CHAPTER FOUR
Hester Lynch Piozzi, Antiquity of Bath
At my Death the Battle about my Merits & no Merits, will be renewed over my Memory. Friends wishing to save it—Foes contending for the Pleasure of throwing it to the Dogs like the Body of Petroclus in Homer.
—Hester Lynch Piozzi, entry in her copy of Goldsmith’s
Almanack, July 1820
Too old, by Heaven!
—Epigraph (from Twelfth Night) to Love Letters of
Mrs. Piozzi, Written When She Was Eighty to
William Augustus Conway (1843)
Though Hester Lynch Piozzi’s life and writings have received significant scholarly attention, her later years have not been given their due. As we have seen in previous chapters, this is not a condition peculiar to Piozzi (1741–1821). Like many of her long-lived female contemporaries, Piozzi remained an active writer up until her last days, although in prominent biographies her old age gets short shrift.1 Perhaps this is in part because it is received wisdom that Piozzi’s most interesting years were those in which she was “Mrs. Thrale.” If what is considered most compelling about Piozzi is her connection to Samuel Johnson, then her later years may fail to fascinate. But Piozzi—as those who have studied her know well—interests in her own right. Her later years, too, are intriguing and even moving, as can be gleaned from her work for publication, from her recently published letters, and from her still unpublished life writings.
In discussions of Piozzi’s later years, two matters have repeatedly emerged. Both have the potential to overshadow any attempts to reassess her late literary reputation. The first is her so-called 80th birthday party in 1820. Six months before turning 79, Piozzi decided to throw herself a party and dispatched invitations to “all parts of the world” (Clifford, HLP 450). Approximately six hundred friends gathered at the Lower Assembly Rooms in Bath for a concert, ball, and supper. At her lavish party, for which she ran up debts, she allegedly danced with “astonishing elasticity.”2 This event is among the most chronicled of her later life, whether for good or ill, and is used as a focal point either to memorialize her or to ridicule her as an aged literary celebrity.3
The second matter that comes to the fore in discussions of Piozzi’s late life is her friendship with the young actor William Augustus Conway (1789–1828), an episode that was sensationalized in the decades after her death. It was rumored in her lifetime and then claimed in a series of allegedly doctored letters published posthumously that she had conceived a romantic passion for Conway, a passion painted as both absurd and unrequited, proving Piozzi to be preposterously vain. Her intentions toward Conway remain subject to debate, and the matter has threatened to overshadow—and perhaps even to forestall—more nuanced discussions of her final years. This is unfortunate, because both the birthday party and the Conway episode might rightly serve as evidence of the vibrancy of her later life. I argue that these episodes, their reception notwithstanding, demonstrate the unusual ways in which Piozzi tried to take control of her position as an author in late life, after having been thwarted by the literary marketplace.
In this chapter, I look to Piozzi’s writings in old age to see the ways in which she modified her understandings of herself as a writer while coming to terms with the disappearance of a mass readership. I look at her published letters, her unpublished diaries and almanacs, and her late writings themselves in order to show that her old age—though perhaps not free of folly—was neither contemptible nor pitiful. In the latter part of the chapter, I give particular attention to Piozzi’s relationship with Conway, making sense of how it has wrongly come to characterize her as an irrational old woman. Revisiting this story affords us the opportunity to see her choices afresh. I argue that we ought to understand them as characteristic of an indefatigable and forward-thinking author, as well as an impassioned friend/mother/mentor figure. It is not simply to champion Piozzi’s old age that I make this argument. She herself does not present that period in her life as a model or an ideal. Rather, this chapter ought to encourage us to revise our neglect of and partial conclusions about her late life. Piozzi’s old age deserves to be freed from calumny, from apotheosis, and from run-of-the-mill neglect.
Because the age of 60 generally marked the onset of old age in the late eighteenth century, Piozzi may have been considered an old woman from the turn of the century. She was an active writer during this period, both for private and public consumption. Personally, this was not an easy time, in that she confronted outliving many of her contemporaries, both of her husbands, and most of her offspring.4 In July 1820, she made a list of fourteen friends who had died since she left Bath. At the same time, she made a list of the “profess’d enemies outlived by H : L : P in 1820.” Obviously, this list-making was not just a melancholy experience, as she reveled in having been predeceased by the likes of Sir John Hawkins (1719–89), Giuseppe Baretti (1719–89), James Boswell (1740–95), George Colman (bap. 1732–94), and Peter Pindar (John Wolcot) (bap. 1738–1819).5 Piozzi jokingly referred to herself as “one of the Antiquities” of Bath, the city she called home for most of the last years of her life. But even if (as she suspected) she was treated as an antique curiosity by strangers and acquaintances, Piozzi was no relic in her day-to-day activities. Any account of her during this time should center on the fact that she was actively engaged in writing in—and writing about—her old age.
Attention has centered on her colorful old age, as several biographers and critics have given sustained attention to the period. As one scholar puts it, interpretations of Piozzi in old age “differ: she either enjoyed her new acquaintances at Bath and retained a reputation for impressive powers of conversation, or she spent a miserable decade, not writing anything worthwhile, increasingly isolated, disappointed in both her children and the uncertainty of social applause.”6 Critics Catherine Rodriguez (1999) and Patricia Meyer Spacks (1970) echo this difference when considering the writings of Piozzi’s old age. Rodriguez’s essay considers Piozzi’s 24-page autobiography, written while she was in her seventies for Sir James Fellowes, a retired naval doctor and one of her literary executors. Rodriguez argues that this text presents an account of her life that shows Piozzi’s fears that it has been misunderstood. Rodriguez demonstrates that “the writings from the last ten years of Piozzi’s life have remained relatively obscure,” offering the hope that “rereading Piozzi’s late writings for their contribution to the understanding of identity issues for an aging woman in late eighteenth-century England may prove a fruitful endeavor.”7 She finds evidence of resilience in Piozzi’s last writings.
