it begins:

The wretched Flavia on her couch reclined,

Thus breathed the anguish of a wounded mind. 

A glass reversed in her right hand she bore,

For now she shunned the face she sought before.

   ‘How am I changed! alas! how am I grown

A frightful spectre, to myself unknown!

(lines 1-6)

The shift from external narrator to the actual voice of Flavia here allows Montagu to convey the psychological impact of the physical scarring.  Her appearance irrevocable altered, Flavia is now ‘to [her]self unknown’, and the rest of the poem is narrated from her perspective as she is overwhelmed by the loss of self-worth that she equates with the loss of her beauty.  In particular, this worth is defined through the influence her good-looks had given her over men from many different walks of life.  She lists her former triumphs:

‘For me the patriot has the House [i.e. the Houses of Parliament] forsook,

And left debates to catch a passing look;

For me the soldier has soft verses writ;

For me the beau has aimed to be a wit.

For me the wit to nonsense was betrayed;

[…]

The bashful squire, touched with a wish unknown,

Has dared to speak with spirit not his own:

Fired by one wish, all did alike adore;

Now beauty’s fled, and lovers are no more.

(lines 28-32, & lines 37-40)

Remember that the poem’s opening highlighted that Flavia perceives her appearance as indistinguishable from her identity when it stated that she is now to ‘[her]self unknown’. The ‘me’ in these lines does not so much refer to Flavia herself but to her physical features. It is her beauty which the politician wants ‘to catch a passing look’ of, and it is for her beauty that ‘the soldier has soft verses writ’.  No hint is given in the poem of Flavia possessing any other qualities beyond her physical attractiveness. We are told how in the past Flavia has gazed into her dressing room mirror:  

 While hours unheeded passed in deep debate,

How curls should fall, or where a patch to place

 (lines 48-49) [just in case you don’t know, the ‘patch’ referred to here is a beauty patch, usually a small fancy shape in black that was intended to draw attention to the most attractive feature of the face]

Later in the poem Flavia throws spiteful shade upon women she deems ‘meaner beauties’ (meaning those less beautiful than she had been) claiming that ‘Tis to my ruin all your charms ye owe’, and that if ‘pitying heaven’ would return her to her former glory her now successful rivals ‘still might move unthought of and unseen’ (around line 60). But this is actually the closest the poem comes to allowing Flavia an opportunity to expose herself to ridicule.  Montague’s crucial, unspoken question here is whether Flavia has allowed herself to be defined by her appearance, or whether it is the everyday sexism of her time that has caused her to equate her personal value solely with her physical appearance. 

Hints as to the answer to this question are given in various subtle ways throughout the poem, for example when Flavia begs her servants to remove the portrait of herself before her illness:

Far from my sight that killing picture bear,

The face disfigure, or the canvas tear!

That picture, which with pride I used to show,

The lost resemblance but upbraids me now.

(lines 43-46)

Perceiving herself to be mocked by the portrait of her former self, the choice of the term ‘upbraid[ing]’ here indicates Flavia’s assumption of blame for the situation, as if she herself is somehow at fault.  This is of course totally untrue, and having suffered an illness like small pox she is genuinely lucky to still be alive; but the fact that she even unconsciously absorbs blame or fault for what has happened to her contains within it the implication that it is somehow a duty or responsibility for her to look beautiful.  Her success or failure as an individual, her whole worth as a person, is defined by her appearance.  As the poem draws to its conclusion, the problem that Flavia now feels she faces is the inability to reclaim a life for herself in a society that prioritises surface appearance over substance. It is not just her sense of identity which she has lost, but her capacity to influence others and be respected as an individual.  Flavia exclaims:

But oh, how vain, how wretched is the boast

Of beauty faded, and of empire lost!

What now is left but weeping to deplore

My beauty fled, and empire now no more?

