CHAPTER SIX
Jane Porter and the Old Woman Writer’s Quest for Financial Independence
My sunshine of youth is no more!
My mornings of pleasure are fled!
’Tis painful my fate to endure—
A pension supplies me with bread!
Dependant at length on the man
Whose fortunes I struggled to raise!
I conquer my pride as I can—
His charity merits my praise!
—John Cunningham, “Verses by Mr. Cunningham,
Written about Three Weeks before His Death” (ca. 1773)
Jane Porter (bap. 1776–1850) did not enter into her twilight years unthinkingly. As an author who lived much of her adult life with her beloved sister (author Anna Maria Porter [1780–1832]) and their widowed mother, Porter knew that old age brought financial challenges for the unmarried woman writer.1 Though the sisters enjoyed early fame and considerable acclaim, by the time they reached middle age, supporting themselves by writing had become a burden. Jane Porter had a vision of a female author’s ideal old age. She longed for the steady income not common to writers, just as she hoped to revive her literary reputation. She began very deliberately to try to build toward this vision in late middle age. Repeatedly, however, her plans were derailed, whether by a death in the family, a bank’s failure, an unrealized sum from a promised bequest, or a rejected request for monetary assistance. Although each part of her story deserves a more complete telling, it is Porter’s quest for a pension—and the ways in which that episode has played a heretofore unknown role in her career as an author in late middle and old age—to which I turn in this chapter.
Porter published no new full-length works in old age. She did not pursue a late life novel or memoir, as Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth did, and she does not appear to have completed book-length nonfiction works designed for publication, as Hester Lynch Piozzi did. Porter did not pen poems about history or old age or edit and introduce the works of previous generations, as did Anna Letitia Barbauld. But like Catharine Macaulay before her, Porter appears to have felt acutely the waning of her laurels, and she lived long enough to fight for her reputation, in private and public, under her own name and anonymously. Some of this struggle is evident in the voluminous prefaces and postscripts she added to her most popular novels when they were republished in new editions during the last decades of her life. The bulk of the information about her struggles, however, lies in her unpublished manuscripts and letters.
Porter’s labors in late life were not tied up with working toward new success in the literary marketplace, but she did engage in efforts to make it possible to retire comfortably. Perhaps she knew, as historian L. A. Botelho writes that “the foundations of how one’s old age would be experienced (both materially and emotionally) were often laid in youth and middle age.”2 Porter’s is a story worth telling, as it provides a picture of a different kind of resourcefulness in old age from those we have seen in previous chapters. Porter did not want run-of-the-mill charity, assistance she viewed as insulting her respectability and assaulting her dignity, but she was not above making pleas for state monies as she sought remuneration coupled with recognition. In her own day, from among the limited means that were available to women writers, Porter aspired to a royal or governmental pension to honor her literary service. Though she never received the pension she so doggedly sought, her petitions resulted in compensation that contributed to her ability to maintain, however precariously, a middle-class standard of living. Porter’s case demonstrates that it was possible for a celebrated aged woman author in reduced circumstances to live off of her former fame.
Jane Porter and the Royal Assignment
In the early 1820s, Jane Porter took on a project that a fellow female author had refused. Late in her life, Porter wrote of having accepted an assignment from a royal emissary, who asked her, on behalf of the king, to write a historical novel based on his royal forebears. If this story sounds familiar, it is because Jane Austen was encouraged to do the same—and famously declined. In her 1816 letter to Royal Librarian James Stanier Clarke, Austen writes:
You are very, very kind in your hint as to the sort of Composition which might recommend me at present, & I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance, founded on the house of Saxe Cobourg might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic life in Country Villages as I deal in—but I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem.—I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.—No—I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.3
Instead of writing Clarke’s desired royal historical romance, Austen worked on Persuasion (1818). The exchange between Austen and Clarke now looms large in accounts of her life. The episode is read by some as displaying her steadfast irony and by others as revealing her straightforward self-deprecation. In either case, the interaction with Clarke is generally presented as a momentous one in Austen’s career as an author.
