CHAPTER TWO
“Fancy’s Shrine”
Lady Miller’s Batheaston Poetical Assemblies
Anna Seward participated in a local poetic coterie and circulated poems in manuscript, but she did not publish in print until 1780, a transitional time for poetry, publishing, and the professionalization of writing (Barnard, Anna Seward 110, 122). In this chapter, I examine the poems Seward chose to publish in her collected works (1809) from among those she presented to her first, semi-public audience, the guests at Lady Anna Miller’s Batheaston salons. These poems, although neglected when not maligned by later critics, demonstrate that Seward entered the public marketplace as a polished poet, ready to please her anticipated readers. They position her as a poet skilled in the century’s principles and techniques, ready to brave contemporary professional criticism. Seward’s decision to compete in Lady Miller’s poetry contests before seeing her work into print, besides illustrating the nature and values of her poetry, invites us to ponder her relationship to the rapidly evolving profession of writing. I offer several explanations for Seward’s choice to begin her career in Batheaston rather than in London. Seward’s career can be seen as a next-generation version of Alexander Pope’s, which, as Margaret Ezell has reminded us, was typical of a poet’s trajectory in the early eighteenth century in that his poems circulated both in manuscript and print (Social Authorship, 60–83). As Ezell also observes, provincial writers were slow to adopt print publication, often preferring manuscript publication not because they were less skilled but because they were wary of the commercial context or were interested in an interactive readership, among other reasons (121). Seward opted to share her early verse in manuscript as well as to perform them at Bath-easton, contexts that informed her poems’ structures, content, and sounds. Once she was ready to commit her poems to print publication, she could reasonably hope that she might achieve national recognition, a topic I take up in the next chapter, owing to the wide circulation of books and periodicals.1 Seward’s career illuminates the distinction between amateurism and professionalism in an era when the latter did not necessarily connote a certain financial condition, gender, or social position.2 Finally, my readings of Seward’s Batheaston poems show how their models, structures, and sound effects challenge the twenty-first-century reader while demonstrating the national concerns of provincial literary spheres, such as that at Batheaston, and Seward’s professional perspective as she used patronage for nonfinancial motives.
Whether viewed as an “amateur” or a “professional,” Seward cherished an exalted notion of the poet and consequently held fellow writers to exacting standards.3 In doing so, she participated in a national trend: as Mary Poovey observes in Genres of the Credit Economy, the late eighteenth century witnessed efforts to discriminate between “Literature” and other forms of writing (285–335). Poovey concentrates on William Wordsworth’s campaign in the following century to convince the public that poetry had an aesthetic value discernible only to elite readers. Paradoxically, however, as Poovey notes, Wordsworth’s literary reputation depended on the wide sales of inexpensive editions of his poetry (290–98). But Seward’s generation was already entangled in such questions as whether the best poetry required critical elucidation and whether a broad audience indicated lack of merit or the reverse. Ezell cites the vogue for “series” of publications said to constitute the “classics” but often reflecting the mere availability of certain texts as a phenomenon that has persuaded too many succeeding critics to accept eighteenth-century publishers’ decisions regarding the British “canon” (Social Authorship 136–39). The very identity of the poet was in question: should such a writer be “professional,” regularly producing income-yielding volumes, or a leisured gentleman or lady, writing only to satisfy the muses with no thought of payment? In this chapter, I observe the growing split between “professional” and “amateur” writing characteristic of Seward’s lifetime. I also note the confusion evident in later critical responses to Seward’s poems, produced for an eighteenth-century readership prior to the decisive changes Poovey documents but subject to post-Romantic definitions of literary value and poetic identity. By retrieving the context in which Seward made professional decisions, I am responding to Paula Backscheider’s call, in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, for scholars to pay serious attention to women’s careers. As Backscheider notes, Seward’s is a prime example of a career that integrated serious writing with social and domestic responsibilities while “demonstrating more sustained dedication than we find in the lives of many of the canonical men” (25). Backscheider states what my chapter confirms and Poovey’s argument supports: Seward wrote in an environment hospitable to women poets, but later critics failed to acknowledge the shape and terms of her career (Backscheider 24–26).
Seward’s first biographer credited Lady Miller with initiating Seward’s career. Walter Scott observed that “Miss Seward’s poetical powers appear to have been dormant, or to have been only sparingly exercised, until her acquaintance with Lady Miller, whose fanciful and romantic institution at Bath Easton, was then the subject of public attention” (Seward, Poetical Works 1:xi). It was, he adds, “the applause of this selected circle” that “gave Miss Seward courage to commit some of her essays to the press” (1:xi). Margaret Ashmun, Seward’s only twentieth-century biographer, described the Batheaston assemblies less charitably in 1931. Unfortunately, she complained, Seward was “too much of a lady, too much hampered by her sense of social values, to burst boldly forth and seek a free channel for her talents as her friend Helen Williams was to do” (72). Ashmun of course ignored Seward’s circumstances, which would have made a quest like Williams’s or Mary Wollstonecraft’s for London employment unnecessary, if not impossible. Still, Ashmun concludes that at least Seward’s “connection with the Bath-Easton group, ridiculous as they may have been, gave her a new interest in life, and fixed within her the resolve to write, in spite of all opposition” (73).