Spacks, in her work on Piozzi’s old age, is less sanguine. Spacks discusses Piozzi’s five-volume “scrap book,” or journals, written between 1810 and 1814. The volumes were written for John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury, Piozzi’s second husband’s nephew, who was also her adopted son, coexecutor, and heir.8 Spacks offers a portrait of Piozzi as an aging female writer, looking back on her life and career, but considers Piozzi’s late journals as an “extended piece of self-justification” (221), demonstrating an “unhappy” old woman relying “on the triumphs of her youth for emotional sustenance” (224, 225). Piozzi is viewed as an interesting case study of an educated eighteenth-century woman coping with a sexist culture, but her ideas in old age are considered random, puerile, and tedious (235) and her psychology pathetic (242).
In the years since Spacks’s essay was published, it has become clear that Piozzi had more going for her in her old age than bitter self-defense and pathetic self-pity, though that interpretation may yet hold some weight as a portrait of the years 1810–14. During that time, Piozzi was grieving over the death of her second husband and trying to rebuild (once again) a life as a widow. A full picture of Piozzi’s late life, however, would also see her as a lively and interested thinker and writer, filled with intellectual curiosity. As she put it in a letter several months prior to her death, “I must go on adding to my Stock of Ideas while Life is lent me—for who knows at 81—how soon that Power may be taken away?”9 Piozzi seems to have lived by this dictum, as the written materials that survive from this period are voluminous.
Piozzi’s writing for publication in her old age was sustained and self-conscious, and it exhibits an acute sense of how her advancing age might affect readers’ responses. In her late works, Piozzi many times referred to herself as “old.” The anonymous political pamphlet, Three Warnings to John Bull before He Dies (1798), published when she was nearly 60, is signed “an Old Acquaintance of the Public,” although ultimately, it is the “public” she likens to being “in its dotage” in that work (qtd. in Clifford 396). After the appearance of her last published book, a world history titled Retrospection (1801), Piozzi published an anonymous short work, the anti-Napoleonic broadside, “Old England to Her Daughters” (1803). There, England—imagined as elderly—calls on her daughters not to faint or fall into fits in the face of invading French enemies but to remain strong and calm. Piozzi writes of females (whom she divides into ladies, women, and laboring women) as responsible for displaying strength, rather than succumbing to weakness. Signing the piece “Poor Old England,” she argues that women alone will be able to increase glory, to add a laurel to the national wreath, or at the least to keep it from “fading upon the brows.”10
Retrospection, too, highlights the aging process—even in the conceit of its title. Piozzi’s introduction highlights her imagined readership. She offers her book as a proper object for the young of the day, who have no time to read “better books” and who are “called out to act before they know.”11 Her book is also pitched to the old: “Perhaps too, those who long ago have read, and long ago desisted from reading histories well-known, may like to please their fancies with the Retrospect of what they feel connected in their minds with youthful study, and that sweet remembrance of early-dawning knowledge on the soul” (1: vii–viii). As a writer she “recommends, and endeavours to facilitate, Retrospection” (17). Piozzi repeats her title like a mantra throughout the two-volume work, up to her last chapter, on 1796–1800. Then she declares, “Being arrived at the interesting moment when Retrospection ceases and observation is begun, our book must with this chapter end itself, and be submitted to the reader’s Retrospect” (2: 521). In the book’s subsequent twenty pages, she nevertheless invokes the term retrospection three more times. The word’s frequent repetition, though grating, demonstrates how looking back is not only central to historiography and reading history but, for Piozzi, central to her work as an aged author. Extensive experience at having second thoughts, in memory and through the process of writing, is something she, as an aged woman, could offer the public.12
Old age was brought forward even more directly in Piozzi’s last full-length work designed for publication. It furthered her interest in the etymology of first names and was titled, “Lyford Redivivus; or, A Granddame’s Garrulity.” As I argued in the introduction, Piozzi’s referring to her work as stereotypically garrulous might be seen as a protest against ageist practices. It might also, however, be a capitulation to or internalization of them. Given the intricacies of Piozzi’s late life self-concept, it may well be both. With “Lyford,” Piozzi signed herself not with her own name, as she had done in the past, but as “An Old Woman.”13 In the preface, she includes an “Address to my Readers,” characteristic of her published work in style and tone in that it is anecdotal and alternately serious and tongue-in-cheek. Piozzi maintains that the title page of the book (which quotes an epigram in two languages) is proof of her garrulity but asks that readers remember that her “little work” is “meant for the mere Amusement of a vacant hour” and is “just good enough to keep worse Books out of their hands” (Hyde Case 9 [16]). She does not claim originality but maintains that her work is “more extensive” and “may easily be more amusing, than a small Pocket Volume composed near 200 Years ago, & now scarce known in the world” (i.e., Lyford’s). She gives a history of names and naming, but then maintains that she is not using “Tricks” to “give momentary Importance to our Trifle, either by a long or learned Introduction.” In these elements of apology and defense, the work resembles her previous writings but employs the stereotypes of women and aging in doing so.
