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Jtlary 1Zi!Sselljtliiford Jtlary 1Zi!ssellJtliiford (1787-1855) Best known for her amusing, affectionate, down-to-earth prose sketches of village life, Mary Russell Mitford was also a respected dramatist and poet. Born in Alresford, Hampshire, 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 London. 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 Letitia Elizabeth Landon 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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 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 Three Mile Cross, 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 William Macready and Thomas Talfourd, was per­ formed at Covent Garden 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 Berkshire 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. Charles Lamb 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 Charles Kemble 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, Anna Maria Hall, 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.
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