In a story earlier told but now much less circulated, Jane Porter, too, was said to have received such an invitation from Clarke. We know the details from Porter’s own pen, as she described it in the “Recollective Preface” (1840) attached to the newly revised edition of her popular novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810). According to that account, Porter’s invitation from Clarke came— unbeknownst to her—several years after Austen’s. Though Porter’s narrative is less well known, her interaction with Clarke was, if anything, more significant. Twenty years after the fact, Porter describes for the public the circumstances of Clarke’s proposal: “Dr. Clarke … librarian to our then Sovereign George the Fourth … told me that his Majesty … took my early published volumes from the royal shelf, and was so satisfied with the historical fidelity of the heroes they portrayed that Dr. Clarke was commanded to communicate to me his Majesty’s gracious request that my next subject should be ‘The Life of his great and virtuous progenitor, Duke Christian of Luneburg.’”4 Porter attributes her invitation to chance (the king happening to take her book off of the shelf) and to a virtual royal decree (a “gracious request” that was also a “command”). Her fictional account of the royal family’s ancestors appeared as Duke Christian of Luneburg; or, Tradition from the Hartz (1824). As Porter put it in 1840, “I could but obey so distinguishing a command, and the royal goodness soon furnished me with many original documents for the building up of my story… When it was published, I was honoured by an assurance from my gracious Sovereign that ‘it had been completed to his fullest wishes’” (1: 39–40).
Why would Porter have been tempted to complete a novel to the “fullest wishes” of her sovereign? Unlike Austen, Porter published her major works under her own name and achieved great fame in her lifetime. Her most successful novels went through many editions, regularly republished into her old age. Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) was her novel of a fictional Polish military hero in the 1790s. The Scottish Chiefs (1810) told the story of William Wallace and Scotland in the thirteenth century. Her third best-known novel, The Pastor’s Fire-Side (1817), featured the imaginary English son of the Spanish duke of Ripperda in the 1720s. Each of these novels went through multiple editions. Could not Porter, like Austen, afford to reject a bid for profit and popularity—the terms through which Austen saw Clarke’s invitation? Porter’s letters show that the circumstances that led to the writing of Duke Christian differed from those she would later claim in print. Choosing to write a historical romance based on the royal family’s ancestors was driven by concerns for her financial well being in late life. Bringing an account of the episode out of the archives deepens our sense of the relationship of Porter’s aging to the literary careers of Austen and Sir Walter Scott, as well as to other writers who sought (successfully or not) to turn their early fame into a regular late-life income.
The overlapping circumstances and opposite choices of the two Janes have always reflected more poorly on Porter and more admirably on Austen. Austen is said to have stood her ground and maintained her authorial dignity, choosing to “go her own way,” rather than to capitulate to His Majesty or mammon. Austen’s refusal is called “polite,” while Porter’s acceptance produced a work whose hero was so perfect that it “not surprisingly” “met with full royal approval.”5 One twentieth-century critic comments slyly on Porter’s choice, as if it is risible—and a joke that Austen herself would have been in on: “One can imagine how Jane Austen, had she lived, would have smiled” (Jones 136). A recent short biography of Porter labels her “more cooperative” than Austen where the royal invitation was concerned.6
Characterizations of a fawning, malleable, or greedy Porter and an upright, self-determining Austen are not of recent vintage. Early twentieth-century literary critic Mona Wilson, contrasting the two writers, cites the demurring letter of the “greater Jane” and notes that Porter, “on the other hand, dutifully wrote” for Clarke and the king.7 Before Wilson, Sarah Tytler thought it strange that “two such women as Jane Austen and Jane Porter—equal in moral worth, though standing on very different intellectual heights—should have eagerly availed themselves of the permission to dedicate books to George IV.”8 Tytler writes, “what is if possible stranger, is that the Prince Regent should have been, even professedly, an admiring, assiduous reader of the novels —altogether apart in literary merit, but alike in good tone and taste—of these two upright and blameless women” (29). Defending Porter as a woman but selling short her literary skill, Tytler admits that the “so-called historical novels were in Miss Porter’s way and not in Miss Austen’s” (30).
These stories have given us one view of Porter’s late life—that of an unsuccessful, fawning sycophant. Because she accepted Clarke’s invitation, Porter has long been viewed in contrast to Austen as having degraded herself, prostituting her talents in order to advance her success at court. This is an incomplete if not inaccurate version of Porter’s old age. As her unpublished correspondence shows, Porter’s desires for advantage from Duke Christian were directed, on the one hand, toward her brother, the travel writer, military man, and artist Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842). She was anxious to secure Robert’s future as a diplomat and wistfully envisioned herself sitting at his feet, happily serving as his private secretary.9 Jane hoped that favor from the king might advance Robert’s career as a diplomat, relieving her of the need to publish, as well as freeing her brother from having to scramble to provide financial support for his mother and sisters.10 The personal economic benefit that Porter most hoped to receive after writing Duke Christian, though, was a royal pension to support herself and sister Anna Maria in their old age.