In “Lyford,” Piozzi highlights her own old age and the wished-for long life of her book. She ends her preface by predicting the book’s future, denigrating it as frivolous, and expressing her desire that it will survive because frivolity is fashionable: “On the wide Sea of Time we find many a richly laden Vessel foundering in Gales that toss the light skiff into immediate notice, and in the busy Moments when this Book was planned, frivolous Publications had best Chance to live” (Hyde Case 9 [16]). Anticipating her critics, she then tries to disarm them with her modesty and low expectations:
This tiny book will be easily broken down by your criticism, if not blown up by the more fortunate Breath of Caprice: and if its own nothingness does even at length condemn it as many Modern Travels are condemn’d, to travel the Remainder of their Days inside a Trunk—
Or doom’d with Tarts to try the Oven’s heat
Or round Salt Butter seize my Slippery Seat;
With rebel Will I’ll ne’er oppose
The Current of my Destiny,
But pliant as the Torrent flows,
Receive my Course implicitly
—having still the honour to be
Gentlemen & Ladies
Your most humble Servt.
An Old Woman—.
The destiny of the book (traveling the remainder of its days in a trunk) and the destiny of the “old woman” writer seem intertwined, with the use of the first person (“my destiny,” “my Course”) applying equally well to book or author. Piozzi ultimately suggests that she will not fight for or turn angry at the book’s reception. But the fact of her age was given the last word, whether as apology or justification.
When she wrote this address, Piozzi presumably still had hope that the manuscript would see print. She showed it to her friend the writer and critic Edward Mangin in 1815. In his memoir of Piozzi, published in 1833, Mangin reports being impressed with “Lyford Redivivus” as “learned.” As we saw in the introduction, he believed it to have “much information, ably compressed,” promising an “excellent popular volume,” though his subsequent praise is damningly faint. He writes that Piozzi “was … seventy-five; and I naturally complimented her, not only on the work in question, but [on] the amazing beauty and variety of her handwriting.” Though he presented extracts from the manuscript to a London publisher, they “could not come to an arrangement” (14). Despite—or perhaps because of—her inability to find a publisher, Piozzi never forgot “Lyford Redivivus.” Several months before her death, she refers to it in a letter to Fellowes, asking him, “Do you remember the Name Book? It ended with Zenobia” and tells him a story about a local woman with that name (Letters 6: 477).
Anticipating and even poking fun at the supposed garrulity of old women, Piozzi’s “Lyford” attempts to hold together the categories old woman and writer at a time when this was no easy task. It seems clear simply from the titles of her anonymous published and unpublished late works that Piozzi’s self-concept as an aging woman affected how she approached her authorship and how she expected others to perceive it. Her embracing a stereotype about talkative old women may be seen as an act of self-pitying capitulation, but it is also possible to read it as an act of resistance or, barring that, sassiness. In “Lyford,” Piozzi was not just replaying the achievements of her youth. She was trying to add to them, perhaps realizing that she faced an uphill battle because, as an author, she had already been packed away in the proverbial trunk in the minds of many.
Imagining Piozzi Past Her Prime
It was not a personal foible that led Piozzi to mention her age in tandem with her authorship. Reviewers of her last signed publication, too, had commented on her age. Retrospection was dubbed by the Critical Review “a series of dreams by an old lady.”14 The London Review suggests that Retrospection failed because Piozzi grew old. It begins by describing the portrait of Piozzi included as the book’s frontispiece: “The portrait is not what was once the gay, the sprightly, the admired Mrs. Thrale, nor yet the maturer features of Signora Piozzi. … Yet, after every allowance for the depredations of time, we cannot discover in the plate before us the likeness of anything, but of a cunning looking woman, with enormous large eyes and nose, wrapt up in a non descript dress. The work itself is subject to the same animadversion.”15 We might see in this comment what Jill Campbell has identified as “men’s gleefully horrified rejection of the figure of the aging woman” in eighteenth-century culture.16 Piozzi’s reviewers made it clear that they thought she failed as an author because she was no longer “herself”; she was past her prime, in body as on the page.
Despite such responses, Piozzi did not step down, whether as an author or as a member of the literati. She remained in the public eye enough to become fodder for periodical gossip, particularly when she forged a friendship with a 27-year-old struggling actor, in her capacity as an octogenarian theater aficionado. In 1819, while living in Bath, Piozzi met William Augustus Conway, and the two became fast friends. Over the next two years, Piozzi wrote him devoted letters; befriended his mother; helped him navigate the Bath theater scene; unsuccessfully tried to forward his engagement to a young woman of her acquaintance; and, depending on which account you believe, developed feelings for him of an ambiguous and potentially romantic nature.
During her lifetime, rumors circulated about their relationship, some intimating that she was going to be married to the actor.17 But it was not until 1843 that the Piozzi-Conway episode was widely publicized in print. Since then, it has featured prominently in any discussion, however brief, of her late life. In the American Cyclopedia (1875), a two-paragraph entry tells readers that Piozzi “survived her second husband, and in the latter part of her life became attached to the actor William A. Conway.”18 In this description, Conway is given the virtual status of a third husband. As anyone who knows Piozzi’s life history must recognize, the Conway episode was hardly the first time Piozzi’s love life was scrutinized and seen as beyond the pale. She was subject to such imputations when she married Piozzi. But the idea of her so-called love letters, written at nearly 80 years old, became fixed in the nineteenth-century public imagination long after it was capable of being shocked by her middle-aged second marriage to a Catholic musician.