Her characterization of Lady Miller’s assemblies as “ridiculous” no doubt derives in part from Johnson’s comment that an eminent acquaintance who participated in her contests “was a blockhead for his pains” (Boswell 2:336–37). But another source was Ruth Hesselgrave’s ironic account of the Millers and their activities, from which Ashmun drew her information. Lady Miller was doomed like Seward to a biographer who, like numerous scholars of the twentieth century’s first three decades, found something intrinsically comical in the literary activities of gentlemen and ladies, especially ladies, of the eighteenth century. According to Hesselgrave, it would have been difficult indeed for Seward or anyone else to emerge with credit from the Batheaston assemblies, simply due to the nature of the hosts and their misguided effort to establish gatherings both social and literary, resembling the bluestocking salons of London, at Bath. Today, scholars such as Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg have proposed that indeed Lady Miller’s parties were provincial equivalents of the bluestockings’ receptions (5). Seward certainly believed she had chosen in them a viable alternative to the capital’s literary gatherings. But many others before and since have deemed Lady Miller a distant imitator of the London hostesses and their conversation parties. A brief review of Lady Miller’s life, shorn of sarcastic comments, may therefore be helpful.
John Miller was an Irish gentleman who in 1765 married Anna Riggs, the heiress of Irish estates but born and raised in England. The couple wed in Bath and soon afterward purchased Bath-Easton Villa, situated on the Avon outside the city. Expensive renovations led them to retrench by moving abroad for two years in 1770. They returned from their grand tour bearing, among other artifacts, an urn excavated at Frascati, earlier known as Tusculum, the site of Cicero’s villa. Anna Miller placed the urn on a pedestal in the bow window of her drawing room, where by 1774 it inspired her invitations to fortnightly morning assemblies at which breakfast was served before the performance of a literary ritual. All the guests had been encouraged to compose poems, which were rolled up and placed in the urn. Most brought their poems with them to the assemblies, but some who could not attend sent poems nonetheless. After everyone had arrived and enjoyed conversation and refreshments, a young lady drew the poems from the urn and each was read twice, first by a random gentleman guest and then by the poem’s author if present. Afterward, all the gentlemen withdrew to deliberate before awarding three myrtle wreaths and declaring one of the three poems so honored the best of that week’s submissions. Mrs. Miller herself—by 1778, Lady Miller, her husband having been granted a baronetcy in Ireland—presented the wreaths and fastened them into the hair of either the poet or if the poet was male that of his spouse or choice of female guest (Hesselgrave 22–26). She then kept the poems before choosing a sufficient number for publication in a series of anthologies she titled Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath, the proceeds of which supported a poor-relief fund headed by her husband. The volumes appeared in 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1781 before Lady Miller’s sudden death in June 1781 interrupted preparation of a fifth anthology (Hesselgrave 35).
Even if Hesselgrave’s tone is jocular, she does emphasize the tremendous success of the Millers’ assemblies among fashionable visitors to Bath. Because of the anthologies and publication of the prize poems in periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine as well as reports in the equivalents of today’s gossip columns, the Batheaston assemblies became famous throughout England. While many observers expressed disdain for the upstart Millers, their pretentious salon, and the inevitable mediocrity of most poems submitted on short notice to comply with Lady Miller’s requested rhymes or themes, there was never a shortage of guests crowding the villa’s small but elegant rooms. An early twentieth-century French writer, Alfred Barbeau, deduced that selectivity was perhaps the chief reason for Lady Miller’s success: “For the entrée at Batheaston, rank, or a certain degree of fame, were almost indispensable, and in any case, an unblemished reputation. The lady of the house weeded out her visitors with extreme care, and very probably desire to be admitted to an exclusive circle contributed quite as much as the affectation of culture to establish and maintain the success of these extraordinary gatherings” (qtd. in Sutro 11–12). Stripped of irony, the accounts recall six years of levees with sufficient cachet to sustain the avid participation of most talented and well-connected visitors to Bath. Although Hesselgrave notes that such provincial success would not have translated into acceptance among the same society in London, Lady Miller, an obscure Irish baronet’s wife from Shropshire, must have gloried in the sensational success of her levees among the titled and talented who came when they visited Bath. Her guests included the duchesses of Northumberland and Devonshire and writers such as Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, T. S. Whalley, Christopher Anstey, and Edward Jerningham.
Lady Miller’s credentials for sponsoring a literary salon were three volumes of travel memoirs she had published after her tour in the form of letters to her mother. (Her mother was a notoriously unpolished woman worthy of a Burney novel—indeed, she was caricatured by Burney when she visited Batheaston.) Lady Miller’s memoirs could make a claim to novelty, partly because they contained meticulous records of art holdings but also because of the comparative rarity of a female-authored guidebook. Unfortunately, what impressed some as the records of a woman with panache struck others as pretentious and unsophisticated.4 Although the memoirs were a more substantial literary production than those of London hostesses Frances Boscawen or Elizabeth Vesey, they did not establish her credentials among the elite. The irresistible conclusion is that Lady Miller offended primarily by her too-obvious pursuit of literary and social success, an offense compounded by her husband’s willingness to appear merely as his wife’s dutiful assistant. Mrs. Delany called her “conceited” (Hesselgrave 6) and Burney “mock-important” (Hesselgrave 10). While the ton was quite willing to divert itself at her villa, it would never have embraced a woman who clearly did not know how to cloak her self-confidence or ambition in a properly feminine manner, despite the exclusivity and decorum of her assemblies.
