Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Category: Influencers

Perdita, Mary Robinson, the Life of a Georgian Lady.

The village of Chawton in Hampshire is best known today for its association with Jane Austen. Her brother inherited a sixteenth century manor house in the village. He stayed there only occasionally, but his mother and sisters became permanent residents in the former bailiff’s cottage and visited Chawton House whenever he was in residence.

Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra, and her elder sister, Cassandra Elizabeth, are both buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in the village.

Chawton House, Hampshire
Graves of Jane Austen’s mother and sister, St. Nicholas churchyard, Chawton

But I did not visit Chawton in search of the Austens. In 1992 Chawton House, by then in poor condition, was sold to an American businesswoman, Sandra Lerner. She restored the house and established a research library and study centre with the rather cumbrous title The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing 1600-1830.

The contents of the library include Sandra Lerner’s own extensive collection of early and rare editions of women’s writing. Regular exhibitions highlight different writers: the centre is currently presenting Mary Robinson, more commonly known as Perdita.

Mary was born to a well-heeled family in Bristol in 1758, but her father lost his money following an ill-advised investment in a whale fishery in Labrador. When he returned from Canada, he left his wife and children to live with the mistress whom he had brought back to England. Mary’s mother moved to London with her children and set up her own school. There, Mary, who had received a better education than most girls of her generation, started teaching at the age of fourteen. Her father, however, despite deserting his family, resented this public acknowledgement of their poverty and forced the closure of the school.

Mary had always been attracted by the theatre and through connections of her mother secured an introduction to David Garrick. Impressed by her abilities, he began to train her: she was to play Cordelia to his Lear. Meanwhile however she had met Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk purportedly expecting an inheritance. She agreed to marry him, possibly under pressure from her mother, who was acutely aware of the dangers of a stage career at a time when “actress” was often a euphemism for prostitute.

The marriage was not a success. The inheritance did not materialise. Married at fifteen, Mary had a child at sixteen, and at seventeen, along with her husband and child, was housed in the Fleet prison for debt.

The debts had piled up as both Thomas and Mary had pursued a recklessly extravagant lifestyle. There was an expensive address, an open top carriage, clothes, jewellery, evenings at Ranelagh and Vauxhall gardens, and for Thomas the races, gaming houses and brothels. Quintessential Georgians, in stark contrast to their gloomy Victorian successors, they had an infinite capacity for living in the moment, ever hopeful that their fortunes would turn tomorrow, combined with an unattractive habit of tapping other people for “loans.” Detention in a debtors’ prison was an experience so widespread that it often seems to have served as little more than a rite of passage for large numbers of Georgians.

When it came to survival in the Fleet, however, Mary proved herself to be of superior mettle to Thomas. She accepted work, which he had refused, copying legal documents, and she published her first volume of poetry.

After Thomas was discharged from the Fleet, the playwright and theatre manager Sheridan encouraged Mary to return to the theatre. With characteristic generosity Garrick came out of retirement to tutor her again, and Mary made her stage debut as Juliet at Sheridan’s Drury Lane theatre.

Her subsequent stage career was an enormous success; particularly popular were her performances in the “breeches roles,” cross dressing as Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It. At the same time, she published her second volume of poetry.

In 1779 Sheridan revived Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s adaptation of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the story of Prince Florizel and his love for the shepherd’s daughter Perdita, who of course turns out to be a princess.

The Prince of Wales, later George IV, came to see the play and promptly declared himself “head over heels in love” and “blinded by passion.”* One of his most unappealing characteristics was his capacity for self-deception. For the previous six months he had been declaring his love for his sisters’ governess, Mary Hamilton, threatening to commit suicide if she rejected him. Before he left for the theatre that night, he had sent her a letter declaring his undying love. When he returned, a second letter abruptly reduced Mary Hamilton to the status of a friend to whom he confided his new passion. In his letters to Mary Hamilton, he had called her Miranda and signed himself Palemon, now he began to write love letters to Mary Robinson calling her Perdita and signing them Florizel. Originality was alien to him.

Though Mary Robinson was flattered, she was not a fool. She held out against his blandishments and a welter of letters (her biographer notes that Palemon had penned a letter every three days to Mary Hamilton, “establishing a pattern he would far surpass when taking the name of Florizel.”**) reminding him that if they were to have a “public attachment” she would have to abandon her career and be financially dependent on him. After six months he sent a bond promising to pay her twenty thousand pounds when he came of age, and she retired from the stage to become his mistress.

