public?in thirty or more principal roles, nine of them in plays by Shakespeare. A beauty and leader of fashion, she attracted many suitors and was painted by many of the leading portraitists of the day, including George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy. At a command performance of The Winter's Tale in December 1779, playing the role of Perdita, Robinson captivated the teenaged prince of Wales and, after negotiating financial compensation in the form of a .20,000 bond (because she would have to give up her acting career), became his mistress. As a royal mistress, she was even more exposed to the public eye than she had been on the stage; years after the prince abandoned her, ribald speculation about the erotic adventures of 'Perdita' continued to engross gossip columnists and satiric cartoonists. Robin- son's attempt, following the prince's desertion, to sue for the promised .20,000 failed, but through the efforts of the Whig parliamentarian Charles James Fox, another
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famous man who may have been her lover, she received an annuity from the prince of .500 per year. At twenty-five she formed an attachment with Banastre Tarleton, an army officer who had just returned from the war in America and was embarking on a career in Parliament. That attachment lasted ten years, until Tarleton married an heiress. Robinson was by this time in poor health and, as a consequence of either a miscarriage (in some accounts) or rheumatic fever (in others), was paralyzed from the waist down. Even in this condition she made a striking public figure, as four liveried servants, covering their arms with long white sleeves, bore her from the opera house to her waiting carriage. A sawy self-publicist, she appears to have been well aware of the part she played in the spectacle that was fashionable London, accepting and even embracing (in the words of her modern editor, Judith Pascoe) her role as 'the most attractive object in a large urban display.'
Literature became Robinson's principal activity and source of income when she was in her early thirties. In 1788 and 1789, writing under the pen name 'Laura Maria' and sending her verse to the papers the World and the Oracle, she entered into a passionate poetical correspondence with 'Delia Crusca' (pseudonym of the poet Robert Merry, who had already participated in a similar public flirtation in the periodical press, in the series of love poems he exchanged with 'Anna Matilda,' the poet Hannah Cowley). When, in her Poems of 1791, Robinson reprinted some of these 'effusions' of feeling, she attracted six hundred subscribers. In 1796 she contributed to the English revival of the sonnet with her Petrarchan series Sappho and Phaon. In the
1790s she also authored seven novels, beginning in 1792 with Vacenza, or The Dangers of Credulity. She succeeded Robert Southey in the influential office of poetry editor of the Morning Post in 1799. Other writings by Robinson include her political tracts Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France (1793) and Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799) and her posthumous Memoirs (1801), an autobiography whose description of a woman's poetic vocation makes it (like Robinson's critical discussion of the Greek poet of passion Sappho) exceptional in an era now better known for its models of masculine artistry.
Robinson is one of the accomplished writers of blank verse in the 1790s (as in 'London's Summer Morning') as well as one of the most irrepressibly musical in many different forms of rhyme. Outspokenly liberal in its politics, good-humored, satirical, and sentimental by turns, her late verse in particular exemplifies what Stuart Curran calls 'the new realism that will impel English poetry into the nineteenth century.' Lyrical Tales (1800), the final volume of Robinson's poetry to be published in her lifetime, appeared the month before the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads?from the same publisher and printer and in exactly the same format and typography (Wordsworth, in reaction, tried to change his own title to Poems by W. Wordsworth). Robinson's 'The Poor Singing Dame' is modeled on the most popular of Wordsworth's 1798 ballads, 'Goody Blake and Harry Gill.' Wordsworth in turn based one of his pieces ('The Seven Sisters; or, The Solitude of Binnorie') on the elaborate metrical scheme of Robinson's 'The Haunted Beach,' a poem that prompted Coleridge to exclaim to Southey, when he first saw it in the Morning Post, 'the Metre?ay! that Woman has an Ear.' Coleridge admired her 'undoubted Genius,' and Robinson returned the compliment in one of her last poems, 'To the Poet Coleridge,' a shrewd reading of 'Kubla Khan' sixteen years before it first got into print.
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68 / MARY ROBINSON
January, 17951
Pavement slipp'ry, people sneezing, Lords in ermine, beggars freezing; Titled gluttons dainties carving, Genius in a garret starving.
5 Lofty mansions, warm and spacious; Courtiers cringing and voracious; Misers scarce the wretched heeding; Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.
Wives who laugh at passive spouses;
10 Theatres, and meeting-houses; Ralls, where simp'ring misses languish; Hospitals, and groans of anguish.
Arts and sciences bewailing; Commerce drooping, credit failing;
15 Placemen' mocking subjects loyal; Separations, weddings royal.
Authors who can't earn a dinner; Many a subtle rogue a winner; Fugitives for shelter seeking;
20 Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.0
Taste and talents quite deserted; All the laws of truth perverted; Arrogance o'er merit soaring; Merit silently deploring.
25 Ladies gambling night and morning; Fools the works of genius scorning; Ancient dames for girls mistaken, Youthful damsels quite forsaken.
Some in luxury delighting;
30 More in talking than in fighting; Lovers old, and beaux decrepid; Lordlings empty and insipid.
Poets, painters, and musicians; Lawyers, doctors, politicians: 35 Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes, Seeking fame by diff'rent roads.
Gallant souls with empty purses; Gen'rals only fit for nurses; School-boys, smit with martial spirit,
40 Taking place of vet'ran merit.
1. First published in the Morning Post as the work of 'Portia.' political appointees
