Jtlary 1Zi!ssellJtliiford

(1787-1855)

Best known for her amusing, affectionate, down-to-earth prose sketches of village life, was also a respected dramatist and poet. Born in Alresford, , on r6 December 1787, she was the only child of Mary Russell, a well-read heiress, and George Mitford, a physician with a weakness for gambling and high living. By the mid r79os George Mitford had squandered almost all of his wife's inheritance of twenty-eight thousand pounds, and the family was forced to sell furniture and portions of the library to satisfy creditors. But they moved to a grander house in the fashionable resort of Lyme Regis, where the doc­ tor attempted to recover his finances through more gambling. A year later almost all their belongings had to be sold at auction, and they left for dingy apartments in . On Mary's tenth birthday her father asked her to pick a number for a lottery ticket. Her choice was the twenty-thousand-pound winner. From that day forward Mary would be the chief financial support of her family, which now was able to move to a substantial house in Reading. Beginning in 1798 Mary attended the same boarding school at 22 Hans Place, London, where Caroline Lamb had once been a pupil and where later enrolled. There she studied French, English, Italian, Latin, history, geography, dancing, and drawing. Among her teachers was the poet Frances Rowden, who became her mentor and laid the foundation for her love of drama and literature. In r802 her father purchased an estate near Reading and removed Mary from school. The family lived in town during the four-year renovation of the mansion, which spared no expense. Furnish­ ings included a Gainsborough, a Greuze, and a portrait of Dr. Mitford by John Opie. Meanwhile, Mary continued reading voraciously. In r810 she had privately printed a volume titled simply Poems, treating politics as well as nature and country life. Reviewers were cordial. But her pleasure was short-lived, for because of her father's extravagant habits credi­ tors were once again closing in. She decided she could earn a livelihood for

451 452 Mary Russell Miiford her family through writing and began working on a long narrative poem about recently revealed incidents on Pitcairn Island after the mutiny on the HMS Bounty. read each canto of Christina, the Maid ef the South Seas as it was completed and suggested changes. Published by Rivington in 18n, it was popular in America as well as in Britain but did not earn enough to do more than pay immediate financial obligations. In March of that year her father was briefly imprisoned for debt. Watlington Hill; a Poem (1812) celebrated hunting and country landscape. Poems on the Female Character, published by Rivington in 1813 and pirated in America, includes "The Rival Sisters" and the ambitious "Blanche of Castile," read in manuscript by Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who encouraged the young author to attempt tragedy). During a stay in London in 1813, Mitford was a guest in the home ofJames Perry, edi­ tor of the Morning Chronicle, where she met Thomas Moore and Amelia Opie. In 1818, with family finances still on shaky ground, she began to write prose descriptions of her neighborhood, which appeared in the Lady's Magazine, a little-known periodical, beginning in 1819. By March 1820 Dr. Mitford's gambling and extravagant spending had reduced his family to poverty, and they moved a mile away to a labourer's cottage in , a village on the turnpike road between Reading and Basingstoke. Mitford was to stay there for thirty years, allowing herself only the luxury of a flower garden. Meanwhile, Mitford's sketches had become so popular with readers of the Lady's Magazine that its circulation had increased eightfold, and the editor begged for more. Since her writing was the only source of income for her family, she was glad to supply them. Her tragedy Julian, which had been written with the advice of and , was per­ formed at on 15 March 1823 with Macready in the title role; it played for eight nights, bringing her two hundred pounds and much ac­ claim. But the weight of supporting her family was heavy at times. She told Sir William Elford, "I am now chained to a desk, eight, ten, twelve hours a day, at mere drudgery. All my thoughts of writing are for hard money. All my correspondence is on hard business. Oh! pity me, pity me! My very mind is sinking under the fatigue and the anxiety." 1 In 1824 Mitford collected and polished twenty-four of her Lady's Magazine sketches of life and published them with George Whittaker under the title Our Village. The book took the world by storm, was critically well received, and sold beyond her wildest dreams. Within months Whittaker was