As Perdita, Mary enjoyed her fame although it was tinged with notoriety, and she was frequently caricatured in the press. She spent lavishly and conducted a simultaneous affair with Lord Malden. When predictably the prince moved on, as he soon did, first to Elizabeth Armistead, then via Grace Dalrymple Eliot to Maria Fitzherbert, she was left seriously in debt. But she had held on to that slew of letters, which she now threatened to publish, and while denying that her motive was mercenary, negotiated a payment of five thousand pounds for their return. Moreover, she still held the bond.

It is hard to see her as a complete victim, though she did try to present herself as such, for in many respects she and the prince were cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding his greater advantages. Her capacity for self-dramatisation was congruent with his. Once she had secured the money, she sat for her portrait with Gainsborough who portrayed her as a pensive, abandoned beauty, clutching a miniature of the prince. Then she purchased a new carriage and headed for Paris.

In Paris she was welcomed as a celebrity, found new lovers, made the acquaintance of Marie-Antoinette, and returned to London bearing the latest fashions. Perdita introduced the white muslin shift dress, high-waisted and tied with a silk sash, which became known as the Perdita chemise, and which quickly replaced the paraphernalia of hoops and stays. All those Jane Austen heroines who appeared a few years later in their muslin frocks were, like everyone else, following the trend set by Perdita. No modern-day influencer can compare with Perdita as a leader of fashion: there were Perdita hats, gowns, handkerchiefs, stockings. Where Perdita led, society followed.

The prince may have wearied of her, but Perdita was at the height of her fame and popularity. She was painted by Hoppner, Reynolds, and Romney. There was an expensive new address, carriages, appearances at the theatre, opera, pleasure gardens and parks. Everywhere she met with admiration and emulation. Though there was always salacious gossip about her, she had learned to orchestrate the press to her advantage.

She continued her long running affair with Lord Malden and began new affairs with Banastre Tarleton, recently returned from fighting for the British in the American War of independence, and with Charles James Fox, the Whig MP. When the affair with Malden ended, she secured another annuity. Tarleton meanwhile ran up gambling debts and she “borrowed” money from Fox on his behalf.

But then things began to go badly for Perdita. Hearing a rumour that Tarleton had fled for the continent to escape his creditors, she set out in pursuit of him. While travelling she contracted rheumatic fever resulting in severe arthritis which gradually deprived her of the use of her legs. She was only twenty five years old. When the prince came of age Perdita should have been able to cash the twenty-thousand-pound bond, but Florizel prevaricated, eventually agreeing to an annuity of £500 in lieu – it was seldom paid. As she ran into financial difficulties, combined with lameness and some loss of her looks, the press increasingly pilloried and denigrated her.

 With considerable fortitude, she reinvented herself as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Her early poems were influenced by the effusive, flowery, writings of the Della Cruscans and her early novels were gothic money spinners, but Mary was writing for money, and she was successful.

Later she moved to narrative poetry much admired by Coleridge, and the Monthly Review dubbed her “The English Sappho.” Her novels ridiculed the hypocrisy of fashionable society and incorporated political themes of inequality and discrimination. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed them with enthusiasm.

By the time Tarleton left her, Mary had become an independent woman of letters. She corresponded with William Godwin discussing liberty and reason. Under Wollstonecraft’s influence she adopted feminist causes, critiquing women’s exclusion from parliament, double sexual standards, and prohibitions on physical exercise for women. She condemned domestic drudgery, advocating a university for women and their right to own their own property.

After her death Mary’s writing fell from fashion, yet while the early work was sentimental, the analysis of misogyny in her later work anticipates both the first and second waves of feminism. In “A Letter to the Women of England, on the injustice of mental insubordination” she elucidated the male disdain for intellectual women:

There are but three classes of women desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women: licentious women: and good sort of women. The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love by confessing inferiority***

In her memoirs Mary presented herself as a victim of male deceit and contempt. There was some truth in this, but Garrick and Sheridan both recognised her talent, while Coleridge and Godwin accorded her respect and praise. Mary was far more than a victim: she was clever, talented, shrewd, and as capable of self-deluding sophistry as the more unattractive men in her life. And if she is remembered today more as an actress, fashion icon, and mistress, than for her writing, she herself played a key role in the spinning and promoting of her early celebrity.