The story of Duke Christian—Porter’s last single-authored novel—is one undergirded by the fear of an impoverished old age. In 1821, when Porter first contemplated writing Duke Christian, she was in her late forties, unmarried (as she would remain), and in need of money. Her most recent novel, The Pastor’s Fire-Side, had taken years to write and, though respectably successful, was not as profitable as her previous efforts had been. The Scottish Chiefs “was one of the most widely read and influential texts produced during the Romantic period,” Gary Kelly notes.11 But it had been ten years since its publication, and Porter’s writing career was in a slump. The Porters perpetually struggled financially to maintain their place in polite society.12 They were in debt for hundreds of pounds to their friends, to their publishers (who regularly provided them with advances against their next novels), and to their creditors, who they feared would realize their plight and take collective action. Porter’s choosing to write a novel on assignment takes on a different meaning in such a context. By the late 1810s, she felt she had been passed over for the literary accolades that were her due. Using her writing to please a potential royal patron—and perhaps to secure a pension—may have seemed a better bet than counting on renewed success with the fickle reading public.
The idea of Clarke’s asking at least two women to write a historical romance is not in itself surprising. The genre was extremely fashionable. Today we associate it principally with one name: Sir Walter Scott, long seen as its originator. Many of his contemporaries, including Austen, suspected that the anonymously published Waverley (1814) was the product of his pen. In an 1814 letter to her niece Anna, Austen complains, “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair” (Letters 277). Because “He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet,” Austen quips, he “should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.” She concludes, “I do not like him [Scott], & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it—but fear I must.” Joking or not, Austen was obviously frustrated with Scott’s successful move into her genre, despite leading Clarke to believe two years later that she thought historical romances and fictional pictures of domestic life were very different.
Scott was neither the first nor the only author writing historical fiction during the Regency period. Indeed, the phrase “historical novel” was used as the subtitle of several productions of the 1790s, including E. M. Foster’s The Duke of Clarence (1795) and Jaquelina of Hainault (1798); and Charles Dacres; or, The Voluntary Exile (1797), which proposes to “shew men as they are.”13 But the phrase long predates that period, found as a subtitle in fiction translated from French, such as The Count de Rethel (1779), Claudine Tencin’s The Siege of Calais (1740), and The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone (1725).14 Though its significance no doubt changed across the period, the term “historical novel” was in use in the early eighteenth century.15 Fictional works with “historical romance” or “founded on facts” in their subtitles appeared in significant numbers in English texts from the 1760s on but particularly after the late 1780s. Until Scott, however, few of these novels rivaled in popular success Porter’s contributions to the genre. P. D. Garside shows that Scott, in “inventing” the historical novel, drew heavily on the fiction of female predecessors. Garside argues that “the Waverley novels first emerged at a time when male authorship was at an unusually low ebb; though from 1820 the position changes sharply, and by the later 1820s, no doubt partly because of Scott’s influence, male novelists are dominant.”16 This claim is supported with statistical evidence drawn from publication histories that demonstrate how Scott and his historical fiction, directly or indirectly, had a hand in squeezing women novelists out of the literary marketplace.
As it turns out, at least one of Porter’s contemporaries also noticed the phenomenon. The anonymous reviewer of Reginald Dalton (1823) writes, “It is, we apprehend, chiefly to be attributed to the success of the ‘Waverley novels,’ that so many men of distinguished talents have within these last few years devoted their pens to works of imagination” (200).17 This rise of the male novelist, the reviewer recognizes, is a change, “for, fifteen years since, all the popular novelists of the day, with a very few exceptions, prefixed Mrs. or Miss to their names” (200). He lists, “Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, Miss Benger, Miss Owenson, the two Misses Porter, Mrs. West, Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Opie, &c. &c.” The reviewer then implies that the women have been forced out because they have not produced new work:
Since that period, however, the ladies have been almost driven from the field of fiction by the hosts of powerful writers of the masculine gender who have occupied it. The most serious incursion has been made by our neighbors the Scotch, the well-known “Unknown” [Scott] leading the way.… These masculine writers have at length almost entirely superseded their feminine predecessors. Even Miss Edgeworth’s pen has been idle since the publication of her Patronage; and Miss Anna Maria Porter’s romantic heroes now seldom make their appearance. Mrs. Opie’s Tales have become “few and far between,” and if we except the fair writer of “The Favorite of Nature,” no new female writer has for some years past appeared before the public with any claims to celebrity as a novelist. (200)
Some of this reviewer’s claims are preposterous. Austen could not have produced new works, as she was no longer living, but others on the list must have been enraged to see the falsehood spread that they had stopped publishing.18 New works of fiction by Anna Maria Porter had appeared in 1817, 1818, 1821, and 1822. Indeed, the very month in which this review was printed, Jane Porter published Duke Christian.
