Category: Writers Page 1 of 5

John Betjeman, more than just a National Treasure

On May 17, 2026

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.

But Betjeman was not just, as he is sometimes presented, a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”

Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:

For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn…

But remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another

Let us hold hands and look.”

She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s inglenook.

The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells

And sights, before the dark of reason grows.

Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath…

Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.

In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake,

And if that it is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake…

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

Honduras and Togoland;

Protect them Lord in all their fights,

And, even more, protect the whites.

Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town…

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast,

Trolley-bus and windy street!

How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

As Cook is a little unnerved;

You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?

The frills round the cutlet can wait

Till the girl has replenished the cruets

And switched on the logs in the grate…

(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)

In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.

Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing, golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”

Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.” There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine…

National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is neither lightweight nor cuddly. He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very attributes make him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.

Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.

A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to

Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.

The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.

Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.

Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.

Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.

Statue of Betjeman gazing up at the glass ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

Ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.

The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”

It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.

*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford

**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.

William Golding and Human Evil

By Gravedigger

On March 8, 2026

In Writers

The BBC recently commissioned a four-part adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It has provoked particular interest here in the West Country, for when Golding published it in 1954, he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. In the opening sequences of the production the boys stranded on the island are wearing Bishop Wordsworth’s school uniform… the school authorities must be convinced that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Now elderly men, former pupils have appeared on local news channels speculating that the writer took inspiration from the behaviour of boys in his classroom, though no one has laid claim to have been the role model for Jack or Roger.

The Guardian critic, Lucy Mangan, after praising the acting, skewered the essential weakness of the production with an acuity worthy of her much-missed predecessor, Nancy Banks-Smith:

It falls victim to the modern curse of psychology. All the main characters are explained by a neat backstory. Jack comes from a loveless household. Ralph’s alpha maleness is tempered by compassion because he comes from a secure home, but his mother is ill. Simon is mentally fragile because his abusive father plays mind games with him and his mother…It reduces the elemental power of the story, along with its point, which is how much evil there is in a man and whether it can be overcome. This is the question. Not how much therapy he needs.

Since its publication Lord of the Flies has seldom been far from a school syllabus. No surprise, for it is of a manageable length; well written but in accessible prose; all the main characters are adolescents; the story is gripping; and there is endless scope for discussion of symbols, allegories, irony, and inherent human depravity. A cornucopia for teachers and pupils alike.

When we were introduced to the book in our early teens my schoolmates and I were passionate about it, delighted to chew over its themes, self-consciously cynical in our discussions of man’s capacity for savagery and the fragility of social norms.

Golding wrote the book as an antidote to Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a once popular children’s adventure story advocating Christianity and the humanising influence of British colonialism. For Golding there was nothing there to admire or glorify; beneath the thin veneer of civilization, he believed, lay a selfish and violent desire for power, and a herd mentality where individuals could quickly descend into barbarity under evil leadership, and ostensibly decent people reveal murderous sociopathic instincts.

Golding’s focus on the dark side of humanity was influenced by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and by the violence and atrocities of World War Two. Later he wrote:

“My book was to say: you think the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”

The book ends with a naval officer chiding the boys for their “unBritish” behaviour while, in an obvious parallel, his own warship anchored in the bay embodies an aura of menace. “Irony,” we all wrote in capitals in the margins of out texts.

Yet, on an adult reading, it is not the most subtle of works, and we might crave a little optimism, but our current international landscape affirms its timeless relevance.

Following the success of Lord of the Flies, Golding retired from teaching and moved to the Wiltshire village of Broadchalke. He produced twelve more works of fiction, novels of the human condition, achieving cult status in the second half of the twentieth century.

Rites of Passage, the first novel in his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth won the Booker Prize in 1980. Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) completed his story of a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. It is one of my favourite novels both for the harrowing descriptions of the twelve-month voyage in the cramped wooden ship, and for the vivid portraits of the passengers drawn from the whole spectrum of society.

Golding evokes the creaking timbers, the thick air, the foetid atmosphere, the decks streaming with seawater, the darkness, and the claustrophobia so vividly one might retch alongside the exhausted, nauseous emigrants.

Through his motley protagonists he exposes patronising class and gender systems, pretension, power, privilege, arrogance, self-delusion, vanity, and double standards. His trenchant prose can engender in one paragraph an amalgam of sympathy, pity, loathing, irritation, and contempt for any one character.

Again, he lays bare the fragility of civilisation and the ease with which social constraints can collapse to be replaced by casual cruelty, this time amongst adults. Some critics have interpreted the closing chapters of Fire Down Below as a “happy ending,” with Edmund Talbot, having developed self-knowledge, determined to do good in the future. But I suspect this is a misreading of Golding’s conclusion. No one will do good in a rotten borough, and Talbot remains insensitive, self-absorbed, shallow, and pompous. Never more so than in his obtuse response to Zenobia’s message, “Tell Edmund I am crossing the bridge,” which carries even more poignancy than Charles Summers’ tragic death.

Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for novels which with “realistic narrative…illuminate the human condition in the world today.”