Mary Robinson was only forty-three when she died of heart failure and was buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. Only two people attended her funeral. Yet when I visited the tomb the flowers beside it indicated that, two hundred and twenty five years after her death, Perdita, Mary Robinson, still has her admirers.

Tomb of Perdita, Mary Robinson, Churchyard of SS Peter and Andrew, Old Windsor
The lettering here is clear but that on the sides of the tomb is very worn. One side bears a sonnet by her friend Samuel Jackson Pratt, and the other an epitaph which she wrote herself.

*Quoted in Paula Byrne, Perdita, the Life of Mary Robinson, Harper Collins, 2005, p.110, p.113.

**ibid. p.116

***ibid. p.170

For details of Chawton House and the exhibition on Mary Robinson see https://chawtonhouse.org

Hoppner portrait of Mary Robinson at Chawton House, the more famous Gainsborough is in the Wallace Collection.

Merry Christmas, Henry Cole

Henry Cole (1808-1882) combined administrative skills with a practical flair for production and design. Between 1837-40 when he worked as an assistant to Rowland Hill, these twin talents became apparent. He played a key role in the introduction of the Penny Post and was responsible for the design of the world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black.

Under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly he created his own award-winning designs, including a tea service produced by Minton. But it was his organisational talents which were truly breath taking. In 1851 Cole proposed an International Great Exhibition of Culture and Industry to celebrate, and to stimulate the improvement of, modern manufacture and decoration. He sought to promote international trade, providing a platform for British products; British manufacturers were to get the best locations at the exhibition. Despite opposition from Parliament, and the press doubting the success of his venture, he launched his scheme, and under his management it became an enormous success, the first in a series of World Fairs.

Joseph Paxton designed the massive glasshouse, the Crystal Palace, in which the Great Exhibition was held at Hyde Park. The prefabricated structure with a cast iron frame was an engineering triumph. Within it more than a million objects were displayed, with sectors showcasing raw materials, machinery, manufactured goods, and fine arts. A massive pink glass fountain stood in the centre. William Morris found the latter in bad taste, but the public loved it.

Exhibits included the entire process of cotton production, electric telegraphs, steam powered machines, a lighthouse, locomotives, scientific tools, microscopes, barometers, surgical instruments, kitchen appliances, an early adding machine, an umbrella which doubled as a weapon, a neo-gothic medieval court designed by Pugin, Indian textiles, musical instruments including a folding piano, silks, porcelain, tapestries, majolica. From glass vitrines the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the eighth century Tara Brooch flaunted their mystique. Who would not have wanted to be there amid the extravagant opulence and exciting new inventions? Everyone did: in the sixth months of the exhibition six million people, a third of the population, visited. The railways offered discounted tickets and Thomas Cook arranged one of his earliest excursions, bringing 150,000 people from the North and Midlands.

The Crystal Palace witnessed the first international chess tournament, and played host to the first modern pay toilets, use of the latter priced at one old penny, bringing a new coy euphemism into the English language. Canny businessman that he was, Henry Cole persuaded Schweppes, the world’s first soft drink company, to sponsor the exhibition, and organised a tempting line in souvenirs with stereoscopic cards, fans, and plates. A huge financial as well as a popular success, the exhibition made a profit of £186,000, around £34 million in today’s money.

This enabled Cole to embark on his next great project, the founding of the South Kensington Museum for Education in Applied Art and Science. With the profits of the Great Exhibition, he organised the purchase of land in South Kensington, supervised the building works, and became the first director of the museum from 1857-73. It subsequently became the Victoria and Albert museum, specialising in decorative arts and design, while the Science and Natural History museums became independent entities. Always concerned with the educational function of the collections, Cole also helped to develop the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Under Cole’s guidance the Victoria and Albert Museum became a magnificent show case for outstanding designs of furniture, textiles, glass and metal work, and ceramics. Determined to instruct people in superior design and good taste, Cole also set up a Gallery of False Principles, displaying what he perceived as bad designs. These included fabrics and wallpapers with naturalistic images of foliage and flowers, which he considered excessive and illogical ornamentation. Their failings were spelled out on their labels, and alongside them sat “correct” versions. The Gallery proved popular and caused much amusement, but the display was closed after two weeks following complaints from manufacturers whose work was pilloried there. But the memory of the intended lesson lives on, for Charles Dickens, more sentimental and sympathetic towards anyone who might like something pretty, satirised Cole’s judgment in Hard Times when the Utilitarian School Board Superintendent visits Gradgrind’s schoolroom:

Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’  Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these examinations.