(lines 61-64)

The syntactic repetition of the clause structure – ‘Of beauty faded […] of empire lost’ – solidifies the link between the two terms still further.  As a woman, Flavia’s power has been derived from her appearance. It’s especially worth keeping in mind here that this pessimistic self-expulsion from society is not, of course, the approach Montagu took in her own life – the very existence of this poem (written after Montagu’s own experience of small pox) obviously belies the sense of uselessness that Flavia has fallen prey to here. All that Flavia believes is left for her is to ‘Forsake mankind, and bid the world adieu’ since she believes she is now fit only for the mockery of those men who previously worshipped her beauty.  Although she refers briefly to some visits from male admirers come to console her, she is painfully conscious of what their eventual attitude towards her will be when their predictions of her swift recovery and resumption of beauty are not fulfilled: ‘Men mock the idol of their former vow’, she notes darkly. What Montagu draws attention to here is actually that Flavia is only worth less because of her illness if the society in which she lives considers her to be so. There is also an implicit critique of a society in which women like Flavia are made to feel that physical beauty is the only way in which they can contribute. That Montagu was able to use her own experience to fuel her passion for promoting better standards of health-care owed much to the privileged position she occupied, and to her own determination to use that position to best effect.  As her most recent biographer Isobel Grundy notes, ‘Lady Mary had more of a life outside her family than most women of her class’ (p. 261).

You can find this poem:

http://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o5152-w0110.shtml#o5152-w0116

(Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive – a nice free copy with added notes and information)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44766/town-eclogues-saturday-the-small-pox

(Poetry Foundation – a nice free copy)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Saturday’, from Six Town Eclogues, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 143-6(A fantastic collection of poetry, highly recommended!!)

You can find out more about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Mary_Wortley_Montagu

(Wikipedia – often a useful first stop for general information)

http://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00001.shtml

(Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive – includes links to many of Montagu’s poems, and a short biographical note; also details editions of her poems and writings in case you want to delve further)

Resources used in writing this blogpost:

Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

'The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat' - Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

‘The Queen of Birds, t'encrease the Regal Stock,
Had hatch'd her young Ones in a stately Oak,
Whose Middle-part was by a Cat possest,
And near the Root with Litter warmly drest,
A teeming Sow had made her peaceful Nest.
(Thus Palaces are cramm'd from Roof to Ground,
And Animals, as various, in them found.)’

(lines 1-7)

The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

(published 1713)

It sounds like the start of a joke, but the only humour here is of the darkest kind.  Three animals are

all living in the same tree, but one of them sees a chance of monopolising the situation and takes it.  By playing upon the fears of his neighbours, the cat finds a cunning way of coming out on top; there is no hero in this story, only a stark warning about being careful when taking advice that the advisor doesn't have their own best interests at heart.

Illustration from 1668 edition of Jean de La Fontaine's
Fables, Book III.  Woodcut by François Chauveau.
This image courtesy of:
http://www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net/aiglaichat.htm

The basic storyline comes from a French poem by Jean de La Fontaine, entitled ‘L’Aigle, la Laie, et la Chatte’, published in 1668 with the accompanying illustration by François Chauveau.  Yet Anne Finch’s poem is far more than a simple translation.  In analysing Finch’s work, both Charles H. Himnant and Paula R. Backsheider have noted how in Finch’s hands this little fable becomes a subtle political comment.  In 1688 William and Mary of Orange deposed Mary’s father, James II of England; differences of religion were the focus of the coup.  Yet while this incident is frequently referred to as the ‘Glorious Revolution’ because of the comparative peacefulness with which it took place, there were those who opposed the change.  Anne Finch and her husband, Heneage Finch, were amongst those who refused to support the new monarchs.  Fleeing London for the safety of the country, they remained active in support of James (with Heneage even ending up imprisoned for a time for having attempted to join James's exiled court in France).  For Anne, this activity was in the form of writing; through the cat’s smooth assumption of power in ‘The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat’ it is easy to see, as Paula Backsheider points out, the character of ‘the wily courtier, a figure risen from the middle ranks, who rejoices in sowing dissent’ (p. 47).  Though this is not strictly allegorical, and the politics surrounding the ‘Glorious Revolution’ is much more complex and intricate than there is space to discuss here, this is certainly a poem that assumes a highly critical tone of those who use deceit and betrayal to usurp power.