He is buried under a yew tree in Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke. The inscription on the stone has not been deeply incised but can still just be read:

Grave of William Golding and his wife Ann Golding

Remember with love

William Golding

1911-1993

Ann Golding

1912-1995

It is the star to every

wandering barque

The quotation is from one of Shakespeare’s most famous and beautiful love sonnets, number 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring barque

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

So perhaps Golding’s personal life was happier than his social and political weltanschauung might imply.

Golding’s grave, Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke, Wiltshire

William Golding, Rites of Passage, Faber and Faber (1980).

Close Quarters, Faber and Faber (1987)

Fire Down Below, Faber and Faber (1989).

An Angry Young Man: John Osborne (1929-1994)

By Gravedigger

On July 20, 2025

In Dramatists

My English teacher had been at the opening night of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and more than a decade later conjured for us the consternation of the audience when the curtain rose on a squalid flat and its slovenly inhabitants.

Beyond the classical canon, British theatre audiences were used to the escapism of the so-called “well-made plays,” genteel country house dramas from the pens of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. On stage a tastefully furnished drawing room would open via French windows onto a garden beyond, and cut-glass accents would deliver brittle, witty dialogue punctuated by pauses for audience appreciation.

Kitchen Sink Painters like Osborne’s contemporary, John Bratby, had already brought a new category of social realism to art, celebrating the everyday lives of ordinary people. Their canvases featured shabby prams parked in overgrown gardens; washing hanging in backyards surrounded by broken bicycles, chairs, and discarded beer bottles; wretched kitchens with chip friers, overflowing rubbish bins, and, of course, grimy kitchen sinks.

Osborne was the first of the Angry Young Men who brought working class anti-heroes to the stage in the late fifties and early sixties. The Kitchen Sink Dramas, located in cramped, low income, domestic environments, addressed issues of alienation, provincial boredom, alcohol abuse, crime, adultery, pre-marital sex, and abortion. They brought regional accents to the stage, and a radical, anarchic howl of rage against middle class privilege and a smug, autocratic Establishment.

Reviews of Look Back in Anger were mixed. The majority disliked Osborne’s play and dubbed it a failure, but notable exceptions were the theatre critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. Tynan, whose vitriolic reviews had castigated what he dubbed the Loamshire plays of Rattigan and Coward, eulogised Osborne’s work:

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.

His fervour proved prescient; the play transferred successfully, and a film version followed. When I first saw a production in the 1960s, I was enthralled, fascinated by every detail; still today I seldom contemplate a pile of ironing without remembering Jimmy Porter and Alison.

Osborne’s success continued with The Entertainer (1957). Again premiered at the Royal Court, it was a more overtly political play set against the background of the Suez crisis. The dying music hall tradition, eclipsed by rock and roll, cinema, and television, mirrored the declining influence of the British Empire supplanted by the growing ambit of the USA. Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice, the bitter, failing music hall performer, a role he repeated in the film version in 1960.

More successes followed for Osborne with Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965).

But by the 70s Osborne had abandoned his early socialism, impassioned attacks on the monarchy, and support for CND, espousing instead conservative prejudices, bigotry, and nostalgia, even supporting Enoch Powell. He wrote for the right-wing Spectator and moved to the Shropshire countryside where he played the role of country gentleman. Returning to the Church of England and becoming a drum-beater for Anglican ritual, he approximated to a blimpish caricature of one of the stereotypes in the despised Loamshire plays.

Hindsight is a cheap skill, but looking back at Osborne’s work it seems obvious now that the conservative strain was there from the beginning. Look Back in Anger is largely autobiographical; Osborne’s alter ego Jimmy Porter is angry, but his anger is not that of constructive, political protest, but rather a whining, shouty, resentful outpouring of bile directed against a world which does not provide him with the opportunities and rewards he feels are his right.

When the play was revived at The Almeida last year, I reread it but decided not to see it again. It is a misogynistic rant. Where I remembered working class rage, I found toxic masculinity, dated and unpalatable. His autobiography reveals him in an equally sour light: vicious in his attitude towards his mother and his daughter whom he threw out when she was only seventeen; abusive towards four of his five wives- although, in fairness, they seemed able to reciprocate- jealous of their successes and presuming that they should give up their own work to tend to his needs.

Of course, Osborne was not alone in his misogyny; an unsubtle clue to the ubiquity of that persuasion in the 50s and 60s lies in the genre designation Angry Young Men. Apart from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Poor Cow, the writing of angry young women was not visible.

And yet, although his repugnant attitudes are dated, and his writing sometimes shrill, Osborne can also be witty, perceptive, and clever, and the audience shock when the curtain went up on that first production at the Royal Court was one of the defining moments of twentieth century theatre. Moreover, his early kitchen sink realism opened the way for other working-class dramas, novels, films, and television. Those of us who grew up in the sixties still remember the high quality of ITV’s Armchair Theatre and the BBC’s Wednesday Play: who will ever forget Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home directed by Ken Loach?