r. Letter dated 25 April 1823, quoted in The Life of Mary Russell Miiford, Told by Herself in Letters to her Friends, ed. A. G. K. L'Estrange, 2 vols. (New York, 1870), 2:227-28. Mary Russell Miiford 453 asking for a second series, which appeared in 1826; three more volumes, draw­ ing on her experiences at Three Mile Cross, eventually came out at two year intervals. said that nothing so fresh had appeared for a long time. Harriet Martineau regarded Mitford as the originator of a new style of "graphic description;' which Elizabeth Barrett compared to Dutch paint­ ing in its detail, light, and humor. H. F. Chorley called Mitford "the Claude of English village life," and Felicia Hemans was cheered by the sketches in sickness.2 As Coleridge had predicted, Mitford also excelled at writing tragic drama on historical themes. Her Foscari played at Covent Garden for fifteen nights beginning in early November 1826, with in the leading role. From this production, along with the sale of its copyright, the publication of her Dramatic Scenes, and sales to periodicals and annuals she earned more than six hundred pounds for the year. But because of her father's irresponsible spending the family remained poor. And her father was growing person­ ally more difficult. Her success made him jealous of her literary friendships, and he taunted her and treated her friends with contempt. Another tragedy, Rienzi, played at Drury Lane to a crowded and rapt house for thirty-four nights in October 1828, earning Mitford four hundred pounds. The printed play sold eight thousand copies and became popular in America. Now her poems and stories began to appear frequently in the literary annuals, includ­ ing the Forget-Me-Not, Friendship's Offering, the Literary Souvenir, the Amulet, and Finden's Tableaux (which she would edit in 1838 and 1839). Her popularity allowed her to command high prices for her work. Whittaker, the publisher of Our Village, claimed that Mitford's name "would sell anything." But her father's continuing extravagant spending meant she always felt financially in peril. She told a friend, "I myself hate all my own doings, and consider the being forced to this drudgery as the greatest misery that life can afford. But it is my wretched fate and must be undergone-so long, at least, as my father is spared to me. If I should have the misfortune to lose him, I shall go quietly to the workhouse, and never write another line-a far preferable destiny." 3 Mitford wrote a scena in English verse, Mary Queen of Scots, in 1831 and a blank verse opera libretto, Sadak and Kalasrade, which was performed only once at the Lyceum on 20 April 1835 and considered a failure. But her Charles the First, produced in July 1834, earned her two hundred pounds. In early 1835 Richard Bentley published in three volumes her novel about the town of Reading, Belford Regis; or, Sketches of a Country Town. By this time the first

2.DNB. 3. Quoted in W. J. Roberts, The Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Miiford (London, 1913), 312. 454 Mary Russell Miiford

volume of Our Village had gone through fourteen editions. Mary and William Howitt visited that year, and the latter published an appreciative piece in the August Athenaeum entitled "A Visit to Our Village." The next year, Mitford dined with William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Samuel Rogers and on the same visit to London met Joanna Baillie and Jane Porter. An inveterate letter writer, she carried on a voluminous correspondence with such friends as William Macready, Felicia Hemans, Frances Trollope, Barbara Hofland, , Mary Howitt, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Barry Cornwall, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Allan Cunning­ ham, and others. She was such a good conversationalist that some preferred her talk to her books. In r836 she met Elizabeth Barrett, beginning a long friendship that included the gift to Barrett of her spaniel Flush, later immor­ talized by Virginia Woolf. Before Barrett showed her Sonnets to the Portuguese to Robert Browning, she sent them to Mitford for her criticism and approval. In 1837 Mitford received a civil list pension of one hundred pounds a year, and in 1842 her eighty-two-year-old father, whom she had nursed through four years of sickness, died. Even though he had squandered during his life­ time about seventy thousand pounds and had never worked for a living, his affectionate daughter always forgave him his faults. Now Mitford was left with a crushing debt of almost a thousand pounds. In 1843, friends, including H. F. Chorley, Thomas Moore, Henry Hart Milman, and others, took up a public subscription that paid the debt and left a small surplus for Mitford. In September 1851 her cottage was no longer habitable, and she moved to , near Reading. Recollections of a Literary Life appeared in 1852. A novel, Atherton, and Other Tales, published in April 1854, won praise from John Ruskin. In 1854 her plays were published collectively in two volumes with an autobiographical introduction. Mitford died on IO January 1855 and was buried in the village churchyard. Walter Savage Landor expressed what many felt when he observed in verse that no one could tell "The country's purer charms so well/ As Mary Mitford."

MAJOR WORKS: Poems (London, l8rn); Christina, the Maid of the South Seas; a Poem (London, l8II); Watlington Hill; a Poem (London, 1812); Narrative Poems on the Female Character, in the Various Relations of Life (London, 1813); Julian, a Tragedy in Five Acts (London, 1823); Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery, 5 vols. (London, 1824-32); Foscari: A Tragedy (London, 1826); Dramatic Scenes, Sonnets, and Other Poems (London, 1827); Rienzi: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (London, 1828); Charles the First, an His­ torical Tragedy, in Five Acts (London, 1834); Belford Regis, or Sketches of a Country Town, 3 vols. (London, 1835); Sadak and Kalasrade; or, The Waters of Oblivion. A Romantic Opera in Two Acts (London, 1835); Country Stories (London, 1837); Inez de Castro: A Tragedy in Mary Russell Miiford 455

Five Acts (London, 1841); Recollections of a Literary Life, 3 vols. (London, 1852); Atherton, and Other Tales, 3 vols. (London, 1854); The Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Miiford, 2 vols. (London, 1854); The Life of Mary Russell Miiford, Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends, ed. Rev. A. G. L'Estrange, 3 vols. (London, 1870).