Critical mockery of Lady Miller’s assemblies might ironically have promoted Seward’s attachment to Batheaston and its hostess. An exclusive drawing-room company engaged in literary pastimes would have suited Seward’s decorum and her apparent preference for taking incremental steps toward print. Since Batheaston was famous before Seward made the Millers’ acquaintance, it must have seemed a viable alternative to the celebrated London salons. The London bluestocking salons may seem to us a more natural environment for her debut, but their connection with fellow Lichfieldian Johnson may have discouraged Seward from seeking to participate there. Although some of the same people, such as Burney and David Garrick, appeared at both Batheaston and in the bluestockings’ drawing rooms, Batheaston’s morning entertainment was less formal than, for example, Elizabeth Montagu’s rigid conversational semicircle. Lady Miller discouraged embarrassing or potentially offensive poems, setting a gentler tone than Seward might have imagined she would encounter in Johnsonian circles. Seward disliked Johnson’s harsh criticism of other writers, publishing after his death her opinion of his “spleen and envy; potent … to shroud the fairest claims of rival excellence” (Letters 1:13). Seward may have decided not to expose her yet-unpublished verse to him or his coterie, opting instead to join a group replete with admired writers but where Johnson scorned to appear. Her attendance eventually yielded lifelong friendships with writers such as Whalley, whose Edwy and Edilda (1779) had won not only Seward’s but the reading public’s enthusiastic approval. Because the Millers’ gatherings led to friendships with the Whalleys and Hayleys, Seward would have been impressed not only with the propriety of Batheaston’s “fanciful and romantic institution” but also with its capacity to attract highly esteemed writers. Although not in the capital, Batheaston nevertheless hosted some authors with national reputations, a respectable audience in a domestic setting noted for encouragement.
Teresa Barnard believes that Seward entered her first Batheaston contest at the urging of Anna Rogers Stokes, a poet with whom she collaborated after their meeting in 1778 (Anna Seward 110). According to Barnard, the 1770s were a miserable decade for Seward owing primarily to repeated confrontations with her parents over her attachment to the married John Saville. Feuding with her parents and ostracized by many former acquaintances, Seward solaced herself by writing verse, often in collaboration with Erasmus Darwin, Francis Mundy, and Rogers Stokes, and engaging in manuscript exchanges (Barnard, Anna Seward 110). Barnard’s account confirms that Seward’s entrance into the literary marketplace via Batheaston marked her conscious passage from amateur to avowed poet. Another motive may have been to avoid not merely the literary but also the moral scrutiny of Johnson. The man who once described a close friend’s wife as a whore because she had divorced her first, abusive husband and married her lover may have been a person Seward felt uncomfortable meeting in London drawing rooms, although there is no record of Johnson’s ever making an unkind remark in her presence.
Seward may also have identified with Lady Miller’s ambition. Seward’s decision to read her verse in the drawing room of a suburban Bath villa may have been “feminine,” but her literary aspirations, signaled by the national themes of the monodies she submitted to the urn, were decidedly “masculine” in their scope. While Seward’s first submission to Lady Miller was a suitably light “Invocation of the Comic Muse,” she also premiered some of her most ambitious poems at Batheaston. Lady Miller likewise juxtaposed feminine and masculine characteristics. Her satin gowns, diamonds, and decorum were feminine, but her bold pursuit of social cachet was not. Seward’s decision to befriend Lady Miller and to take her assemblies seriously seems almost defiant in retrospect, a conscious decision to associate herself with an institution that some mocked but that provided her a refined and literate if not demanding audience. Anna Miller and Anna Seward, quite different in appearance and manners, may each have sympathized with the obstacles that confronted the other in her quest for eminence. In Borderlines, Susan J. Wolfson studies “slips at the limits of [gender] definition” in the Romantic era that correct our assumption of rigid categories, although too apparent breaches of gender decorum drew attention and ridicule (3). Wolfson describes the anxieties suffered by writers such as Maria Jane Jewsbury when she attempted to establish herself in the 1820s as a writer characterized by “manly” intelligence (79–91). Wolfson remarks that Jewsbury’s culture, much like that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, still paid homage to the ideals of feminine softness and weakness extolled by Alexander Pope in “Of the Characters of Women” (81). Seward’s and Lady Miller’s mutually supportive quests were therefore courageous in context. Seward apparently overlooked Lady Miller’s self-importance and coarse appearance, while Lady Miller embraced a guest whose dramatic readings drew a great deal of attention to herself and her verse (Ashmun 73–74). As if reversing Johnson’s tendency to confront others and to ridicule the most popular publications, Seward participated in assemblies orchestrated to encourage and praise both the experienced and amateur. As hostess of literary and musical evenings at Lichfield, Seward would have recognized the difficulties of organizing such events and would therefore have admired Lady Miller’s skill in founding and sustaining her unique “poetical amusements.”
The mockery leveled at Batheaston also fails to account for its genuine utility as poetic sponsor. Scholarship in the past twenty years, such as Dustin Griffin’s, has explored the varieties of patronage available to eighteenth-century writers, ranging from political appointment to support by wealthy mentors to subscription fees. Women had little access to the first category, but laborer-poets such as Mary Leapor and Ann Yearsley found wealthy patrons, and many women poets published by subscription. A wealthy, well-connected, mature woman such as Anna Seward had no need for the financial support crucial to women such as Leapor or Yearsley. In Erasmus Darwin she had found a reader, instructor, and champion during her adolescence. She had also begun to correspond with contemporaries like Whalley whose praise sustained her efforts. But finding a critical audience outside of her small circle in Lichfield, before exposing her works through publication in London, would have been problematic. Although Habermas’s theory of the growth of a public sphere has been disputed, there is little doubt that genteel and professional men in eighteenth-century England believed themselves to be participating in the formation of national opinions when they engaged in political discussions at their clubs and coffeehouses. Taste, likewise, was fostered through critical discussions in these venues, as encouraged by Steele and Addison early in the century through their periodicals. Writers could receive not just criticism but also mutual support through clubs of like-minded individuals such as the Kit-Cats or Scriblerians. Ladies, however, were mostly confined to their tea tables, domestic rather than public spheres of influence. The bluestocking salons were devised to enable women to converse with eminent male contemporaries, ostensibly to enlarge men’s sympathies but concomitantly to grant intelligent women some share in public discourse. The salons and assemblies, where books and poems were read and discussed, gave women an opportunity both to join critical conversations and to develop their personal reputations as critics and writers. Seward herself presided over a cultured drawing room at the Lichfield Bishop’s Palace, but Lady Miller’s venue attracted many glamorous and prominent visitors whom Seward would otherwise not have met and whose approbation made her determined to appear in print. Her victories at Batheaston showed Seward that her verse appealed to the tastemakers of elite society as well as to several widely admired writers. She also made the acquaintance of many potentially important readers and supporters, another opportunity that women’s previously more confined circumstances would have rendered impossible.
