Almost all men are bastards. This would seem to be the hypothesis of Laetitia
Pilkington’s Memoirs, and not solely with reference to her rebarbative
husband, Matthew. But he was the worst of a bad bunch. Matthew Pilkington,
poet and clergyman, was also an Irish specimen of what Henry Fielding called
“the modern husband”, in a comedy of that name. That is, Matthew sought to
profit from his wife’s body by proxy, hoping that a rich friend would
cuckold him, for a reasonable price – or, when Laetitia failed to succumb,
that he could be rid of her by catching such a friend in the act of
cuckolding him. Divorce would almost certainly favour the innocent, injured
party.
The first two volumes of Laetitia’s Memoirs appeared in Dublin in 1748, eleven
years after Matthew and his bought witnesses, a mere twelve watchmen, burst
into her bedroom late one night to find her with a book in her hand; a young
surgeon called Robert Adair, who owned the book, was sitting nearby, waiting
patiently for her to finish reading it. Although she concedes that it was
not entirely proper for a young wife to find herself alone at such an hour
with a young man who was not her husband, Laetitia denies any wrongdoing.
It was on this dramatic, disputed moment that the life of Laetitia Pilkington
turned. Preceded by years that had not been entirely happy, her life gave
way to the promised divorce, disgrace, enforced departure from Dublin, a
drawn-out literary struggle and, most awfully, separation from her young
children. It now seems a neglected omen that Laetitia had written a
“Petition” on behalf of the birds that Matthew went out and shot during
their honeymoon:
What Phrenzy has possest your Mind,
To be destructive of your Kind?
The Pilkingtons had loved at first, charming one another with their poetry and
shared delight in music, and happy to be the “little” people included in the
cultured Dublin mob over whom Jonathan Swift and his fellow poet-priest
Patrick Delany presided. In the company of Mary Barber, Constantia Grierson
and Mary Davys, they joined in the praise and criticism of one another’s
works and began to circulate their own. Laetitia and Matthew were an
ambitious pair, and competed to impress. It was his Poems on Several
Occasions that had appeared, from the press of Swift’s printer, in 1730:
Shall I to Gems compare thine Eyes,
Thy Skin to Virgin Snows,
Thy balmy Breath, to Gales that rise
From ev’ry new-blown Rose?
Yet this was also the couple Swift would describe, after the divorce, as “the
falsest Rogue, and . . . the most profligate Whore in either Kingdom”.
Laetitia found herself cast out from his clique – as did Matthew, whom
Swift’s friends in England disliked – and liable, even after she had fled
Ireland, to be recognized as a scandalous woman and shunned. To some extent,
she anticipated this. When she left Dublin for London, she took her mother’s
maiden name, but made good use of her reputation as a fallen woman among
those willing to hear her side of the story, and perhaps express their
feelings of sympathy in terms of monetary support. Genteel begging for help
was not unusual, but as an accomplished storyteller Laetitia had a great
advantage.
From this point onwards, her story might be read as the weighing of wit’s
market value against womanhood’s. She published satirical verse and prose in
her own right, and ghosted works, in both verse and prose, for men. For a
time, she lived opposite White’s, the eighteenth-century gentlemen’s club
sans pareil, exhibiting herself as a writer, flirting with the club’s
members, making useful connections. She also received visits at home that
could, she later claimed, be profitable without becoming indecorous.
The Memoirs emerged from the tales she could tell of conjugal ill-treatment,
of literary life in Dublin and London, and above all, of Swift, her former
mentor: how Swift laughed, for only the second time in his life (at Tom
Jones); how he could be difficult, selfish and rude. The portrait has proved
invaluable. The Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, sat enraptured as she told him
her entire history, a narrative polished by necessity, then urged her to
write it out “just as you relate it . . . . I’ll engage it will sell”. In
this she would be following a highly successful precedent: An Apology for
the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, published in 1740, which declared
the author’s unimpeded vanity but also his vast knowledge of the theatre.
Idiosyncratic and opinion-dividing, just as Laetitia’s book would be, it
went through three more editions in the author’s lifetime.
In The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004) and Dr Johnson’s Women
(2000), Norma Clarke rehearsed Mrs Pilkington's story as part of a broader
narrative; in the former, she is filed under “Lived Experience”, alongside
other women who made literary reputations out of telling it like it was:
Delarivière Manley, Jane Barker, Mary Davys. Queen of the Wits: A Life of
Laetitia Pilkington offers the different delights and insights of linear
biography, from birth, to precocious reading habits, to Matthew, to Swift,
to disaster, to London, to White’s, to Memoirs, to death. Intelligent and
involving, it gives its subject the closer attention that its title
promises, even if that title is slightly misleading: on both sides of the
Irish Sea, Laetitia aspired to be queen of the scene, but only briefly wore
the crown, and spent much of her life striving against the odds, her verbal
gifts, obvious as they were, unacknowledged. Once cut adrift by Matthew, she
was always to struggle against adversity, and it is out of this struggle
that her Memoirs emerged.