Scott himself may not personally have been to blame for stealing the thunder of these women writers, though as Ina Ferris, Michael Gamer, April London, and others have shown, Scott was both aware of and trying to distance himself from the “femininity” of the novel.19 Scott ultimately credited some women writers, such as Maria Edgeworth, for spurring his move into historical romance. In the postscript to Waverley (1829), Scott cites Edgeworth and two other female authors, Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) and Anne MacVicar Grant (1755–1838), whose work he says prompted his own.20 Despite his gratitude, he goes to great pains to distinguish his writing from that of all three women. Edgeworth, he says, he emulates in a “distant degree,” as she is dealing with Irish subjects (5). The work of Elizabeth Hamilton, he claims, is “confined” to “rural habits,” while Anne MacVicar Grant’s work is “distinct from fictitious narrative.” But in acknowledging these female authors as having reinspired him—after he allegedly started Waverley but put it away in a drawer and mislaid it for some years—he ignores authors who might more obviously be classed as his predecessors. Nowhere does he mention Jane or Anna Maria Porter, whom he apparently had known since childhood, information that would make his omission all the more striking.21 By 1845, it could be claimed that Porter and Maria Edgeworth followed Scott into historical fiction, after he “made this way of writing at once popular and catching.”22
Much remains to be said about the Porters’ complex personal and authorial relationship to Scott.23 It is enough to note here that Jane Porter felt the lack of homage from the Waverley author strongly. Indeed, she and her sister believed that the writer stole his ideas for, if not actual material from, their works. In 1819, Anna Maria writes to Jane that the Waverley author “evidently uses our novels as a sort of store house” from which “he draws unobserved whatever odd bit of furniture strikes his fancy for his own pompous edifice. I do not say he steals the thing itself, but the idea & fashion of it, and if he had the honesty to shew that he thought well of our writings, by a hand or two of such commendation as he liberally give to works that have no resemblance to his own, I should say the conduct was fair and allowable. But I quarrel with the self-interestedness of working the hints we give him, yet never owning that he does” (HL, POR 819). It is important to note that Scott was not the only author against whom the Porter sisters leveled charges of neglect or outright theft. In another letter to her sister Jane in 1815, Anna Maria complains that she reads poet Robert Southey’s work with a little “mist-rising” because he has “rifled” “unacknowledged” all of the “best parts” of one of her novels (728). A letter from Jane to Anna Maria shows that she agrees with her sister. Jane writes of Southey as having stolen from their novels in his latest poem, complaining, “It is monstrous how these poets play the vampire with our works.—I beg of you to read it.—Some time or other, I think I shall be provoked to give the public the real Genealogy of these matters” (1707).
For many years, Porter appears to have resisted being so provoked. It is possible that she had a hand in one of the published reviews of Duke Christian, which refers to Porter as the author of a “new species … of literary fiction” and to Scott as “only a follower in her wake.”24 Further references to her fictional innovations would follow, eventually in a work to which she signed her own name. In her “The Author to Her Friendly Readers,” a preface to the Standard Novels edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw (1831), she broke her silence, laying out the matter as she had long seen it. There, she claims that it was “Sir Walter Scott; who did me the honor to adopt the style or class of novel of which ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw’ was the first:—a class which, uniting the personages and facts of real history or biography, with a combining and illustrative machinery of the imagination, formed a new species of writing in that day.”25 She reiterates that her Thaddeus of Warsaw and Scottish Chiefs were “both published in England, and translated into various languages abroad, many years before the literary wonder of Scotland gave to the world his transcendent story of Waverley” (vi).