It appears there was some knowledge of Piozzi’s letters to Conway in the decades following her death, perhaps in the form of manuscript circulation. In an 1838 letter to her brother, the novelist Jane Porter acknowledges that Piozzi’s old age has been a recent topic of their epistolary conversation: “You tell me a sad humbling tale of female absurdity in the narrative of poor superannuated Mrs. Piozzi, and her preposterous correspondence. Alas, for the weaknesses of human nature and particularly of old age, when once the reins [sic] is yielded to any Fancy of the Heart unbefitting the term of life!”19 Speculating that Piozzi was driven by an evil spirit or had gone insane, Porter concludes, “In this view I regard poor old Mrs. Piozzi’s calamitous Fancy for Conway” (KU MS 197). Porter, who does not seem to have seen the letters herself, believes that they should have been destroyed, both for Piozzi’s sake and for the sake of old women: “For the honour of our sex and the respectability of Venerable age, I regret that such letters have been preserved. If they were in Conway’s possession after her death, in Gratitude to a memory, which, (even in folly) had bestowed so much to him, he ought to have destroyed them.—And, if accident had thrown them subsequently into any other hands, reverence for the one who had once been the friend of our great moralist Dr. Johnson, and pity for the infirmities of Human age, should have withheld them from being shown to other eyes; should have determined the possessor to make an end of them.” The letters, however, were not destroyed. Somehow, they came into the possession of an American woman, and apparently, without her permission, some of them were shoddily published. The story of their provenance has not been fully discovered.
Portrait of Hester Lynch Piozzi, included as the frontispiece in Retrospection (1801)
The pamphlet Love Letters of Mrs. Piozzi, Written When She Was Eighty to William Augustus Conway (1843) was published by an anonymous editor whose identity remains unknown.20 Called “a literary fraud” and an unsolved mystery, the pamphlet included seven letters from Piozzi to Conway.21 Surprisingly, given the Piozzi-Conway relationship’s later notoriety, the pamphlet at first appears to have received little notice. One especially negative review appeared in the Athenaeum, which asserts, “If we lay aside all consideration of the relative ages of the parties, the letters may fairly enough be called ‘Love Letters.’ We doubt, however, whether Mrs. Piozzi was ever in love—she had not the heart enough—she was a weak, vain, foolish woman.”22 The reviewer concludes that it was Piozzi who was “a far cleverer actor” and that “she played her part to admiration” (259). Why she would want purely to act such a lover’s part is unclear.
The “love letters” came forcefully into the public eye with the appearance of Abraham Hayward’s Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (1861).23 Hayward repeated the hearsay about Piozzi and Conway, wavering from one edition to the next as to whether she was innocently maternal or scandalously randy. The 1843 pamphlet came to the attention of the then-owner of the letters, Mrs. E. F. Ellet. Ellet published a short piece in the Athenaeum, alleging that the pamphlet included “altered passages” and had “garbled and distorted” the letters.24 She reported that she had in her possession 100 letters from Piozzi to Conway, which she offered for publication. Just a handful of them, however, were printed thereafter.
Ellet’s essay and reviews of the Hayward volume set the stage for decades of debate about Piozzi’s late life. Of the many things in Hayward’s collection that could have caught reviewers’ notice, most focused unrelentingly on the matter of Conway. The Knickerbocker’s reviewer proclaims the Conway episode an example of Piozzi’s character “we never heard before.”25 The Edinburgh Review called Piozzi’s feelings for Conway “a last belle passion.”26 The Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reviewer concluded that in her old age Piozzi had become “sufficiently fantastic now and then almost to warrant the silly imputation of renewed love-making, with the handsome young actor Conway.”27 But not all Victorian reviewers and essayists believed the claims of the 1843 pamphleteer. The National Review thought the letters harmless and concluded that “it was not that there was any thing to blame in Mrs. Piozzi” but twice noted that she “made herself ridiculous” in “extreme old age.”28 A review from the Examiner agrees with Hayward that “a relation of warm friendship … is of every day occurrence between youth and age that is not crabbed.”29 That reviewer normalizes the friendship by noting that “with reversal of the ages and the sexes the same thing occurred also in the strong friendship of [Piozzi’s] girlhood for her preceptor, Dr. Collier” (“Hayward’s Mrs. Piozzi” 121).
Perhaps because of its ability to titillate readers, commentary on Piozzi and Conway persisted. Dutton Cook’s article in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1881) gave it extended treatment, concluding that “those can best decide [whether Piozzi wrote love letters to him] who know how octogenarian ladies of vivid fancy write when they are in love, or when addicted … to the expression of their admiration and friendship in exaggerated terms.”30 Percival Merritt’s The True Story of the So-Called Love Letters of Mrs. Piozzi (1927) put together all of the pieces then available about the Piozzi-Conway episode to argue his position “in defense of an elderly lady.” He concludes that his efforts on Piozzi’s behalf are “probably too late” because “the poison has been thoroughly disseminated.”31 The publication of the sixth and last volume of the Piozzi Letters (1817–21) makes available a greater portion of the Piozzi-Conway period’s correspondence and offers the potential, at least, to weaken the poison. Although Charles Ryskamp indicated in 1981 that some two dozen Piozzi-Conway letters “seem to be known,” the editors of The Piozzi Letters include 19 from Piozzi to Conway in their edition.32 Eight brief letters from Conway to Piozzi and two from Conway to Piozzi’s adopted son are held at the John Rylands Library (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596). The 100 Piozzi-Conway letters that Ellet advertised as having in her possession apparently do not survive. Still, the materials that are now known offer opportunities for renewed scholarly scrutiny of Piozzi’s late life, whether in its notorious or its banal aspects.
In her introduction to the Piozzi Letters, Gay Brack calls Piozzi’s relationship with Conway “a passionate friendship so controversial that its nature is still being debated” (6: 13). She further describes it as “a close relationship on the nature of which her commentators have disagreed for more than a hundred and fifty years” (21). Brack gathers her information about the relationship from John Tearle’s biography of Conway, but she promises to give full treatment to the episode in her biography-in-progress of Piozzi. Brack’s introduction notes that the Piozzi-Conway episode is open to multiple interpretations. She lists three possibilities—(1) genuine passion, (2) a wish to influence the development of a young protégé, and (3) maternal or grandmotherly protection (24)—and concludes, “The truth of Mrs. Piozzi’s final deep attachment, perhaps, contains elements of all these versions.”