Clarke quotes judiciously from A. C. Elias Jr’s 1997 edition of the Memoirs to
present a woman with a great need to “vindicate herself and blame others”.
There were plenty of scores to settle. Queen of the Wits begins with an
image of Laetitia alone, on a “bitter winter day in 1744”, “a tiny Irish
woman” trudging through the London snow in order to deliver a forlorn
petition for help. The noble recipient, the Lord High Almoner, Bishop Thomas
Sherlock, rejected this petition out of hand, scorning Laetitia as a
“foreigner” and “a saucy, proud, impertinent Person”. In return, she set him
down in her Memoirs, bad temper and all, with a face distinguished by “Knobs
and Flames of Fire”. Matthew himself comes off as poorly as you would
expect, in both Clarke’s and Pilkington’s accounts, for a husband who said
one morning over breakfast that he felt nauseous at the sight of his wife’s
breast (but was still prepared to sell her body to the highest bidder).
Going one better, Laetitia says that her mother actually vomited on reading
“The Lady’s Dressing Room” by Swift.
Laetitia returned to Dublin in 1747, not long after telling Samuel Richardson
that “the world is the world, and I am quite sick of it”. But she was soon
looking up her old acquaintances, warning them of her anecdotal intentions;
they were invited to make an appropriate, pre-emptive gesture before it was
too late. Had they ever thought about subscribing to the first volume of a
forthcoming work of non-fiction? Some friends needed no such encouragement,
but the dubious, sometimes successful tactic did not pass unnoticed. The
comedian Henry Woodward sent her up on stage, at Dublin’s Smock Alley
theatre in 1748, as the “Mrs Pill-Kill-Tongue” who hissed “Subscribe, or
else I’ll paint you like the Devil”. She was amused and grateful for the
publicity. Her fame had increased with her return to Ireland, to Matthew’s
discomfiture. His sometime lover, a Mrs Warren, declined the invitation to
subscribe, though her reply was thought fit to print: “I aboar yow and yowr
Filthy Idyous. It is not in your Power to defamatonous my Corrector in your
wild Memboirs”.
But Mrs Pilkington died in the summer of 1750, with two volumes of the Memoirs
published and a third to appear posthumously in 1754. Mr Pilkington paid the
funeral costs and, less than a month later, married again. His new will cut
off his children by Laetitia with gifts of a shilling each or, in the case
of William, the eldest, £5.
Since Clarke is generally so scrupulous, it jars to read that Elizabeth
Chudleigh made her notorious appearance in “undress” at a masquerade ball at
the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1749, when it was Ranelagh Gardens that
she so negligently graced in the guise of Iphigenia. The Robert Nugent whom
Laetitia contrived to have blackballed from White’s was not just an “Irish
millionaire”, but owed his millions to a calculated, loveless marriage, and
his reputation as a poet to ghosts like her. A sign of the picaresque
restlessness of Laetitia’s life is that there are many such stories that
could be told in passing, and, as it is, Queen of the Wits opens the doors
to many sad, forgotten rooms – the suicide of a man whose play was a popular
success, the death of an architect that left Green Street, north of
Grosvenor Square, “unfashionable and unfinished” – yet these glimpses never
veer too far from the main attraction, and enhance the reader’s sense of
Laetitia as a survivor in a precarious, often extremely unpleasant world.
It may seem optimistic of Clarke to suggest that the distressed Mrs
Pilkington, camped outside White’s, managed to avoid prostituting herself by
her pen – by combining “the ancient tradition of the courtesan-poet with the
new sentimental image of virtuous, or at least meritorious, female
distress”. The Duke of Marlborough could drop by and find her at her writing
desk, pass some hours with her alone, reward her with £50, but impose, as
Pilkington insisted, no “hard Conditions”. The biographer is perhaps
over-protective of her subject. Faced with the whining slurs of Laetitia’s
former friend Benjamin Victor, who spoke darkly of a “prostituted mind” in a
“prostituted body”, Clarke reassures us: “it is unlikely it amounted to
anything we would find shocking”. More often than not, cynicism melts away
when confronted with the powers of imaginative sympathy on display in Queen
of the Wits. Is it possible, Norma Clarke asks, that before that night with
the book, the surgeon, her husband and his twelve watchmen, Laetitia fell
for the “attractive and dedicated philanderer” with whom she was caught? “It
would be nice to think that she had a bit of rapture before it all went so
horribly wrong.” In the autumn of 1737, she “was pregnant again . . . and
the baby might have been Robert Adair’s”.
Norma Clarke
QUEEN OF THE WITS
A Life of Laetitia Pilkington
364pp. Faber. £20 (US $39.70).
978 0 571 22428 9
Michael Caines edited the volume on David Garrick in Lives of
Shakespearian Actors, published last month. His anthology of plays by
eighteenth-century women appeared in 2004.
