Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson - Paula Byrne

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in a similar high-minded tone: ‘Morality is that great fundamental Tie that forms and preserves the Peace and Welfare of Society.’ But it quickly turns to an admonition that Mary’s ‘immoderate’ desire for material wellbeing is in danger of leading her to ‘Indiscretion’ and exposing her to ‘the destructive Stratagems of some libidinous Profligate’. Having warned her against the seductions of fashionable society, King then lets his own emotions speak:

      That fair youthful Frame is such an Invitation to Love, as no moral or platonic Tenets can restrain. How I pant to be at Bristol, to accompany you through the verdant Meads to the Side of some Silver Stream, slow wandering its Meanders down the Glade, or to the cool Recess of a shady Grove, where every Gale whispers Pleasure, Contentment and Love! Your Breath will add new Fragrance to the Amaranth; the Rose will receive a deeper Hue from the Reflection of those florid Tincts that adorn thy blooming Cheeks, while you melt my Soul to all the soft Attainments of Love.

      The expression of such sentiments was King’s price for the payoff signalled by the end of the letter: ‘Adieu! Be ever happy as you are good. Inclosed £50.’

      The next letter purportedly from Mary would severely damage her reputation when King published the correspondence eight years later:

      I wish you would not write, for while you endeavour to inculcate such good Doctrine, you know I am charmed by your Letters to a Sin. How call I love that stupid Thing R—! yet I am his, Fortune has made it so; but I cannot think I am bound to abide strictly by an Engagement that I was trepanned into, for you know he deceived me. Shall I ever write as well as you do? I am fond of Poetry, and you shall correct some Attempts in that Way, when I come to London. My Friend, you know I esteem you: is it a Crime to say I love you? I feel an Inclination to love Somebody; and how can I love him who is too stupid to return it? Why then, I will love you. Write again, write every Evening, or I shall be melancholy.

      Despite his sordid profession as a moneylender, King had a reputation as a man of culture. John Taylor, an oculist who moved in the very best circles and who was himself a poet and a friend of Mary Robinson, recorded in his memoirs that he had known King for forty years and always found him honourable, hospitable, and attentive, and that he especially liked having men and women of talent at his table.10

      Mary’s letter accords with this image: King is presented as a companion for theatregoing and literary talk, associated with poetry and the language of sensibility. The reference to her own efforts at poetry suggests that, with her stage debut forestalled by her marriage, she is already thinking of a literary career. Robinson, meanwhile, is anything but a sensitive literary man: he is a ‘stupid Thing’ and Mary effectively admits that she only married him because of his supposed financial prospects. Because of his deception on this front, he has forfeited any right to strict conjugal loyalty.

      For King, this was sufficient encouragement. His reply brings him to a pitch of excitement:

      I will not think you sincere, when you say you love; yet if you are not in earnest, you have given too serious a Testimony of it for one only in Joke; but it is almost Blasphemy to suspect one of such heavenly Form, so beautiful, such Symmetry of Features, such delicate welformed [sic] Limbs, such panting snowy Breasts, such – Oh! What Raptures ineffable seize my delighted Imagination, when I recollect the delirious Transports that throbbed to my very Soul, when that beauteous Form stood confessed in all the resistless Power of – Nakedness. I must stop till my enraptured Fancy returns from the ecstatick Thought.

      Is this a ripe fantasy or had he really caught a glimpse of a naked Mary in Oxford or on some other occasion?

      With the flirtation getting this far out of hand, Mary cooled the temperature in her following letter – though she still needed to keep King sweet, because she was, as she put it in a postscript, ‘rather short’. The correspondence had by now lasted for a month. On 1 November, King wrote with further references to ‘the mystick Meaning of thy wanton Love’ and his ‘melting Senses’ drowning in ‘delicious Transports’, while at the same time delivering a rebuke: ‘You little Prodigal, you have spent £200 in Six Weeks: I will not answer your Drafts.’ King’s refusal to forward any more funds, despite a further request, brought the correspondence to an abrupt end in the final week of November. Mary’s last letter is in a very different tone from the preceding ones:

      I Find you have not yet answered my Draft. I do not wish an Acquaintance with any Man who professes so much Love, but who gives so little Proof of it. I wish I could recall those imprudent Moments when I suffered your deluding Promises, and seductive Tongue, to betray me into Sin; but unless you give me the Token of your Sincerity that I ask for, I will take care how I trust you again. I am astonished that you should scruple to lend me such a Sum as £100 when it was the last I should borrow, and should have repaid it faithfully. Now you have an Opportunity of shewing your Love, or I shall see that you have all along deceived me.

      Late in November, Robinson returned to Bristol to fetch his wife. They left Hester and headed across to Wales. They endured a hazardous crossing at Chepstow in an open boat in the midst of a fierce storm. In the Memoirs, Mary novelistically interprets this as an ill omen, akin to the storm that coincided with her birth. Throughout the journey Robinson tried to prepare his refined young wife for her first meeting with his family. Still denying that Harris was his father, he asked Mary to ‘overlook anything harsh that might appear in the manners of his uncle’. But she was busy absorbing the beauties of the landscape as they drove into the remote Welsh countryside: ‘We passed through a thick wood, the mountains at every brake meeting our eyes covered with thin clouds, and rising in a sublime altitude above the valley. A more romantic space of scenery never met the human eye!’11

      With a shift of tone typical of Mary’s mercurial nature, the narrative of her visit to the in-laws then turns from romantic novel to comedy of high and low life, with the sophisticated townies meeting the country bumpkins. Mary was fabulously dressed, as usual, in a dark claret riding habit and a white beaver hat trimmed with feathers. She looked askance at the odd couple that waited to greet her, her father-in-law, Thomas Harris, and his daughter, Elizabeth. Harris, evidently pleased with the elegant Mrs Robinson, kissed her ‘with excessive cordiality’, while his daughter led her into the house ‘with cold formality’. ‘She could not have taken my hand with a more frigid demeanour,’ Mary adds, clearly relishing the memory.12

      The young women sized one another up. Elizabeth was not a great beauty and must have felt threatened by her brother’s fashionable wife. She was cold and haughty and took an instant dislike to her new sister-in-law. To Mary’s sharp eyes, she looked a fright. Elizabeth seemed older than her twenty years, moved stiffly, without grace or elegance, and was short and clumsy looking. She had a rustic face with a snub, upturned nose, and cheeks ‘somewhat more ruddy than was consistent with even good health’.13 Her countenance, Mary thought, was ‘peculiarly formed for the expression of sarcastic vulgarity’. The elegantly dressed Mrs Robinson was equally appalled by Elizabeth’s vulgar attire; she wore a cheap gaudy chintz gown and a ‘thrice-bordered cap’ decked with a profusion of ribbons. Her initial impression of retired tailor Thomas Harris was just as dismaying: he wore an unfashionable brown fustian coat, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, a gold-laced hat, and – instead of the silk stockings that befitted a gentleman – a hideous pair of woollen ‘spatter-dashes’. He cuts an engagingly

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