Osborne is buried in St. George’s churchyard in the village of Clun in Shropshire beside his fifth wife Helen Dawson. The quotation on his grave

Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night – and I’ll come and see you

is spoken by Archie Rice in The Entertainer. It is his final interaction with the audience before leaving the stage, and as well as a farewell, I suspect it carries the unspoken, bitter question, “do you think you could have done any better?”

The quotation on Helen Osborne’s grave

-My feet hurt

-Try washing your socks

is an exchange between Cliff and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger. Helen Dawson had chosen a copy of the play as a literary prize when she was in school. When she married Osborne she gave it to him, inscribed, “And back to you.” I have no idea of the significance of the particular quotation, although it does sound like an expression of the disdain which both Osbornes could exercise towards other people.

But they are, undeniably, an attractive pair of graves.

Paul Julius Reuter: Truth in News

By Gravedigger

On July 6, 2025

In Journalists

Until the 1980s Fleet Street was a metonym for the national press. Giant printing presses rumbled in the basements of the newspaper offices to which reporters filed domestic and international news. The street held a magical, romantic sense of urgency. Late at night vans collected the packaged newspapers and raced them to mainline stations where they were loaded onto trains to be dispersed in the early hours of the morning at provincial halts throughout the country.

Fleet Street’s association with printing and publishing began in 1500 when William Caxton’s former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde set up a printing press beside St. Bride’s church. Others followed, and the presence of the presses stimulated the publication of newspapers in the same street. In 1702 the first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared. The repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855 heralded the great days of newspaper publishing, and for the next hundred- and thirty-years major newspapers made Fleet Street their headquarters.

Reuters News Agency joined them there. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899) had begun his working life as a bank clerk but moved into book publishing. In 1848 he had produced radical pamphlets in support of the revolutions. Following the conspicuous failure of the revolution in Berlin, he judged it politic to move to Paris where he worked for the Havas news agency, before founding his own agency in Aachen.

Aachen and Brussels were the terminal points of the German – French/Belgian telegraph line, but there was a seventy-six-mile gap in that line. Reuter used forty-five homing pigeons to bridge the divide. The pigeons, carrying financial news from the Paris Stock exchange, could complete in two hours a journey which took the train six hours.

When the telegraph line was laid in Britain in 1851, Reuter moved to an office near the London Stock Exchange, setting up a specialist financial news agency supplying information on securities, commodities, stock prices and currencies to Continental Exchanges. Now he supplemented the telegraph lines with two hundred carrier pigeons. When undersea cables were laid, he expanded his service to other continents.

In 1863 Reuter erected his own telegraph link from London to Crookhaven in SW Ireland; ships coming from America would throw cannisters containing news into the sea to be retrieved by Reuters employees and telegraphed to London. Since this was quicker than waiting for the ships to dock in London, national papers began to subscribe to Reuters Agency which diversified to provide a general news service in addition to its financial speciality.

Reuter had early established a reputation in the financial world for accuracy, rapidity, and reliability. When he expanded his service, his aim was to provide “Truth in News” with the same exacting standards of expeditious, concise, accurate reporting. His agency was the first in Europe to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the surrender of the south in the American Civil War.

After Reuter’s death the success of his agency continued: it was the first to report the Relief of Mafeking (1900); the Great War Armistice (1918); the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1923); the assassination of Gandhi (1948); Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin (1956); and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990).

Reuters moved from its original office to Fleet Street in 1939 to be in greater proximity to the newspapers who used its service. But less than fifty years later modern technology was leading to the replacement of hot metal printing by digital. In 1986 the News International owner Rupert Murdoch moved production of the Times and the Sun to cheaper manufacturing premises in Wapping. In doing so he also sought to break the power of the print unions, the NGA and SOGAT; all the print staff were dismissed and fresh staff brought in to operate the presses using computer aided technology.

As other newspapers followed, Fleet Street ceased to be synonymous with printing and publishing. In 1989 The Daily Express was the last newspaper to be printed there. Reuters was the last news agency to leave, moving to Canary Wharf in 2005. On the day they left a service was held in St. Bride’s, formerly the journalists’ church, in whose shadow Wynkyn de Worde had setup his printing press, and where he is believed to be buried.

Reuters lives on, today employing 2,500 journalists in two hundred locations worldwide. Its founder, Paul Julius, was buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London, one of the Big Seven Victorian cemeteries, known in his day as the Millionaires’ Cemetery. With no small irony, given his passionate commitment to accuracy in reporting, Reuter’s own grave bears a misspelling of his name. In 2002 the agency placed a plaque beside the grave, ruefully acknowledging the error.

Grave of Paul Julius Reuter, West Norwood Cemetery.

A plaque placed at the foot of the grave ruefully acknowledges the error, adding “this mistake is ironic since accuracy has contributed to the enduring success of the news agency which he founded.”

For more on Fleet Street see https://symbolsandsecrets.london Fleet Street Legends, 22 February 2018

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

By Gravedigger

On March 30, 2025

In Actors, Influencers, Writers

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.

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