TEXTS USED: Text of "Winter Scenery, January, 1809" from Poems. Text of "To Mr. Lucas" from Friendship's Offering for 1830.

Winter Scenery, January, 1809

The dark sky lours: a crimson streak In vain the heavy clouds would break; The lowing herds desert the plain, Scatter'd is all the fleecy train; The feather'd songsters all are gone, The dear domestic bird alone, The cheerful robin, seeks his food, And breaks the death-like solitude: For, save his notes, no earthly sound Through the chill air, is heard around; IO

E'en she, whose playful fondness still Attends my steps on dale or hill, She, who still wears the victor blue, Maria of the raven hue! No longer seeks with frolic glee, Where'er I roam, to follow me, But shrinks within her shelter warm, And hides in straw her graceful form.

Yet lovelier is the magic scene, Than blooming summer's brightest green: 20 The icicles in crystal row Suspended from the pent-house low, O'er the luxuriant ivy fall, Or glitter on the moss-grown wall; The level lawn, in dazzling light, Mary Russell Miiford

Array'd in pure unsullied white, Scarce marks, with undulating bend, With its smooth edge, where waters blend.

Crown'd is each grove with vestal snow. 30 Whilst varied colors gleam below; The holly's deeply burnish'd green, With coral berries faintly seen, The oak's rich leaves of saffron hue, The tow'ring fir's dark misty blue, Closer their mingling branches twine, And through their brilliant burthen shine.

See on the pi~e the snow arise, A tap'ring cone, it seeks the skies! Or wreathes the rugged elm around! 40 Or bends the light broom to the ground! Or in ethereal lustre gay, Clothes the pale aspen's fl.exile spray!

And, still to fancy's eye more dear, What strange fantastic forms appear! High arches rise, abrupt and bright, And gothic fret-work silv'ry light; There frown dark pillars, slim and tall, And there the mould'ring turrets fall! But, emblem true of human joys, 50 Rais'd in an hour, an hour destroys; Already has the brilliant ray Melted the fairy scene away; No fleecy whiteness decks the ground, No glitt'ring frost work gleams around; All, all are gone. The swollen flood Spreads its stain' d waters to the wood; Each tree, with snowy crest so fair, That rose with gay fantastic air, Now waves its dark boughs, rough and bare; 60 And o'er the hills, the groves, the plains, The daemon Desolation reigns! (18rn) Mary Russell Miiford 457

To Mr. Lucas, Written Whilst Sitting to Him for my Portrait. December 1828*

Oh young and richly gifted! born to claim No vulgar place amidst the sons of fame; With shapes of beauty haunting thee like dreams, And skill to realise Art's loftiest themes; How wearisome to thee the task must be To copy these coarse features painfully; Faded by time and paled by care, to trace The dim complexion of this homely face; And lend to a bent brow and anxious eye Thy patient toil, thine Art's high mastery. IO Yet by that Art, almost methinks divine, By touch and colour and the skilful line Which at a stroke can strengthen and refine, And mostly by the invisible influence Of thine own spirit, gleams of thought and sense Shoot o'er the care-worn forehead, and illume The heavy eye, and break the leaden gloom: Even as the sun-beams on the rudest ground Fling their illusive glories wide around, And make the dullest scene of nature bright 20 By the reflexion of their own pure light. (1830)

•Lady Madelina Pahner, patron of John Lucas (1807-74), urged Mitford to pose for the artist and lent her clothes for the occasion. There were at least three sittings in December, and the portrait, which was said to be a strong likeness, was complete by 7 January 1829. Mitford observed, "It was difficult, in painting me, to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of making me dowdy, like one of my own rustic heroines, or dressed out like a tragedy queen. He has managed the matter with infinite taste, and given to the whole figure the look of a quiet gentlewoman. . . . The face is thoughtful and placid, with the eyes looking away-a peculiarity which, they say, belongs to my expression" (quoted in The Life ef Mary Russell Miiford, Told by Herself in Letters to her Friends, ed. A. G. K. L'Estrange, 2 vols. [New York, 1870], 2: 86). An en­ graving from the portrait is reproduced opposite p. 290 of W. J. Roberts, Mary Russell Miiford (London, 1913). A later portrait of Mitford by Lucas, dated 1852, is owned by the National Portrait Gallery, London.