Another criticism of Lady Miller’s assemblies was and remains that little inspired poetry resulted from her contests. Few poets assigned a specific set of rhyme words or a topic can produce a masterpiece in two weeks or less. Hesselgrave sniffed that “the verses produced at Batheaston cannot profitably be discussed with reference … to their literary excellence” and that nobody, with the “possible exception” of Seward, won fame through Lady Miller’s publications (53). As Marlon Ross has suggested in a discussion of Felicia Hemans, women writers were particularly disadvantaged by the prejudice against writing for contests (233). Hemans, for example, entered national contests to demonstrate her prowess, only to be dismissed for doing so by modern critics who assume no genius would ever tether her imagination to an assigned topic (233). As Ross observes, Hemans deliberately sought to prove herself and to win fame through such ventures, which were among the few ways a woman might compete with men for such recognition. He adds that many male geniuses, including William Wordsworth, wrote poems on assigned topics for patrons or as poet laureates. Ross argues for a fairer estimate of how such contests might have figured in women poets’ careers. Ross’s comments are pertinent not only in the case of national contests but even for such drawing-room competitions as Lady Miller’s, and not only for women but even for less privileged male poets. Christopher Smart, for example, began his publishing career after winning the Seatonian poetry competition at Cambridge. In his popular although outdated biography of John Keats, Robert Gittings disparages the young poet’s participation in the fifteen-minute sonnet-writing contests Leigh Hunt hosted in his parlor. “The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead” resulted from one evening’s amusement (170).5 Gittings condemns such exercises as “a dangerously domesticated attitude to adopt to poetry” (170) yet admits that Hunt’s hospitality provided invaluable encouragement and instruction to Keats at that early stage of his career (137).6 Wolfson, writing over forty years after Gittings, has described how contemporary literary critics dismissed Keats by “feminizing” his appearance and verse (243–84), efforts that evidently influenced his biographer’s wish that Keats had not invited such comments by engaging in the “domestic” verse Mellor has associated with Romantic-era women (Romanticism 11). But domestic contests profited both the “feminized” male poet and the woman poet with “masculine” ambitions. Contests may not inspire brilliant verse, but they may inspire gifted poets to attempt publication and to brave professional criticism. For Seward and Keats, such amateur recreations pushed them toward literary careers. The gratifying response to Seward’s initial Batheaston poems spurred her to compose more ambitious poems and to publish her verse. It is easy to mock contests on the assumption that all poets have adequate mentoring and ample opportunities to polish and test their skills before seeking publication. But such an assumption holds only for the privileged, usually privileged men, and ignores in any case the blurred distinction between amateur and professional writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Seward as for many other poets, contests, with their opportunities to perform and receive sociable critical feedback, were a valuable part of the continuum spanning from manuscript circulation to print.
None of her biographers specifies the number of poems Seward submitted to the urn, nor did the poet herself record a total. Seward included in her collected works four poems that won myrtle wreaths at Batheaston. Because she evidently arranged her volume with care, I examine them in the order she chose. Each poem reveals a facet of her skills as a poet versed in the trends of eighteenth-century verse as well as her skill in crafting a poem on an assigned topic for her projected audience. “Invocation of the Comic Muse” (Poetical Works 2:22–24) was Seward’s first submission (Ashmun 71), in 1778, but she placed “Charity” (Poetical Works 2:11–14) first among her edition’s Batheaston selections, possibly because of its reverential subject. Precisely the kind of poem instanced by those who despise contests (it is set in the Batheaston drawing room, reflecting its “purpose-written” origin), “Charity” nonetheless probably deserved its prize in light of the way it infuses a mundane Batheaston assembly with visionary sublimity. To the fashionable cult of sensibility the poem marries the contest’s conception as a latter-day classical exercise. Seward chose an artful stanzaic structure: the ninety-two-line poem’s six-line stanzas maintain an a-a-b-c-c-b rhyme scheme in which iambic octosyllabic couplets are each followed by an iambic pentameter line. The pentameter lines contribute stateliness to the brisk stanzas, as well as the drama appropriate for the apparition of a heavenly being. They also contribute variety, which as Seward often remarked, pleased the ear: Seward was well aware that her poem would be read aloud at Batheaston. Indeed, she belonged to a generation that still read poems aloud in both private and social settings, and so she took care to ensure the musicality of her verse. “Charity” begins dramatically with a rhetorical question that conjures an uncanny light streaming into the drawing room amid a Batheaston gathering. Although it is day, “with clear, yet sober beauty shine / The verdant bower, the classic shrine” (ll. 7–8), as if seen by moonlight. Could the source of this chaste light be a visiting muse, perhaps Clio? Seward describes a being of “female, but celestial grace” (l. 23) who appears too reserved and dignified, in both dress and mien, to be a “Nymph … of Phoebus’ train” (l. 24).
