The Power of the Puff: Mary Robinson's Celebrity and the Success of Walsingham

By the time Walsingham appeared on Paternoster-row in December 1797, Mary Robinson had successfully refashioned herself from "Perdita"—the infamous actress, courtesan, and socialite—into "the English Sappho"—the renowned poet and novelist. She understood the demands of the literary market and how to capitalize on her fame in order to compete in it. By all indications, Robinson's previous three novels—The Widow, Angelina, and Hubert de Sevrac—failed to meet the success that she had anticipated. As a result, she took advantage of every means available to ensure the same success for her fifth novel that she had experienced with Vancenza, her first. She began by writing the most controversial and politically charged novel that she had written thus far, filling it with contemporary characters, scandals, and commentary. "[I]n this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of literary and political Gossiping," Samuel Taylor Coleridge later commented, "the most vapid Satires have become the objects of a keen public Interest purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-work Notes" (150). In order to attract the public's "keen interest"—to make this novel the talk of the beau monde and the public—Robinson utilized what may be called the power of the puff to capitalize on her celebrity, manipulate audiences, and make Walsingham competitive on the market. During the three months that preceded the printing and the three months that followed, over eighty puffs appeared in The Oracle and The Morning Post in the forms of notes, extracts, tributes, advertisements, and health reports. Examining the context and content of these puffs reveals not only how Mary Robinson related to the public through the newspapers, but also how she used that relationship to promote her work.

Robinson understood the benefits of using the periodical press as a marketing tool: on 11 February 1797, The Telegraph listed Robinson among forty-two others "who pay to have themselves puffed in the Newspapers"—an accusation that many recent critics believe. Kristin Flieger Samuelian surmises from recent scholarship that Robinson "managed her public image and calculated the public's reception of her from at least the beginning of her acting career" (28). Claire Brock contends that Robinson's "shrewd manipulation of eighteenth century publicity allowed her actively to exploit secure knowledge of her public's regard and, ultimately, display confidence in her own contemporary fame to sell her texts" (99). Certainly, Robinson used the press to foster a relationship with her public: she extended the discourse found in her poetry and novels that Tom Mole dubs "the hermeneutic of intimacy" to the puffs in the dailies, permitting readers to "form an asymmetrical, mediated relationship with the celebrated individual" (190). Essentially, newspapers permitted the English Sappho to take advantage of the "symbolic asset" her personality had become and to circulate that identity among readers who knew more about her "ostensible private life than . . . her work" (Goldsmith 27). According to David Higgins, "[c]hanges in literary production and consumption, perhaps most crucially the growth of the periodical press, encouraged the emergence of a culture of literary celebrity in which certain writers (most notably Byron) became of interest to the public as much for their personal appearance and private lives as for their works" (42). No other newspapers drew more attention to Robinson's private life and puffed her celebrity more than The Oracle and The Morning Post—especially during the months surrounding the publication of Walsingham. Robinson, Peter Stuart, and Daniel Stuart all benefited from the exposure of her name and her work: the dailies sold her novel, and her name sold the dailies.

Beginning in the spring of 1797, references to Robinson's newest novel appeared interspersed in the social columns with reports of her health and her private affairs. In one 18 April puff, The Oracle's readers learned that she had departed "for Bath, for the spring season" with her daughter. In another printed directly below, they learned that a new novel was imminent: "Mrs. ROBINSON has nearly completed a Work for the Press next Winter; a Domestic...