For his part, William McCarthy has characterized Piozzi’s letters to Conway as expressing “intense, doting, needy enthusiasm” and their posthumous publication as having “sparked a flurry of leering innuendoes and a controversy that still occasionally flares back to life.”33 McCarthy sees Piozzi’s relationship with Conway as another example of her propensity to “mothering,” a role he views her as taking up in her interactions with Samuel Johnson, second husband Gabriel Piozzi, and adopted son Salusbury (HTP 102). McCarthy focuses on Piozzi’s admission to Conway that she had been accused by her second husband of spoiling her children and was now “trying to Spoil dear Mr Conway.” But as McCarthy later suggests, “Conway, for all he figures to her as her newest child, figures also as the man whose admiration her intellect requires, the father-uncle-tutor to whom, once again, her performances are delightful” (261). This is an interesting contention, but we might do just as well to see Piozzi not as seeking a father in Conway but as enacting a feminine version of the “father-uncle-tutor” role herself.
Piozzi’s Innovations as Mentor-Author
Piozzi’s letters to Conway apparently date from 15 June 1819 (some six months after they first made each other’s acquaintance) to 6 February 1821 (a little less than three months before her death). They demonstrate a devoted attachment, in which Piozzi most often figures herself as a surrogate mother to the actor, but they also show how important literature and her attempts to fashion him as her literary progeny were to their interactions. In the close relationships she formed with men during her last ten years of life—from Fellowes to Mangin to Conway—her main objective seems to have been finding figures who would make sure that her words would live on after her. Her renewed close friendship with Penelope Pennington (1752?–1827) is more complicated, as both seemed in league in promoting Conway’s career and happiness; after Piozzi’s death mutual friend Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) suggested that Pennington become Piozzi’s biographer.34 In short, Piozzi was cultivating not just an executor (she had already named two—Fellowes and Salusbury) but a number of posthumous literary agents. Naturally, she wanted all of them to get along. In a letter to Fellowes, she calls Conway a “Man of high Polish, general Knowledge, and best natural Abilities,” and she warns that if he doesn’t like Conway, it will vex her (Letters 6: 251).
Piozzi may have valued Conway precisely because he was appreciative of her as a literary figure, an intellectual, and an educator. Indeed, her relationship with Conway has distinctly Johnsonian overtones. She might be seen as replicating, from the other side of the partnership, some aspects of her interactions with Samuel Johnson in his later years. It may seem a stretch to compare the young Hester Thrale to the young William Conway. He was a struggling actor of uncertain birth who never married; she was a child of privilege, made “half a prodigy” by her doting parents, married to a man who apparently did not appreciate her passion for poetry. Both Conway and the young Piozzi, however, were ambitious artists. Each had distinct advantages and impediments. Conway’s theatrical advantage, his beauty, was somewhat offset by an impediment, his great height. (The diminutive Edmund Kean allegedly refused to share the stage with Conway for fear of turning tragedy into farce [Tearle 131].) Piozzi’s advantages—her access to social circles and her ability to foster them—were also impediments, in that she became known as a “hostess,” rather than a literary figure in her own right. Her children and stepson did not follow her into a life of arts and letters. It is possible that Piozzi sought to further Conway’s artistic ambitions at a time when she lacked another proper object, just after her own attempts at new publication with “Lyford Redivivus” had been stymied. In her arena of greatest influence, the arts, Conway would benefit from her patronage. In one of his surviving letters, Conway himself refers to her as his “revered Patroness” (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596). If Piozzi styled herself Conway’s Johnson, it was as his chief booster and cheerleader.
Conway was never a caretaker for Piozzi. If anything, she once again desired to be one for him. But he did appear to enjoy the company of this much older woman. Perhaps it was because of her access to elite cultural circles, her connections to literary and theatrical luminaries of a bygone era, or her willingness to take him seriously. Piozzi appreciates Conway’s youth, his beauty (she calls him “the handsomest Man in England” [Letters 6: 324]), and—most of all—his promise as an actor. He seemed to put her in mind of her own bloom and offered her the opportunity to exercise her powers as a mentor. She wanted something out of Conway—not the least of which appears to have been his devotion. But her letters also suggest that she was trying his willingness to carry on her literary name. She refers to herself as his “old woman” “companion,” for when he prefers “chat to reading” (337). She writes of him as if he were a divine gift: “You were sent at 27 years old to calm your headlong Monitress and Manager at Thrice your age,” she tells him (335). But Piozzi frequently tries to give him something, too—the wherewithal to succeed on the stage and to believe in his own dramatic powers. She writes, “My whole Desire is to do you good in Some Way; any Way; May it but be in my Power! either to assist or amuse You” (308).
In a letter written over the course of a week in June 1819, Piozzi jokes that she has created “a sort of pamphlet” rather than an epistle (Letters 6: 282) from his “oldest and newest Friend” (280). Later, she describes this letter as “my long Letter sewed in blue Paper 13 Pages long” (289). She begins by praising Conway for his model letter to her, which she has just received. She frequently tells him that she longs to see him or to hear from him. When she contemplates the months until their next meeting, she concludes “’tis 20 years till then” (279). Her maid, she says, warns her, “Why, Madam! You will not live to see Mr. Conway again, if you go on so.” She writes effusively of her love for him, writing of her wish that “all may be constrained to admire You as I do; altho’ to love You so, is quite Impossible; as no one knows your Worth—and your Inestimable Value as it is known by Your truly and tenderly attached / H : L: Piozzi” (281). Her subsequent letters complain of his not having written, and she wonders, “shall We meet again? where when, and how? Oh I am grown so weary, it seems as if I was quite dead indeed” (330). These examples are typical of the tone of separation and loss in the letters and of her wonderment at his fine qualities.