I don’t want to get too heavy though: I originally chose this poem for inclusion here because, at least on first reading, it does seem rather funny.  A bit like an Aesop fable, it conveys a serious moral message through the means of entertainment.  It’s the kind of poem designed to make you first laugh at the gullibility of the eagle and the sow - then stop and realise that, actually, the author has quite a serious point.  Not least, it's aim is to provoke reflection upon gullibility more generally, and on the importance of not letting the selfish concern for personal safety create destructive panic.  The eagle and the sow both abandon their young because of the cat’s machinations, yet this is as much a result of their own preoccupation with self-preservation as of the cat’s deceit.    

One or two points to note before you read this: the first two lines look like a clumsy attempt at rhyme, but it’s useful to remember that pronunciation of words has changed a lot over time.  Linguistic historians would probably be able to explain it better, but basically don’t write her off as a poet just because her first couplet doesn’t seem to work; when she was writing, it probably did rhyme.  Also, when the poem refers to ‘Sow’s paps’ as a great delicacy, it is referring to mammary glands (I know, sounds disgusting: but then the cat is the villain of the piece, remember). The 'sycophant' referred to in the moral describes a person who is ingratiating towards another simply for their own gain (in this poem, the cat). 

Happy reading! And apologies to all the internet cat lovers out there!

As always, feel free to leave comments and ask questions!

You can find this poem:

http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/finch/1713/mp-eagle.html

(editions of Anne Finch’s poetry are not always easy to come by, so I would recommend readers use this free version of the poem available online, and from which I have taken the reading that follows.)

Other poems by Anne Finch can be found here:

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)

https://www.waterstones.com/book/selected-poems/anne-finch/9781857547207

(this is pretty much what it says on the tin: selected poems by Anne Finch.  Available from numerous places; I just put the link to Waterstones for variety.  And because they have a points card system…)

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

(available from numerous book shops online and on the high street: an excellent volume!  Last time this came up in a blog post I entered up ordering a copy, which arrived in the post the other day… Look out for future blogs referring to poems in this exciting little anthology! There are plenty of economical priced second-hand copies of this available online too!)

The information for this blogpost was taken from the following sources:

Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (JHU Press, 2005), p. 47

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kRVSnAqeKBoC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=anne+finch+the+eagle+the+sow+and+the+cat&source=bl&ots=DVEtLiRz9S&sig=bBeCNWf8nKOWaLvzI7PjP4jC3Sk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCwQ6AEwA2oVChMIs8KGjfPhxgIVoo_bCh2IgAco#v=onepage&q=anne%20finch%20the%20eagle%20the%20sow%20and%20the%20cat&f=false

(This looks to be a fascinating and clear book; like many works of literary criticism, this might be a little expensive for small budgets (like mine), so I’ve attached a link to the pages relating to this poem, available via a preview on googlebooks)  

Charles H. Himnant, The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation (University of Delaware, 1994) pp. 194-6

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NPJuMBADoYAC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=anne+finch+the+eagle+the+sow+and+the+cat&source=bl&ots=mK9qsHosPB&sig=S2QdnbXZfpMgRFrqWTPUBnx3P8g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAWoVChMIo6ec793hxgIVQZ8UCh0zVgB5#v=onepage&q=anne%20finch%20the%20eagle%20the%20sow%20and%20the%20cat&f=false
(The link should lead to a googlebooks preview of the book that gives most of the relevant information about this poem)

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)

Leslie Clifford Sykes, “Jean de La Fontaine”, Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2015
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-de-La-Fontaine [accessed 17 July 2015]

(an excellent, and free, resource!)

http://www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net/aiglaichat.htm

(a website all about Jean de La Fontaine, written in French but accessible to to English-only speakers via google translate)

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com
(a useful free dictionary online!  Always worth looking up unfamiliar words!)

You can also find out more about Anne Finch on her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Finch,_Countess_of_Winchilsea

'Evelina' - Frances (Fanny) Burney

‘This moment arrived.  Just going to Drury-Lane theatre.   The celebrated Mr. Garrick performs Ranger.  I am quite in extacy.  So is Miss Mirvan.  How fortunate, that he should happen to play!  We would not let Mrs. Mirvan rest till she consented to go; her chief objection was to our dress, for we have had no time to Londonize ourselves; but we teized her into compliance, and so we are to sit in some obscure place, that she may not be seen.  As to me, I should be alike unknown in the most conspicuous or most private part of the house.