Seward’s apparition shortly announces herself, although her white garments and blood-stained “sacred book”—presumably the New Testament in which charity is said to take precedence over the more rigid Old Testament laws—suggest her identity well before (ll. 31–33). Charity has evidently materialized in the alcove where Lady Miller placed her vase, and now “gently o’er the shrine she bends” (l. 34) to address the “ye Fair,—ye Learn’d,—ye Gay” that constitute a typical Batheaston assembly (l. 37). Not surprisingly, she warns her audience to avoid luxury if they would pursue real happiness; goodness, even extending to martyrdom, is the path to immortal joy (ll. 43–48). Perhaps better to communicate with these devotees of a mock-Apollonian ritual, Charity designates herself “First Priestess of the Christian shrine” (l. 47), usurping the normal space of the poetry contest to convey her divine greeting. Her message —that “with tongues of angels though ye sing,/No ear divine the tinkling sound perceives” unless motivated by charity (ll. 59–60)—is essentially that of Paul’s thirteenth letter to the Corinthians.
Charity adapts her message to the privileged group she addresses, warning that their usual charitable activities of tending to the sick and hungry of their neighborhoods, or even more extreme sacrifices such as martyrdom, will yield no blessing without divine love (ll. 61–66). Seward adds a footnote explaining the charitable function of the Batheaston society, which both argues for the appropriateness of this imagined vision and adds a note of skepticism regarding the charitable activities of the genteel folk typically assembled at the villa. Charity also warns her audience to avoid suspicion, anger, pride, envy, and slander (ll. 85–87), vices committed on the grand scale by public figures but also, of more immediate concern, by those competing for attention in domestic and social circles. Women especially, for example, were frequently chastised for exhibiting suspicion and anger toward their spouses, and for envying the possessions or accomplishments of others whom they attacked through slander. When Charity explains that God sent her to “bend the stubborn mind / To all that’s patient, soft, and kind” (ll. 83–84), her message is typical of Christian sermons but is clearly intended to resonate most forcefully with the Batheaston guests.
Seward ends the poem on a sublime note that appropriately seeks to elevate her audience’s thoughts beyond their drawing-room setting. Charity concludes her speech by promising that she will return at the end of time, in the literal sense of Paul’s statement that “when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.… And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor. 10:13). Charity declares that she will appear again “amid the falling spheres” along with Faith and Hope, to be hailed by God himself as first in importance. Her speech concludes dramatically with an alexandrine; God will exalt the personified virtue “who his benign commands did best on earth perform” (ll. 85–90). Charity then dissolves, amid the same rays of light that earlier announced her impending visit, in a couplet that closes both vision and poem. Seward’s poem, charmingly occasional in its precise references to the Miller’s home and poetic institution, might be accused of flattery. It nevertheless approaches the theme of charity ingeniously, incorporating mystic sublimity into what might have ended up being a mundane sermon to Lady Miller’s revelers. Seward’s decision to paraphrase Paul’s famous letter to the Corinthians enriches the divine visitor’s speech. Seward, who later wrote several sermons for Lichfield Cathedral services, enjoyed a clergyman’s daughter’s familiarity with scripture and with pulpit rhetoric. The vision’s warning is perfectly calculated for a genteel audience of “ye Fair,—ye Learn’d,—ye Gay” who might well pay charitable visits to dependents in the afternoon before indulging in slander in the evening. While a modern reader may not agree with the vision’s condemnation of slander as “cruel Assassin of the Human Race!” (l. 78), Seward’s first audience would have understood her emphasis and perhaps have believed that in a society where reputation was a woman’s chief asset and of crucial importance to professional gentlemen, character assassination was a cardinal sin.
“Charity” also demonstrates Seward’s keen pictorial sense. Jacqueline M. Labbe has discussed Seward’s ability to create “textual images that enter through the eye, as we read” when describing paintings, interpreting scenes in a manner that stimulates readers to participate in a kind of “sensual interaction” with the landscapes she evokes (210–11). Although “Charity” describes a room rather than a painting, Seward likewise conveys the uncanny light that bathes Lady Miller’s parlor. Although it is morning, the room appears “as when, in calmest hour of silent night,/In soft perspective rise the vales,/The silvered lawns, the shadowy dales,/Beneath the full-orb’d moon’s unclouded light” (ll. 9–12). Seward invites her audience to contemplate a moonlit landscape such as Claude Lorrain might have painted and that many rural locales, such as Batheaston itself, regularly boast. Having drawn her readers into both the imagined landscape and the mood such a setting promotes, she has prepared them for the sublime apparition of Charity that soon descends.
In his influential Elements of Criticism (1762), Lord Kames had discussed the technique of personification that Seward employs throughout the rest of the poem (3:54–87).7 Derided today, personification was highly regarded in the eighteenth century; Seward would have imbibed its use as a child from her beloved Milton’s “L’allegro” and “Il penseroso.” Indeed most of Lord Kames’s examples of personification, both positive and critical, are taken from Shakespeare. Lord Kames defends personification as essential when writing about abstract terms, which “are not well adapted to poetry, because they suggest not any image to the mind” (3:65). While Kames advises caution in its use, he refuses “to set limits to personification: taste is the only rule. A poet of superior genius hath more than others the command of this figure; because he hath more than others the power of inflaming the mind” (3:77). Kames urges merely that the abstract term personified should “have some natural dignity” and that “some preparation is necessary, in order to rouze the mind” (3:79). Seward fulfills Kames’s suggestions by carefully preparing the scene for Charity’s appearance. How more effectively to convey the Golden Rule than from the lips of an embodiment of Jesus’ precept? As she did in presenting her setting, re-creating the uncertainty of the audience suddenly bathed in a light that was neither “summer’s ray” (l. 2) nor that of “cold December’s noon” (l. 3), Seward reconstructs their difficulty identifying the apparition that descends above the Ciceronian vase. Is she one of the muses? A “Nymph … of Cupid’s train” (l. 24)? She lacks the “frolic” expression and colorful robes typical of such beings, dressed instead in “snowy white … decent garments” and clutching a blood-stained book (ll. 30–33). Seward’s readers would have responded immediately to her visual cues. Not only were they adept at reading signs and deciphering visual symbolism.8 They also would have been familiar with popular images, such as Angelica Kauffman’s, of muses and nymphs draped in colorful robes and frolicking with Cupid.9 Seward’s description told her readers what visual image not to conjure up before describing what they should envision, cleverly imposing her interpretation of Charity while following Kames’s instruction to rouse their minds in preparation for the personified virtue.
