In the 18th century it was possible, literally, to live by one’s wits, but the cost of living was high. The literary adventuress Laetitia Pilkington calculated the price of a single introduction to a promising patron at £1.17.7½d. This sum included 1½d for pen and paper. The rest was made up of tips to footmen, valets and a shilling for “a Person to find when his Lordship is at home”. Once through the front door of patronage the supplicant wit might persuade a lord, or lesser gentleman, to subscribe to a book. He, or in this case she, might offer to circulate some flattering verses or even to make the patron witty himself. Mrs Pilkington wrote three operas and 25 odes for the painter James Worsdale, who presented them as his own, and she scripted several practical jokes to make Lord Middlesex look cleverer than he was.

The date of birth of Laetitia (ever an unreliable witness) is unknown. It was probably 1708-09 and the place was certainly Dublin. By the age of five she was reading Pope, and in time claimed to know all of Shakespeare by heart. What might have happened to such a lively, sometimes brilliant mind in another time and place is tantalising to speculate. As it was, her fate was to be, as she put it, “the Football of Fortune” in an age in which wit and elegance went hand in hand with callous indifference to the fate of individuals. Her life became a Hogarthian progress.

Things began well enough with an early marriage to the equally witty and almost equally diminutive clergyman Matthew Pilkington. The two became pets of Jonathan Swift, who enjoyed their conversation, their flattery and their Lilliputian scale. Laetitia in particular he teased physically, squashing her down with one hand until he could claim she measured only 3ft 2ins inches tall. He treated her like a toy, and, in this lively, scholarly biography, Norma Clarke makes the persuasive suggestion that Swift thought of the Pilkingtons as characters, figments of his own imagination. This was not perhaps so odd in the world of high satire, where wits ventriloquised for patrons and the use of pseudonyms, including Swift’s, was part of a complex game of double bluff. Who was who and who was real was not always apparent in the verbal hall of mirrors.

Before long, Laetitia was required to reinvent herself when her husband tired of her and divorced her, keeping the children, her jewellery and everything but the clothes she stood up in. Swift abruptly dropped the now scandalous pair and Laetitia was left to her own remarkable devices. Between London and Dublin, sometimes as “Mrs Meade”, sometimes as herself, she scraped a living as poet, letter writer, anecdotalist and friend of the famous, striking blows for her sex against the male enemy, the “bastard sons of wit”. In London she took lodgings in St James’s, a calculated move that put her opposite White’s Club, where Lord Chesterfield and his companions were delighted to have such an accomplished raconteuse on the doorstep. But if St James’s Street was narrow, the social gulf it represented was bottomless. When her novelty wore off the guineas dried up and the Marshalsea beckoned. Although Laetitia was only once in that notorious debtor’s prison, she was seldom out of its shadow.

In her expert exploration of the background to Laetitia’s life Clarke casts a bright, unflattering light on a world in which every beauty spot conceals a syphilitic sore. We meet Thomas Arne, composer of Rule Britannia, as a philanderer with a gin-sodden wife, and John Wesley as a fawning social hypocrite. What Laetitia’s occasional patron, the actor and poet laureate Colley Cibber, called the “frolicksome Farce of Fortune” was played out to the bitter end. If we feel sorry when Cibber will not bail her out of prison or the housemaid steals her sheets, we cannot help noticing how ruthlessly she drops her own sister or wondering what exactly happened to her last baby, disowned by her exhusband and left behind somewhere in Dublin.

Laetitia’s greatest literary production was her memoirs, two volumes of which appeared before her death in 1750. By the time they were published her notoriety was such that people were paying her not to publish the verses she wrote in their honour. Autobiography was an almost unknown genre, and there was barely a distinction in the public mind between a woman who sold her reminiscences and one who sold her body. It was assumed that Laetitia did both. But if nobody wanted the memoirs dedicated to them, all fashionable London and Dublin wanted to read them. Author and audience were complicit in the desire to enjoy gossip and scandal without being personally tainted. To this end the “Mrs Pilkington” of the memoirs is a literary construct, at least as close to Richardson’s Clarissa as to the Dublin curate’s wife. Weaving her way around certain undeniable facts, she explains that when her husband surprised her in her bedroom with the surgeon Robin Adair she was simply finishing a book he had lent her and wanted back. Her readers did not believe her. She knew they didn’t. Everyone enjoyed the conceit.

It is unfortunate, however, that the memoirs are the principal source for a biography. Clarke is obliged to dismantle them in order to ask the questions Laetitia so archly deflected about what might have been the truth, and the translation from first- to third-person narrative is somewhat deflationary, slowing the pace without adding much to what can be known. Despite which, this book does its subject and its readers a great service in furnishing the “lady of Adventure” with another of those valuable introductions she was always after for a new audience for her wit.

Down and nearly out

The treatment meted out to Laetitia during her divorce shows how precarious women’s lives were in the 18th century. Although her husband Matthew had a mistress, it was she who, after a dalliance with Robert Adair, was ejected from the house. Alone and pregnant in Dublin, she was fair game for sexual predators. Men pursued her in the street, and several burst into her bedroom with a view to raping her. Procuresses tried to lure her into becoming a prostitute. Worse than almost anything was the vicious gossip that pursued her, and that culminated in her former friend Jonathan Swift rejecting her as “the most profligate whore in either Kingdom”.

QUEEN OF THE WITS: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington by Norma Clarke
Faber £20 pp363

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