Piozzi also writes that she considers herself “in the Light of his injured Mother” and assures him “no Parent could feel more than I have done, and still continue to do on your Account” (Letters 6: 281). Later, when Piozzi befriends Conway’s mother, Mrs. [Susanna] Rudd, news of Conway comes through her. In less than a year, Piozzi calls him her “Youngest adopted Child” (358). And in what may be her last letter to him, she writes, “And so God bless my true and honourable Friend—who will I hope live long and happily; and die 60 Years hence in the Arms of his own H: L: P—The Daughter I shall perhaps one Day embrace” (493). An acquaintance of Conway’s wrote, many years after his death, that Piozzi’s “letters touching affairs of the heart … must have been deemed [by the actor] the offspring of dotage.”35 Although the letters show that Piozzi’s romantic and maternal feelings are jumbled, they do not suggest senility. Nevertheless, to quote the passages above and to rehearse the anecdotes surrounding them compounds the errors of the 1843 pamphlet. It takes Piozzi’s high-flown rhetoric out of context and minimizes the complexities of the relationship that are revealed in other parts of her correspondence.
In the few sustained studies to date on the Piozzi-Conway correspondence, critics have downplayed the wide variety of ideas and lessons that she covers in her letters. Nothing is too small for her notice. In one letter, she writes to him, “I hope you eat honey for Breakfast” (Letters 6: 308) and directs him to avoid “all strong Liquors.” After he has been ill, she advises him, “live quiet, and drink Asses Milk” (333). For his part, Conway seems to have taken her advice, on occasion at least. He writes of his throat ailment not worsening “owing chiefly to the frequent application of the Gargle [Piozzi] was good enough to prescribe” (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596). But most of the information she passes on to him consists of weightier fare. She reports in a letter from October 1819, “Dearest Mr. Conway has sometimes in his partial Way asked me how I came to know this and that?” (Letters 6: 331). In her letter of February 1820, she tells him “that you keep your Mind engaged by public and political Events delights my Heart” and follows up with remarks on Parry’s expedition to the Arctic (368). She seems to relish communicating anecdotes and conversing with him about current events.
Of course, there is much exchange about the theater generally and about his own career specifically—which part he has played, which parts other actors have played, her assessments of performances and actors of earlier years and of the present day. These stories are told with an eye to encouraging him, comparing him positively to all rivals. She tells him, “You have been a luckless Wight my admirable Friend, but Amends will one Day be made for you, even in this World I know; I feel it will” (Letters 6: 280). She then recounts a story about her second husband’s difficulties in being cruelly treated by friends and relations, likening their plights (80). In another letter, she assures him that “Accomplishment is at hand” and that he will soon enjoy great success on the stage (289). Piozzi several times refers to Conway in the same breath as her previous favorites, once coupling an assessment of “worthy Sam: Johnson and Augustus Conway” (308).
She also sprinkles quotations throughout her letters to Conway, using authors ranging from Dryden and Homer to Shakespeare and, frequently, Johnson. Last, but not least, she often refers to her own writings. In the “pamphlet” letter alone, she makes specific reference to British Synonymy, to an annotation she has made in a copy she has given him of Wraxall’s Memoirs, and to a reference she cannot find in Retrospection, because the book does not have an index. As she laments to him, Retrospection is “completely useless for want of an Index. If [it ever goes] through another Edition after my Death, somebody will put an Index to them” (Letters 6: 282). Though this may read as a kind of hint to Conway, as well as a hope that her death will occasion a revival of her writings, no one has yet taken Piozzi up on the index or even on another edition of Retrospection.
Piozzi continually gives Conway direct and indirect reading assignments. She again quotes from Retrospection in a letter from November 1819 and points him to a specific chapter (Letters 6: 349). In January 1821, she advises Conway to see the biographical sketch she has written for him and “see Thraliana too” (482), which she tells him she has with her. Some evidence remains to suggest he took these reading assignments seriously. In one letter, he speaks of his desire to reperuse her Anecdotes of “the immortal Johnson” and “ventures to solicit the loan of them, for a few days” (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596). Another letter refers to his return of her volume of Dryden, thanking her for its loan. He also discourses with her on their respective opinions of Sir Walter Scott, concluding that he “perfectly agrees … with Mrs. Piozzi, respecting the temperate heat of the Northern Critic.” An additional piece of evidence that Conway took Piozzi’s reading assignments seriously is that he kept copies of her single-authored works and her annotated works by others until his death. (He apparently committed suicide by jumping off a ship near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828. An acquaintance described him as having suffered from a “melancholy” “nervous temperament,” with a “fixed reserve” that was “beyond the reach of medical skill” [Francis 248–49].) Several of Piozzi’s works and her literary gifts to him, along with her letters, were in his possession when he died and were sold at auction.
During her late life, Piozzi was perfectly clear about her project to make Conway know her as an author. She ends the pamphlet letter with the worry that “Mr. Conway will have had enough of Mrs. Piozzi and her Writings—Print and Manuscript. I will not plague You again God knows when” (Letters 6: 284). Untrue to her word, however, Piozzi starts another letter to him just one day later, writing “And did I actually know my Heart so ill, as to protest that I would write no more for Weeks or Months to come?” (288). She responds to a letter from him, in which he apparently encourages her to continue her education of him, or, at the least, to continue her literary bequests. She writes, “And so you want more Books, more Manuscript Stuff too” (289). In October 1819, she writes, “Live long and happily, and love my Letters; I wonder when You will Be sick of them: but I shall release you soon” (333).