Regardless of Seward’s reasons for placing it first among her contest-winning poems, “Charity” rewards attentive reading. Such consideration helps us to overcome our resistance to its strangeness: Seward’s delight in personification and in musical rhymes and the sociable context of her spiritual address. Seward’s techniques and her sociable approach now seem archaic. But “Charity” demonstrates the mastery of contemporary poetic style and idiom with which she concluded her poetic apprenticeship at Batheaston. It also proves Seward capable of endowing even a contest poem, written in at most two weeks, with some technical intricacy and spiritual depth. Her pride in this prize poem was justified. “Monody on the Death of David Garrick, Esq.,” the next Batheaston selection in her Poetical Works (2:15–17), written in heroic couplets, is considerably more workmanlike. Its opening at Batheaston, its formulaic review of Garrick’s most famous roles, and its concluding invocation to Genius suggest hasty composition. But they also reveal what Gittings deplores in Keats as a result of Hunt’s sonnet-writing contests, Seward’s facility in producing a tolerable poem on short notice. The monody is worth discussing if only for its intimation of Seward’s ambition in joining Garrick’s many prominent poetic mourners. She was evidently determined to seize the occasion provided by the death of a renowned fellow townsman. If the personified Charity urged Seward’s audience to lift their eyes heavenward, Seward lifted her own sights toward a national event in this elegy. The poem’s lack of inspiration is perhaps surprising given Seward’s fondness for Garrick. She often lamented Johnson’s lack of regard for his former student, exclaiming to Boswell that it was “base … as well as unkind” of Johnson not to mention Garrick in his preface to Shakespeare. “Garrick! who had restored that transcendent author to the taste of the public, after it had recreantly and long receded from him” (Letters 1:63). Garrick was beloved at Batheaston, too; although Johnson disdained the assemblies, the actor visited twice in 1775 and had submitted verses both times to Lady Miller’s urn (Hesselgrave 65). Garrick’s death in 1779 provoked a national outpouring of funeral rhetoric, in which Lady Miller’s contestants participated. Perhaps the elegiac deluge stifled Seward’s creativity, or perhaps she felt compelled to write a poem in honor of her admired fellow citizen but had little time to compose her submission. She most likely placed the elegy second among her prize poems owing to Garrick’s fame and her personal admiration for the actor-manager she identified—as did most of her contemporaries—with Shakespeare.
The “Monody” opens with a vignette of Sir John and Lady Miller mourning over their “damp vase” (l. 15), wet with their tears. Seward gives them the poetic noms de plume of Horatio and Laura, a practice mocked by Lucas as “a kind of law compelling poets of that day to be dissatisfied with real names” (143). Lucas ignored the fact that poets had adopted fanciful names for themselves and their addressees for centuries. The convention was especially favored by women poets and their coteries, to whom the pen names gave a modicum of privacy whether in manuscript circulation or in print; the often pastoral aliases also permitted writers a degree of idealization or fictionalization. Seward, like many women poets, continued the practice, little suspecting future jeers. In this instance, Horatio and Laura model a companionate marriage of mutually sensible partners. He gazes sorrowfully at a rainy landscape that mirrors their emotions, and she drops a myrtle wreath she had ostensibly been preparing for a competition. Like her husband’s, her attention wanders toward a view that harmonizes with her sorrow: “dark cypress,” used for funeral wreaths, “meets [her] earnest eye” (ll. 10, 12). Horatio and Laura appear to be Genius and Beauty personified, bending over a funeral urn. Seward again fashions a vivid image for her readers, following Kames’s advice and making sparing use of personification while also acknowledging her friends’ grief for their deceased acquaintance.
The central portion of Seward’s forty-eight-line monody recalls Garrick’s best-known roles. Although mentioning his excellence in “the light magic” of comedy (l. 16), she dwells on his triumphs as Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard III. Seward’s emphasis is on Garrick’s appeal to audiences’ “subject passions” (l. 31), his ability to convey the emotions of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes to a degree that made his interpretations seem the inevitable outcome of the bard’s intentions (l. 32). Having recollected Garrick’s performances, she recalls his inimitable voice and gestures before abruptly asking “Where are they now?—Dark, in the narrow cell,/Insensate,—shrunk,—and wan,—and cold, they dwell” (ll. 39–40). Her images stress the irony of death’s silence and stillness compared with the living Garrick’s famously mobile features and compelling voice. They also glance toward the lurid graveyard meditations that had been popular since midcentury. The monody’s final verse paragraph returns to Horatio and Laura and bids them to continue mourning and draping the urn in cypress. “Then give his talents to your loudest fame,/And grave on your high shrines, Garrick’s unrivall’d name” (ll. 47–48). The concluding alexandrine, with its stress on Garrick’s name after the caesura, seems to mimic the memorial engraving Seward demands. Her request that the Millers “give his talents to your loudest fame” anticipates the very contest that produced this poem; she may refer to both the “loud fame” of multiple Batheaston tributes, to be published in Lady Miller’s anthology, and the “loud fame” of certain individual Batheaston elegists, perhaps including herself. Although undeniably slight, the monody gracefully comes full circle and closes adroitly with Seward’s clever evocation of her own poem.