‘Of course, No.  Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.

‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not.  Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it.  What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses.  Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact?  Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half.  ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half.  ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact.  What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’  Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman.  ‘Now, I’ll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet a room.  Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong.  Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman.  ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir.  They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’

‘Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point.  ‘That’s it!  You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.  You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.  You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.  You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.  You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration.  This is the new discovery.  This is fact.  This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down.  She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

Yet, notwithstanding a little pomposity and a common weakness for conflating his own taste with good taste, Cole gave us something very precious in the V and A. It is magical at any time but especially in winter when the rainbow colours of the textiles and costumes, the gleam and shine of the jewellery and metalwork, triumph over the prevailing gloom of the December skies. I choose a few favourite objects to visit, perhaps Shah Jahan’s winecup or Tipu’s tiger, the carved oak facade of Paul Pindar’s sixteenth century house or the Hereford screen, or Dale Chihuly’s extravagant glass sculpture, before heading for the refreshment rooms.

The V and A was the first museum in the world to have a catering service, and what sublime trio of rooms they are. Ensconced in the warmth with a cup of tea and a bun, surrounded by the magnificently eclectic décor featuring ceramics, stained glass, panelling and enamelling, in the Gamble, Poynter or Morris Room, all is right with the world. I could go into semi-hibernation here, sleeping at night in the Great Bed of Ware, by day wandering the labyrinthine corridors from one gallery to another, taking my meals in the refreshment rooms, emerging to the garden court only in Spring. There to meet with the spirit of Jim, Henry Cole’s Yorkshire terrier, who accompanied his master on his daily site inspections as the museum buildings rose from the ground, and who is buried somewhere here in the garden.

Gamble Room
Poynter Room
Morris Room
Detail, Poynter Room
Detail, Poynter Room
December tiles in Poynter Room
February, no wonder I want to hibernate
Memorial to Jim, on the wall of the garden court. He is buried somewhere in the garden

And at this time of year, I remember Henry Cole for something else, because in 1843 he designed and produced the first Christmas card. Depicting three generations his family raising a toast, with representations of charity and almsgiving around the margins, it is surely an image with which Dickens would have sympathised.

When I was a child our living room filled with cards at Christmas, for my grandparents came from the days of extended families and had a wide circle of friends. We strung the cards in loops across the chimney breast, and cascading down the walls. More jostled on the mantlepiece. Others surrounded and concealed the fruit bowl on the sideboard with its seasonal cargo of tangerines wrapped in tissue paper which when rolled into a cylinder and lit would float magically and weightlessly up to the ceiling. The post came twice a day: cards fell through the letterbox before I left for school, and a second pile arrived in the afternoon, saved for me to open when I came home.

Now there are fewer cards each Christmas, my grandparents long gone and my own contemporaries beginning to slip away. Moreover, the world has changed. Christmas greetings arrive by email. It is an easier way to communicate, quicker, more immediate, and very much cheaper. For in the 50s and 60s not only were boxes of Woolworths cards in the reach even of a child’s pocket money, but so were stamps. And if an envelope contained no other enclosure than a card, and if the flap were tucked in rather than sealed, then an even cheaper stamp would guarantee delivery. Today the annual purchase of books of stamps offers a sharp lesson in inflation, “How much?” we gasp in horror. Yet I cannot resist the pleasure of choosing and writing cards, and while it is nice to receive the emails, I am glad when friends still send those cheery, colourful, paper greetings which nudge each other on my bookshelves basking in the reflected lights of the tree.

So, thank you Henry Cole for the Victoria and Albert, and for Christmas cards. When I first visited your grave in Brompton, it looked a little sad and neglected, but last week I was not your only visitor for someone had taken ivy and plaited a Christmas wreath for you. Merry Christmas, Henry Cole.

Henry Cole
Merry Christmas, Henry Cole

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