She did not send him only books and letters. In August of 1819, she gave him a gold repeating watch, designed as her “last Present,” along with a verse about time and tender emotion. But books seem to be her most common gift to Conway, whether volumes she has just finished reading or those valuable and unique. She writes in January 1820 of sending him Leslie’s Truth of Christianity Demonstrated and Spence’s Anecdotes (1820), offering to “bind them for You beautifully if you will read them” (Letters 6: 360). In June 1820, she writes that she has not had a letter from him since April and complains that he “will not employ Three Fingers for five Minutes to give me unspeakable Pleasure”; she tells of her intention to give him “a French Rasselas given to Doctor Johnson by the Translator—and bestowed on me by the Immortal S. J. half a Century ago” (393). Regretting that she does not have means to serve Conway further, she writes, “I can give you that” and tells him that she will leave the book for him with his mother. When she did send the Rasselas, she also gave to him her copy of The Percy Anecdotes (1820). Making reference to Rasselas, she says it made her think of her own verses, which she also sent to him—a poem about time, death, and eternity (398). Time figures prominently in her interactions with the actor, whether past, present, or future.
Piozzi linked the past to the present through Conway in imaginative ways. In addition to professing her own love for him, she assured him that Johnson would have loved him. She writes: “Dr. Johnson said You know, that Admiration is a short-lived Passion, I have not found it so; but then We never knew a Mortal who could heap Fewel on the Flame as You have done—he would have loved my Conway—not as I do, because no one but Mrs. Rudd can do so; but he would have praised and petted, and made every one else—appear as if sensible to Your Merits” (Letters 6: 408). In a triangle of Piozzi’s design, Johnson oversees their relationship. But rather than imagining Conway as her Johnson replacement, Piozzi understood herself as the mediating mentor and Conway as the would-be protégé.
We know that Piozzi inscribed an autobiography, which she titled “The Abridgement,” in Conway’s copy of her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789). It is not the only time she completed a brief autobiography, but it is, perhaps, the latest one she produced. She inscribed that copy of Observations with the following note: “These Books do not in any wise belong to me; they are the property of William Augustus Conway … who left them to my care, for purpose of putting notes, when he quitted Bath, May 14, 1819 … Hester Lynch Piozzi writes this for fear lest her death happening before his return, these books might be confounded among others in her study.”36 Piozzi seems to have considered writing out her life for Conway as a last act performed for him. As Terri Premo has argued, “Autobiographies in old age often tell us more about the writer’s unique old-age perspective than about specific events in life,” and Piozzi’s bears this out.37 She makes direct references to Conway in the account, addressing him as a reader in multiple passages. She even pokes fun of her enterprise, writing, “poor H. L. P. turns egoist at eighty, and tells her own adventures” (“Original” 616). She ends the autobiography with a tribute to Conway: “Your talents roused, your offered friendship opened my heart to enjoyment. Oh! never say hereafter that the obligations are on your side. Without you, dullness, darkness, stagnation of every faculty would have enveloped and extinguished all the powers of hapless H. L. P.” (622).
Later, when Piozzi moved from Bath to Penzance to cut down on her expenses, she wrote to ask Conway to visit her. She positively discouraged her adopted son from coming, writing a friend that she should be “sorry” if Salusbury comes but would “rejoyce” if the “same fancy” would take Conway “by the brain pan” (Letters 6: 426). She put pressure directly on Conway: “And I wonder if you recollect a certain Friend of mine, named Augustus; who said in Camden Place A.D. 1818; I could be happy in a Prison, with dear Mrs. Piozzi and her Anecdotes. … Come here in the Winter and Try 1821—Imprisonment with H: L: P. and Her Castle by the Seaside” (416). Though Conway never came, Piozzi saw him several months later when she returned to Clifton. She died there, in what was probably one of Conway’s mother’s apartments.
Conway, in a moving letter to Piozzi’s adopted son, indicates as much. On 30 April 1821, Conway writes to Salusbury that Hester Piozzi is “so much reduced as to afford, I fear, no reasonable hope of her recovery.” He tells Sir John not to lose an instant in coming, “if you hope to see poor Mrs. Piozzi alive.” Mrs. Piozzi, Conway says, “has at present taken apartments at my Mother’s, with whom I at present reside,” at 10 Sion Row in Clifton. Conway asks that this information not be attributed to him, however: “I rely upon your honour, Sir John, never to name me as the source of your authority for setting out. My motive for addressing you is good to some, and harm to none, and I therefore stand acquitted to myself for my conduct” (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596; Letters 6: 32). Piozzi died on 2 May 1821. Despite Conway’s warning, Salusbury did not arrive until three days after her death.
Few of Conway’s letters to Piozzi appear to have survived, and one wonders if that means there were only a few. The Conway letters at the John Rylands Library in Manchester—many quite short and cryptically dated—do not allow much insight into his sense of their relationship. The letters are extremely polite, often apologetic, and unusually grateful, suggesting that, even if he is not as attached to her as she is to him, he placed a high value on knowing her. As he puts it in one letter from early in their friendship (26 Mar. 1819), “Mr. Conway is really at a loss to express in adequate terms his sense of Mrs. Piozzi’s very kind and flattering attentions to him, but though he cannot express, he feels them most strongly, and begs to offer her his sincere and heartfelt acknowledgements for the same” (H-T-P, reel 19, MS 596). Two years later, in a letter to Salusbury from 23 July 1821 (some months after Piozzi’s death), Conway thanked him for sending the books Piozzi apparently meant for him to have. He writes that they “are indeed invaluable.” Whatever the relationship was to her or to him, from what we can gather, it was one that revolved around flattering attentions on both sides and around conversations about books. Conway appears to have indulged, and perhaps even enjoyed, the attention.
