Delicately Corrected and Constantly Befriended: Arthur Murphy’s Female Characters

Imagine this scene: a young woman stands on George’s Quay in Dublin in 1729, looking out to sea. Her three year-old son, James, clings to her skirts, while one-and-a-half-year-old Arthur is held in her arms. Day after day she waits for the return of her merchant husband who has set off for Philadelphia in one of his ships, but she is destined never to see him again. All trace of him and his vessel have disappeared, she will learn, presumably lost in a storm. Jane Murphy remains in the house on George’s Quay until the boys are eight and ten years old. Then, having exhausted her resources, she sells her property and moves to Boulogne-sur-mer, across the English Channel from Dover, to live with one of her sisters and her sister’s children. There the future playwright and barrister resides until the age of ten, when he is sent to school.¹ Murphy would remain devoted to his mother and retain a connection to his aunts and female cousins until their deaths.² Did this early experience of a female-dominated household influence Murphy to be particularly fond of women’s company throughout his life? Did the early conditions of his life later influence his creation of intelligent and strong-minded female characters in his journals and plays?

Through his two careers—in literature and in the law—Murphy had professional and personal relationships with many of the most important people in the political and literary worlds of eighteenth-century London. He wrote roles for the leading actresses of the period, instructing them in their performances and acting as their legal representative. He particularly fashioned five leading roles for the talents of his mistress, Ann Elliot. He had a 42-year relationship with Hester Thrale Piozzi, and, unlike Dr. Johnson, was one of the few people who did not abandon her when she married her second husband, Gabriel Piozzi. Jesse Foot, Murphy’s close friend, executor, and first biographer, tells us that Murphy enjoyed the company of women: “He was fond of their society and delighted in giving them instruction.”³ Foot also felt that one of Murphy’s outstanding abilities as a playwright was his creation of admirable and striking female characters:

The study of the female character seems to have been his particular choice, and his darling dramatic passion: in all his scenes, women are delicately corrected, studiously cautioned, and constantly befriended.⁴

(Italics mine.)

Among Murphy’s three twentieth-century biographers,⁵ only Howard Hunter Dunbar mentions this gift, and he dwells on it briefly:

[Murphy’s] forte was his capacity to depict sprightly ladies such as the Widow Bellmour, Maria, and Lady Bell. No author of the period equalled him in the presentation of this type of character.⁶

Modern critics have discussed Murphy’s tempestuous relationship with David Garrick, his use of dramatic sources, his position as a laughing rather than a sentimental playwright, the brilliance and naturalness of his dialogue, and his use of specific male friends and family members as models for satiric portraits, but an exploration of his female characters is long overdue. Surveying those women whom Murphy “delicately corrects,” as Foot puts it, shows that he criticizes those who have wasted their minds on trivialities, such as fads and gambling. In contrast, he “constantly befriends,” as Foot continues, those who are intelligent, witty, confident, and vivacious.

Delicately Corrected

In his Gray’s Inn Journal, written at first during 1753–54 and revised for his collected works in 1786, Murphy devotes a third⁷ of his articles wholly or in part to criticisms of women’s fashions, to their lack of intelligent conversation, and to similar trifles. Scholars who have commented on this fact⁸ have agreed that Murphy spends more space on women than other contemporary journalists. More of Murphy’s satire against women is directed toward shifting vogues in dress than toward anything else. In the second essay, for example, he rails against “artificial embellishments,” especially when they “luxuriantly wanton...