Seward places her “Ode on the Pythagorean System” third among her Batheaston prize poems (Poetical Works 2:18–21).10 If “Charity” illustrates her keen grasp of audience and occasion as well as the language of sensibility and if the Garrick monody reflects her nascent ambition, “Ode on the Pythagorean System” demonstrates her technical virtuosity. Odes were characteristically reserved for serious, usually grand subjects, and presented opportunities to devise elaborate rhyme schemes. Seward’s seventy-two-line poem demonstrates that she was capable of experimenting with rhythm and rhyme, producing a musicality that appropriately reflects the ode’s origins in ancient religious choral song. Rather than the irregular stanzas of Pindaric ode, Seward chose the Horatian pattern, composing six twelve-line stanzas that each follow an a-b-a-b-c-c-d-e-e-d-f-f rhyme scheme. Since Horatian odes are usually shorter than their Pindaric counterparts as well as more restrained in style, Seward’s choice of structure was apt for her reflections on the Pythagorean theory. Her Anglican views on the possible transmigration of souls are predictable, but she approaches the ancient system with respect and wit. She begins by asking how any theory can presume to know the destiny of a person’s spirit after death. She pronounces Pythagoras’s doctrine an “inadequate” (l. 11) effort to explain how souls unworthy of eternal happiness must expiate their mortal guilt by returning to earth embodied in an appropriate animal or vegetable. In the second stanza, however, she admits that because Pythagoras’s ideas do not “discard / A sacred sense … / Of punish’d crime, and virtue’s fair reward” (ll. 14–16), they are superior to “mad Atheism” (l. 18). Pythagoras intuited the immortal nature of the human spirit but was confused about its route to hell or heaven. Nevertheless, Seward decides to entertain belief in the Pythagorean system “for an hour” (l. 32) and playfully contemplate his belief in transmigration. She imagines all the appropriate forms such a process might take: how those guilty of revenge would return as tigers, those of gluttony as hogs, those of avarice as worms, and so forth. She asks only that her personal fate be “gentle” (l. 59), since she has no serious vices or crimes to atone for. If she must return in a lower form to make amends for her failings, however, she wishes her soul to inhabit a myrtle in Lady Miller’s garden. In that case, were Lady Miller to choose her foliage for a wreath, Seward’s spirit would be contented. “Scarce shall its silent destiny deplore,/Since yet I form the wreaths, which once with pride I wore” (ll. 71–72, emphasis in the original). The lines capitalize on the couplet’s potential for an epigrammatic, as well as ironic, closure. Yet by referring metonymically to her identity as a poet and literally to the laurel wreaths she has won as part of Lady Miller’s coterie, Seward’s conclusion further intimates her serious commitment to her chosen genre.
Seward’s poem is unexpectedly light-hearted for an ode, turning midway “to gayer strains” (l. 31) and ending with a witty conceit in which the poet returns as the plant woven into crowns that reward poetic achievement. Her verse is both a meditation on the strengths and flaws of Pythagoras’s theory and a playful reverie about its consequences. The ode’s distinctive feature is its musicality, derived from abundant internal rhyme and assonance. Both lead the ear from line to line, as when Seward asks the human spirit whether any mere system “can trace thy flight,/when thou shalt seek, freed from corporeal load,/In dim Futurity a new abode” (l1. 4–5). The negative “Ah no!” (l. 7) seems to follow inevitably from the preceding “o” sounds. Another example occurs when Seward admits the superiority of Pythagoras’s ideas to atheism:
along their erring range,
Of punish’d crime, and virtue’s fair reward,
They soar, though on weak wings, above the sphere
Where broods mad Atheism o’er precepts drear;
Or, with incessant sneer, delights to lead
By cold Oblivion’s deep and sable waves,
His grovelling crew of sensual slaves. (ll. 15–21)
The ideas “soar” owing to Pythagoras’s intuition of divine justice, virtue’s “reward,” whose “ar” sound echoes and supports their flight. Atheism’s “drear … sneer” seems onomatopoetic as it draws both its victims and its spoken sound toward the deep, Lethean waves. The sibilant effects in lines 18–21, particularly strong in line 19, borrow the technique Milton used to emphasize the snakelike sound of Satan’s speech in Paradise Lost. Through a disparate combination of sound and visual reference, Seward nimbly incorporates both the classical Charon and the biblical Satan into her personification of atheism.
Seward cherished mellifluous sound and labored to create the musical effects of her verse. Famed for “Siddonian” readings of her own poetry as well as the poems and prose of others, she strove for sounds that both emphasized sense or meaning and created drama. In this ode, for example, she uses a caesura to suggest the victim’s surprise when a hornet “rises, and darts the barbed sting” (l. 45). Seward believed strongly in the aural pleasure of variety. She sometimes uses transposition, as when late in the ode the conscious Batheaston myrtle hears “the tuneful train, the groves among,/Pour the full cadence of the dulcet song” (ll. 65–66). Transposing the last three words of line 65 concluded the line with a relatively soft emphasis, strengthening the effect of the dactyl that begins the next line and creating, through clever placement of unstressed syllables, the onomato-poetic effect of pouring. Seward thought that the ear tires of listening to lines with insufficiently varied meter and length. Her stanzas in this ode are crafted of iambic pentameter except for the ninth line of each, which is in octometer, and the twelfth, which is an alexandrine. As we have observed of both “Charity” and the elegy on Garrick, Seward was fond of the alexandrine’s dramatic impact as a summation, a sonnetlike “turn” in meaning, or even, as here, a punch line. The ode ends with a play on words, perhaps appropriate for a poem on a serious subject but intended for a morning’s entertainment. As the figure of Charity remarked, Seward’s audience was the fair, the learned, and the gay, and only the learned in that group would have welcomed a ponderous essay on Pythagoreanism. The ode at the same time allowed her to demonstrate virtuosity in orchestrating melodious but purposeful sound, another step in Batheaston’s informal conclusion of her apprenticeship.
