The Pet of Letters: Marjorie Fleming's Juvenilia

In an era of short-lived poets, Marjorie Fleming, the only notable child romantic poet, had the shortest life of all. Born in 1803, she died in 1811 before reaching her ninth birthday; her entire literary career ran only from 1809 until 1811. Yet because "no more fascinating infantile author has ever appeared, " or so Leslie Stephen argued in 1889 (19:28), her reputation has lasted into our own time. This Scottish literary prodigy was the subject of two rapturous and widely-reprinted essays which are principally responsible for her fame. In 1863, John Brown published "Pet Marjorie" (titled simply "Marjorie Fleming" in later versions). In 1909, in the last year of his life and thirteen years after the death of his own adored and gifted daughter, Mark Twain wrote "Marjorie Fleming: The Wonder Child." Published originally in Harper's Bazaar but later reprinted in the collected works, the Twain essay popularized Marjorie Fleming with American readers. To this day, at least two of Marjorie Fleming's poems—"A Sonnet" and "A Melancholy Lay"—remain easily available to American readers in two major anthologies, Oscar Williams' Silver Treasury of Light Verse (1957) and Russell Baker's The Norton Book of Light Verse (1986).

To her Romantic and Victorian admirers, Marjorie Fleming seemed a child-genius whose achievement was at once prodigious and natural. Walter Scott called her "the most extraordinary creature I ever met with" (Brown 90), while Twain found her quintessentially childlike: "she was the world's child, she was the human race in little" (358). Arundell Esdaile, editor of the Marjorie Fleming manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, has ranked her with the great diarists of literary history, with Pepys, Johnson, Boswell, Scott, and Dorothy Osborne (xix), while Twain considered that "Nothing was entirely beyond her literary jurisdiction; if it had occurred to her that the laws of Rome needed codifying she would have taken a chance at it" (371). At the same time that her extraordinary powers are emphasized, however, virtually all her admirers insist on how ordinary and childish she was. Thus Brown describes a portrait that shows her "fearless and full of love, passionate, wild, wilful, fancy's child"(91). He adds: "How childish and yet how strong and free is her use of words!"(101). MacBean, her turn-of-the-century biographer, echoes Stephens' praise of this "charming character" and emphasizes that the girl is childlike in being a "loving and charming child genius"(3). Esdaile too insists on her normality as a child, bracketing the very qualities that make her a writer; she is normal "in everything...except her intensity and her gift of expression"(xv). A documentation of Marjorie's achievement and an assessment of the reasons for Marjorie's dual authority for her Romantic and Victorian eulogists place Marjorie Fleming within the discourse of valorized romantic childhood and its connection of normal childhood to creative genius.

The story of Marjorie's short life, as befits a romantic child, is notable for its happiness. She was the daughter of a middle-class Kirkcaldy family, distantly related to Sir Walter Scott. Her first five years were spent in a bookish and affectionate home. At the age of five, Marjorie went to stay with the Keiths, her relations and Scott's, in Edinburgh. Here her 20-year-old cousin, Isabella Keith, took charge of her education, "teaching me to make Simecolings nots of interrigations peorids & commas &c" (MacBean 56) and also a host of other literary, moral, orthographic, and social rules.¹

It was during her Edinburgh years with the Keiths that Marjorie came to know Sir Walter Scott. According to John Brown's fulsome account, Scott saw Marjorie often and doted on her for her wit and precocity: "Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key. . . . 'Marjorie! Marjorie!' shouted her friend, 'where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo?'"(88). Brown describes Scott and Marjorie reciting poetry to one another, nursery rhymes, ballads, and speeches out of Shakespeare: "Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to Mrs. Keith [that...