Throughout her late life (indeed, throughout her life) Piozzi made eccentric choices. Like Macaulay before her, she seems not to have anticipated or to have cared about how her unconventional personal life would be judged. At the same time, like Macaulay, Piozzi appeared to care deeply about what would become of her reputation as an author. Instead of working to overturn the ill effects of negative reviews, Piozzi tried to establish her own miniature “reading public,” demonstrating a kind of creative ingenuity. When Fellowes could not find a publisher for “Lyford,” when she was stymied in her attempts to reach a mass audience, she continued her now-famous private writing, in the form of letters and journals, virtually to her last breath. It was through these vehicles—looming large among them the letters to Conway—that Piozzi served as her own literary agent, one reader at a time. She may have assumed that these readers were well placed enough to influence others after her death.
More proof of this assumption is a large Bible, inscribed to Conway’s mother, now housed at the British Library, which features Piozzi’s characteristic marginalia throughout.38 She opens the text with this comment: “It was an imperfect Copy bought cheap for Love of the Prints; in 1819 & intrusted to my Care; who restored the Text & wrote Notes to it, for Love of the possessor and her Heirs: not those of H: L: P.”39 Piozzi makes predictions for the Second Coming, reference to historical and religious works, and reference to her own published and unpublished writings. That she thought the book valuable because of her marginalia is evident. The Bible itself was an “imperfect Copy” “bought cheap.” Still, Piozzi believed it worth protecting, indicating that it ought not to be passed down through her own heirs.
As Piozzi desired, the Bible became the property of the Rudd-Conways. The 1830 will of Mrs. Rudd stipulated that it be given to her grandson, Frederick Bartlett Conway (ca. 1819–74), illegitimate son and heir of her late (also illegitimate) son, William Augustus Conway.40 Whether Piozzi knew of her darling Conway’s progeny is unclear; there is no mention of his birth in her letters or papers. That she assumed, through evidence in this Bible and elsewhere, that the Rudd-Conways would carry on her good name to posterity, however, seems obvious. As one critic put it, though Piozzi’s marginalia show her “pursuing her own train of thought she is also mindful of her audience, the reader who will be reading this Bible with her even after she is gone” (Jackson, Readers 182). Perhaps Piozzi hoped that these readers would “restore” her, when her reputation was “intrusted” to their care. Her choices were not entirely misplaced. Frederick Conway, too, became an actor, and his children enjoyed modest success on the stage and in the theater. But Piozzi’s connection to the Conways kept her in the public eye in ways more damaging than salubrious.
To some, the fact of Piozzi’s old age itself should have protected her from venomous posthumous response. An 1862 reviewer wrongly concluded that her status as a granddame would “at once [disarm] criticism, and [leave] few contemporaries able to criticize” (“Lives” 423). On the contrary, Piozzi became either a touchstone for or a laughingstock in conversations about old women dancing or about May–December romances. Chivalrous catering to her old age did not carry the day, and commentary on Piozzi was profoundly mixed. The Christian Examiner (1861) concluded, “Piozzi can hardly be treated worse by posterity than she was during her life.”41 The St. James’ Magazine (1861) argued that Piozzi “has been too hastily lynched by posterity.”42 But for every Piozzi defender, there was a detractor. An 1861 essay in the Atlantic Monthly held that “the last forty years of her life were not as charming as the first,” describing her as sprightly and good natured, though sad, feeble, undignified, filled with pretense, and lacking freshness (“Original” 615, 622). But perhaps the worst treatment she faced was from those who thought her life and writings were forgettable. One such reviewer concluded that “Mrs. Piozzi is not a woman … who merits much posthumous blame or praise. … She is, in short, one of those persons of whom we like to read, but whom we do not care to remember” (“Memoirs” 392).
Piozzi has been remembered, and rightly so, but how she is remembered is just as crucial as that she is remembered as an old woman. We ought not, wittingly or unwittingly, repeat the nineteenth-century tradition of caricaturing her last years as those of a shallow, happy-go-lucky woman (the “birthday party” Piozzi) or as a would-be seducer in her dotage (the Conway episode). The shallow, happy-go-lucky distortion is typified by an 1861 reviewer for the New Monthly Magazine, who offered a dissenting though apologetic opinion: “Though [Piozzi] dared to give a ball at eighty,” the reviewer opined, “her old age was beautiful.”43 Throughout this chapter I have taken issue with commentary on Piozzi casting her as an aged seductress. In addition to potentially undoing these caricatures, then, renewed attention to Piozzi’s old age allows us the potential to understand her writing career more fully, whether or not she was reaching a mass audience.
Piozzi may have used her interactions with Conway to extend her literary powers to the next generation, during a period when she was unable to find receptive readers through former channels. Needless to say, if this was one of her aims, the plan backfired—at least in part. Long after both had died, Conway indeed kept Piozzi’s name before the public, but in none of the ways she might have hoped. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the Piozzi-Conway episode served to characterize Piozzi as an irrational and self-involved old woman and to imagine Conway as her victim. What this chapter proposes is that we might see Piozzi’s befriending Conway as an innovative and resourceful choice, rather than as a desperate act. Viewed in this way, the friendship’s contours mirror many of the other late-life activities in which Piozzi engaged. Piozzi, according to James Clifford, would “talk, talk, talk away the last years of her long and active life.”44 We might rather say that she wrote, wrote, wrote, with an eye to ensuring that her writings would be remembered.
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