   I can write no more now.  I have hardly time to breathe – only just this, the houses and streets are not quite so superb as I expected.  However, I have seen nothing yet, so I ought not to judge.’

(from Letter X)

Evelina or The History a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World

Frances (Fanny) Burney
1778

A mother abandoned by her husband; a paternity dispute; a child brought up by a foster carer; a quest for identity as the child becomes a young woman; her struggle to assert her own worth amidst a crowd of embarrassing relatives.  All sounds like it could be from a modern-day TV drama, doesn’t it?  In fact, all these elements combine within Frances Burney’s first (and in my opinion best) novel Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World.   

One of Hugh Thomson's superb illustrations
from a 1903 publication of the novel.

Written in the form of an exchange of letters (technically known as an epistolary novel), there is an immediacy to the story that simply leaps off the page.  The quotation I have included for today’s header is a good example of this: the events of the story are not simply narrated to the reader.  Rather, we get to live the events with the heroine, the Evelina of the title (the technical term for this is the eponymous heroine; a useful word with which to dazzle people at parties and pub quizzes).  It’s a bit like having an eighteenth-century pen-pal.  Evelina is an extremely easy person with whom to empathise: keen for adventure, longing to sample life in the big city, yet inexperienced and thus often getting things a little bit wrong.  Kind, intelligent, sensitive, and always trying to do the right thing, she is continually caught up in the ludicrous, pretentious, and sometimes downright dangerous behaviour of relatives whom it is socially impossible for her to avoid; it is perhaps this more than anything else that sweeps you up into the story, making you cheer for her every success, and wince with her at every unintentional faux pas.

Characters’ reactions may occasionally seem a little overblown (there is one point later on in the book where there is a lot of bursting into tears and dropping onto knees in a context that, perhaps surprisingly, has absolutely nothing to do with marriage proposals).  The only thing I can say about this is just to remember that the book was written at a time when sentimentality was a highly prized attribute.  If Evelina seems a little susceptible to what might today seem rather theatrical displays of emotion in one or two places, it is only eighteenth-century code for her general worth as a character. 

One of the most vibrant and engaging of eighteenth-century novels, this is a book that deserves to be savoured and enjoyed.  It is the story of a young woman’s entrance into the world, into life, into love, and it is the story of her quest for a sense of identity and of belonging. 

Happy reading!! And, as always, feel free to ask questions  in comments!  

You can find this book:

 http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/burney/evelina/evelina.html

(this is a free edition of the text, and thus a quick, economical way of reading it!  A word of caution though: readers unfamiliar with some eighteenth-century words and phrases might enjoy enhanced reading pleasure by obtaining an edition of the text that has helpful annotations to explain unusual or archaic terms)

 Free editions may be available for Kindle, also a great way of accessing a text or taking it with you on the bus; just be aware that such editions might not have had the benefit of proper editorial production and thus may contain errors and spelling mistakes. 

 http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199536931.do

(Oxford World Classics edition! I am slightly biased in recommending this, as it is the edition that I first read the novel from in my early teens.  It is full of really useful explanatory notes and so is a great way to read this story.  As this book frequently occurs on students’ reading lists, there is a plentiful supply of economically priced second-hand copies continually available from reputable second-hand dealers.)

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/books/evelina/9780141198866/

(Penguin Classics edition!  This does have a snazzy cover, but I can’t see anything online about whether it has any explanatory notes.  Worth checking before purchase: I cannot overstate the importance of a healthy scattering of notes when first approaching a text like this!)

About the Author:

France Burney, painted by her cousin Edward
Francesco Burney.  This is the most popular,
and frequently reproduced, portrait of Burney.
This image was, er, 'borrowed' from Wikipedia.

 

Frances (Fanny) Burney had a long and enormously fascinating life; indeed, to try and condense this into one neat paragraph has been one of the greatest challenges of this blogpost.  The daughter of the musician Charles Burney, Frances was a personal friend of countless major eighteenth-century figures, including the actor David Garrick and Dr Samuel Johnson (the author of the subject of a previous blogpost, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’).  Later, in 1786, she became the second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte, a post which she greatly disliked and which she was very glad to leave in 1791.  In 1793 (aged 41) Frances married Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay, a French émigré who had escaped to Britain in the wake of the French Revolution; they had one son, who died in 1837.  When Frances Burney died in 1840, she left behind a copious wealth of literary material, including an extensive collection of letters exchanged with some of the most prominent figures of the eighteenth-century, and also four major published novels, of which Evelina is the first. 