“Invocation of the Comic Muse” appears last among Seward’s prize-winning Batheaston poems, although it was evidently the first she submitted to the vase (Ashmun 71). Perhaps the poem’s slight subject caused Seward to rank it behind the others. If the poem is the slightest and least even of the Batheaston poems, it nevertheless deserves attention for its accomplished musicality. It is a charming response to Lady Miller’s request that Seward enter her competition and not at all a “somewhat incoherent rhapsody” as Ashmun claimed (72). Ashmun is correct, however, that Seward modeled her address to the comic muse on Milton’s “L’allegro.” Seward draws attention to her indebtedness by borrowing a phrase from “L’allegro,” “Haste thee nymph” (l. 25), when in her second stanza she addresses Thalia (l. 23). From the outset she imitates Milton’s ebullient tetrameter couplets that so well convey the cheerfulness they describe. Milton had achieved his effect by skillful use of meter, and Seward likewise experiments with stress patterns to make her poem livelier. Seward refines on Milton’s syllabic pattern. While the number of syllables is varied in his tetrameter lines, each of her poem’s forty-eight lines has seven syllables except for the last two lines of each sixteen-line stanza. Seward used dactyls and, especially, trochees to emulate Milton’s lively rhythm. “On this mirth-devoted day,/From these festal bowers away,/In your sable vestments flee,/Train of sad Melpomene!” (ll. 1–4). From the initial trochee and the dactylic “devoted” in the first line to the dactylic effect of the elided second syllable of “bowers” followed by “away” in line 2 to the subdued stress on the final syllable of “Melpomene” in line 4, Seward begins with an explosion of metric effects that chase the tragic muse from her scene. The first stanza’s concluding couplet evokes tragedy’s ultimate personification as Despair, dragging her miserable self through one pentameter and one alexandrine line “with the damp, wan brow, and streaming wound” of suicide (ll. 15–16).
The second stanza of the poem welcomes Thalia, muse of comedy, riding in her “pantomimic car” (l. 18). Seward describes Thalia in her guise as one of the three Graces, often portrayed “bright from [Angelica Kauffman’s] unrival’d hand” in paintings widely disseminated through engravings and on decorative porcelain.11 Seward compares Thalia to one of Kauffman’s images, “Nymphs Stealing the Arrows of Cupid” that she presumes readers have seen, perhaps in one of the engravings made from the painting in 1777.12 But even though she presumes as much, Seward still describes Thalia in vivid detail, from her blue robe (l. 21) and golden hair (l. 23) to the playful manner in which she snaps Cupid’s arrow. Seward extends Kauffman’s visual impression by suggesting aural dimensions such as Thalia’s “varied voice” (l. 24) and laughter and the crisp “snap” of Cupid’s bow as she breaks it over her knee. The stanza’s more regular tetrameter moves briskly, conjuring the nymphs’ quick movements as they pilfer Cupid’s weapons. Seward’s homage to Kauffman is not merely a description but an appreciative interpretation of the painter’s lively scene.
Having paid homage to Milton and to Kauffman, Seward moves in her third stanza to compliment her hosts. She asks Thalia to exert her “all-enlivening influence” (l. 34) not only over the poems submitted to their “Delphic Vase” (l. 33) but also over the lives of the Millers themselves. She characterizes them as patrons of the arts, Sir John’s taste confirmed by his choice of mate and Lady Miller’s by her ability to attract so many fine poets to her villa (ll. 37–40). She begs Thalia to ensure the continued prosperity of their literary enterprise (ll. 43–44) as well as their continuing health and happiness by gilding their lives with “beams of bliss” (l. 48). The address confirms that Seward considered Lady Miller her patron not because she received financial reward from her but because she provided Seward with an appreciative audience and a select venue in which to present her work. Despite her wish for Thalia’s inspiration, however, the poem declines somewhat from the technical fireworks of the first stanza to its rather staid conclusion. Seward had met Lady Miller before writing the poem but had not yet visited Batheaston and was therefore unable to include the details of setting and ritual that enrich other Batheaston poems. The final stanza cannot convey either the deep familiarity of her first stanza’s emulation of Milton or the visual appeal of her salute to Kauffman in the second. The poem therefore ends on a rather flat note—but not before demonstrating Seward’s grasp of Milton’s comic techniques as well as her ability to interpret visual imagery for her readers. Even if “Invocation of the Comic Muse” is less consistent than the previous Batheaston poems, Seward was justified in presenting this clutch of winning poems to posterity as equivalent to the masterpiece by which a craftsman proves his skill, concluding her years as an apprentice poet by competing at the Millers’ salon. From the sublime and tragic to the witty and comic, and in an array of genres and stanzaic forms, Seward’s Batheaston poems display abilities far beyond the amateur. She had mastered eighteenth-century poetic kinds and techniques. Her status as a poet, however, has been defined until recently not by her ability but by what succeeding generations perceived as her identity, that of an amateur gentlewoman residing in a provincial town. My next chapter elaborates Seward’s identity as a professional writer seeking national renown, concluding with her elegiac tribute to Lady Miller, whose support of Seward stretches our definitions of patronage.
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