Robinson's "poetical disguises"

In this 1782 cartoon by James Gillray, Robinson is depicted as tavern whirlligig hanging in the air between two notable men with whom she was romantically tied: the Prince of Wales and Banastre Tarleton.

This 1783 cartoon by B. Pownall depicts the Prince and Robinson in their roles as  "Florizel" and "Perdita." On the Prince's side, the King cries out at his bad behavior, while on Robinson's, her husband is branded the "King of Cuckolds," holding her other lovers upon his horns.

Robinson's long-delayed arrival into the Romantic canon was the result of, not only shifts in critical perspectives, but her own work at re-defining her place within the late-eighteenth century literary world. As shown above, Robinson was a frequent target of political cartoonists, known for her time as an actress and lover to the Prince Regent, as well as the other sordid love affairs that followed. It required a tremendous output to even begin to shift attention to her place as a radical feminist thinker and prolific writer of novels and poetry. But in her final years, Mary Robinson managed to make a living as a poet. At Daniel Stuart's Morning Post, for which she served as a poetry editor, she published 20 poems in 1798, 25 in 1799 and around 90 in 1800. 

Robinson's late career is inextricably tied to her participation in the Della Cruscan clique. The Della Cruscans, begun in Italy by a group of expatriate Englishmen and Italian collaborators led by Robert Merry, made their publishing debut with the Florence Miscellany in 1785. Their work, however, gained far more attention through reprints in the popular press. It was deeply sentimental, flowery in language, and committed to republican values. Role-playing was an essential aspect of Della Cruscan writing, and a major part of what made the mode attractive to both the poets and readers. From behind the guise of Della Crusca, Robert Merry could express both wildly sentimentalized emotional poses and radical political views in support of the French Revolution. The retired playwright, Hannah Cowley, became his lover, Anna Matilda, only to be supplanted by Robinson's Laura Maria. Their competition added drama and urgency  to the procession of poems, and Robinson's theatrical background likely helped her to construct a role for herself. 

Robinson embraced the Della Cruscan conventions, offering odes to reflection, eloquence, and meditation, as well as occasional poems, her lines frequently taken up with describing the author's passion and tears. In a poem from the February 23rd, 1790 edition of the Whitehall Evening Post, "Laura Maria" writes, "Come, blushing Rose--and on my breast/Recline thy gentle head and die,/Thy scatter'd leaves shall there be press'd,/Bath'd with a tear from Pity's eye."  But, despite the artificiality that Della Cruscan verse known for, this overwrought guise could also be used to make significant revelations of Robinson's personal life. This is clear in a poem like the "Lines to He Who Will Understand Them,"  first published in The World October 31, 1788. She bemoans her lover, Tarleton's, betrayal, complaining, "That truth, unwelcome to my ear,/Swells the deep sigh, recalls the tear" and prepares to leave the country altogether. Robinson, who had been so often attacked in the press for her love affairs, is able to reveal her own condition and sentiments (albeit in a stylized and dramatized form) to a reading public.

Laura Maria was just one of an entire dramatis personae worth of names Robinson published under, at least eight of which appeared in the Post. Others included Tabitha Bramble, who was credited, as Mary Elizabeth Robinson writes in her continuation of her mother's memoirs, with "lighter compositions," Sappho, Oberon, and the author of A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, Anne Frances Randall (230). But Robinson never seemed particularly interested in using her various pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. As Judith Pascoe argues, "That Robinson's theatrical donning and shedding of personae did not serve primarily as a form of subterfuge is evidenced by the way she invariably came out from behind the cover of each nom de plume" (Pascoe 263). Indeed, when she came forward as the author of her Della Cruscan poems, she was dismayed to find that the publisher John Bell did not initially believe her, thinking that he already knew Laura Maria's true identity. The preface to the 1795 edition of her Poems repeats this revelation, along with claiming poems written by "Oberon" and "Julia." And ten months after the first publication of the Letter, the second printing (with the title changed to Thoughts on the Condition of Women) gave Robinson's real name. The plethora of identities Robinson took on gave her the opportunity to take on a wide range of poetic voices while temporarily separating herself from her scandalous reputation. Inevitably, though, she tended to claim responsibility for her work, publishing it in the collections of her poems under her own name. The Della Cruscans offered her the opportunity to engage in this kind of play on a highly visible stage.  

However, as she neared the end of her life and career, Robinson felt the need to separate herself from a group that had become much maligned as purveyors sloppy sentimentality and limited craft in biting critiques from the satirist William Gifford and Wordsworth, among others. Mary Elizabeth Robinson insists that her mother became involved with the Della Cruscans because "dazzled by the false metaphors and rhapsodic extravagance of some contemporary writers, she suffered her judgment to be misled and her taste to be perverted" (215). But in many ways her association with the Della Cruscans was essential to her development into what we can consider a "Romantic" poet. Indeed, even as Robinson's daughter attempts to allay damage to her poetic reputation by downplaying her involvement with the Della Cruscans, she points out within the same paragraph, "During her poetical disguise, many complimentary poems were addressed to her: several ladies of the Blue Stocking club, while Mrs. Robinson remained unknown, even ventured to admire, nay more, to recite her productions in their learned and critical coterie." 

Given the cultural capital they, however briefly, held in the late-eighteenth, we certainly cannot dismiss the Della Cruscans. Arguing for the clique's significance, Jerome McGann writes, "One wants to understand Della Cruscan poetry because:1. it provides an invaluable corpus for studying the conventions of the poetry of sensibility; 2. understanding those conventions gives greater access to the work of the major poets who worked in the first phase of the tradition, that is, in the years 1760-1840. 3. understanding the poetry of sensibility in that period opens new avenues for (re)reading the poetry that succeeded it" (96). While his points are well-taken, McGann does place a heavy emphasis on treating these works as part of a narrative of progress toward high Romanticism. Rather than viewing these poets as an intriguing evolutionary dead end, we should focus on how they represent a confluence of social and historical factors in the early-1790s. It is against that background of jacobin thought that this soap operatic bunch of sentimentalists was able to assert a lasting influence on a writer like Robinson. 

Moreover, for the resourceful writer, the passing of a fashion and a critical dismissal does not have to be wholly destructive to one's work. Steven E. Jones points out the rhetorical maneuvers possible from such a position when he argues that, identified with the Della Cruscans by contemporary critics, "both Keats and Shelley collaborate in their own caricatures, offering themselves up as the victims of satire in order to stake out an unsatiric higher ground" (113) Robinson does not directly confront such attacks, but she continues to employ Della Cruscan techniques in order to support causes that, for her, transcend the playful dramatics of the clique. And her continuing awareness of the power in taking on various "poetical disguises," seizing and identifying herself with the new developments she saw approaching, allowed her to stay relevant and make a living at her writing. These considerations have served her well in posterity, while the other Della Cruscans still have not recovered from their consignment to the cultural dust bin. 

Works Cited

Jones, Steven E. Satire and Romanticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Pascoe, Judith. "Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace." Romantic Women Writers. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover: UP of New England, 1995. 252-68.

Robinson, Mary Darby. Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Ed. J. Fitzgerald Molloy. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. , 1895. Full Text.