You can find out more about Frances Burney:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Burney
(Wikipedia!!)

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Fanny-Burney

(Encyclopædia Britannica: kind of like a more sophisticated version of Wikipedia.  Do try and follow up the little blue links to other eighteenth-century figures, such as the wonderful David Garrick: it can lead you round an absorbing who’s who of eighteenth-century society)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3zjk

(this is an engaging radio programme aired this year; I don’t want to sound like I’m namedropping or anything, but I have actually been fortunate enough to make acquaintance with two of the guests on the programme, Dr Nicole Pohl and Prof. Judith Hawley, and was impressed by their friendliness, enthusiasm and kind encouragement!  If you have a spare forty minutes, this programme is definitely worth a listen!) 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fanny-Burney-biography-Claire-Harman/dp/0006550363/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1436539876&sr=8-4&keywords=fanny+burney

(Claire Harman’s Fanny Burney: A biography.  Apologies for only giving a link to this on Amazon: it is available at numerous other retailers, including independent bookstores!)

Information for this blogpost was taken from the following resource:

Pat Rogers, ‘Burney, Frances (1752-1840)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/603 [accessed 9 July 2015]

(unfortunately, access to this resource is by subscription only)  

'January 1795' - Mary Robinson

‘Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;

Courtiers cringing and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldier fighting, bleeding.’

January 1795

Mary Robinson

It’s another less-than-catchy title, I know, but in fact it is a very accurate description of the content of the poem.  English society at the start of 1795: that is exactly what this poem gives you.  Not just the frozen snapshots of architecture and furniture that we glimpse in museums and art galleries today (fascinating and useful though they are).  This is a poem about activity, about living people, inhabiting a diverse and industrious world.  The power of this poem, for me, comes from Robinson’s consistent use of active verbs throughout (the words ending in ‘-ing’).  There is no single story to this poem; rather it is a long description of action, a collage of moving images.

Still more fascinating is the life of Mary Robinson herself.  Actress, poet, society girl and royal mistress, reading through the biography of her life on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a bit like reading a novel.  By the time she wrote this poem in 1795, she was nearing the end of her life (she died in 1800), yet her artistic appreciation for detail, and her capacity for satiric observation, remains acute.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a major figure in the romanticist movement of poetry, whose work will certainly feature in a later post!!) described her as ‘a woman of undoubted Genius’. 

I enjoyed this poem so much, that I thought I would use it to test a new idea for showcasing featured poems.  It’s great to read poetry on the page, but it’s also important to remember that eighteenth-century poetry in particular was often intended to be read aloud.  As my computer demonstrated a profound reluctance to upload only an audio file, this will run as a video, but there are no visuals.  Just sit back, close your eyes, and step into the eighteenth-century:

 

 

Happy reading! (and, hopefully, listening!)

Feel free to ask questions and leave comments!

NB after initial problems with the video element I have made some technical adjustments, and it should now work fine!  If not, do please let me know!

You can find this poem:

 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174252

(Poetry Foundation: an excellent source of free poetry, and also the text used for my reading)

You can find out more about Mary Robinson:

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007164592/perdita

(A biography of Robinson’s life by Paula Jane Byrne.  I discovered this myself whilst writing this blogpost, and (having read some of Paula’s other books) I might now have to visit a bookshop… As always, check Amazon/Ebay etc for cheaper options or secondhand copies.  Also, don't let the title confuse you: Perdita was a sort of pseudonym for Robinson throughout her relationship with the prince who would become King George IV)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Robinson_(poet)

Wikipedia!!

http://www.janeausten.co.uk/mary-robinson-a-life-lived-extraordinarily/

(another interesting blog article about the scandalous Mary Robinson)

The Coleridge quotation was taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Mary Robinson.  I’ve included the link below, but sadly only those who have a registered account with the site can access this information:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23857?docPos=3