Porter’s claims were received with skepticism. One critic published a sarcastic letter addressed to Porter, in which he mocks her with, “What is Sir Walter Scott but an imitator of Miss Jane Porter?”26 The letter writer, who signs himself “Peter Puff,” comments directly on Porter’s claims of having been the first to form a new species of writing: “Believe us, Miss Porter, when we read this fine passage, we blushed as red as our morocco slippers at our disgraceful ignorance. Well acquainted with your novels as we were, and having a little more intimate acquaintance with Sir Walter Scott’s, we assure you we never discovered that Sir Walter had adopted the style of your romances, until you so kindly informed us that such was the case. When the great truth at last flashed on our minds, it is impossible to describe our feelings” (553). Puff tears into Porter for her supposed lack of modesty and teases her about who precisely has copied—or even plagiarized—from whom. Porter’s own statements, Puff writes, “render any criticism on your works almost superfluous” (556). He scornfully claims that the world has been unaware that “Sir Walter Scott has been enjoying the honours rightly due to Miss Porter!” (553). Scott, he writes, “has been made a baronet by George IV, while you, Immortal Madam, have languished in untitled obscurity, and your works been read only by the discerning devourers of circulating libraries!” Scott’s favors from George IV in comparison to Porter’s lack of them ran deeper than this writer may have known.
“I have a hope”: Jane Porter’s Dream of Independence
Given Porter’s longstanding sense of Scott’s literary debt to her, it is not surprising that Scott himself (or at least the idea of Scott) played a role in her writing of Duke Christian. In one of Jane Porter’s long, private letters to her brother Robert, she gives an account of the genesis of her royal romance. In September 1821, Jane asks Robert to save her letter, “because hereafter, I may like to recall to memory, some exact account … on the principle of the work I have in meditation” (HL, POR 2045). When she had an occasion to recall to memory those circumstances to the public many years later, Porter elected to gloss over and even to alter some of the key details. Some of those suppressed particulars relate to flattering comparisons to Scott, while others relate to her hopes for the work as a vehicle for a comfortable old age.
In her old age, as we have seen, Porter led readers to believe that she had been “commanded” by George IV through Clarke to write Duke Christian. This is at best a partial version of events. If her 1821 letter is the more accurate account, as seems likely, the major player in forwarding the idea of a work of fiction based on the king’s ancestors was not Clarke but Sir Andrew Halliday (1781–1839), physician to the duke of Clarence, later William IV. Halliday, himself an author, published treatises on lunatic asylums and on military and historical subjects, and he first met the Porter sisters on their visit to Carlton House. As Jane tells Robert,
last May, when I went up to town, to personally thank Dr. Clarke for the really handsome manner in which he had at last obtained the Royal Permission for the Dedication of your Work [Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, &c. &c.: During the Years 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820 (1821)], I was, as I before mentioned to you, then so very unwell that I could not go over Carlton House with the good Doctor, who wished to shew Maria its state-rooms & c.—I remained below in the Library, with Sir Andrew Haliday [sic], a man of Letters, and a warm-hearted Scotsman.—I had never seen him before; but he soon got on my old ground of William Wallace; and I found that book had given me a friend in him. (HL, POR 2045)
Halliday and Porter had a conversation about literary subjects, and it was he who introduced the idea of her writing a historical romance about royal ancestors. The hook that Halliday used to get Jane Porter’s rapt attention was a story comparing her novels to Scott’s.
Halliday is said to have confessed to Porter that, one year earlier, in the very room in which they were talking, the king and Scott had had a conversation. After “much admiration” was “expressed of the Tales of My Landlord and Waverley,” Halliday told Scott, “Well Sir, who ever may be the author of those Novels; you, Sir Walter, must allow that the foundations of them all, were laid by Miss Porter in her Scottish Chiefs.” (HL, POR 2045). Scott’s reply was said to be, “I grant it … there is something in what you say.” One can only imagine how gratifying a story like this must have been to Porter. This compliment alone might have been enough to predispose her toward Halliday’s project. “Whether this conversation had made the king think more highly of my talents, I know not,” Jane tells Robert, “but in the continuation of our discourse Sir Andrew suddenly asked me, whether I had ever turned my mind towards the interesting annals of His Majesty’s Hanoverian ancestors?” Porter was ashamed to admit she had not, as she said they had never entered her head.
Halliday suggested as a subject for her next historical romance the admirable Duke Christian of Brunswick Luneburg. She reports that Halliday added, “with a peculiar emphasis, ‘I can assure you, nothing would please the king so much, as your writing a romance on that hero!’” This line seems to have hit Porter like a bolt of lightning: “I was struck with Sir Andrew’s manner; and with the opening that Providence appeared to be laying before me, for some future advantage, possibly, to myself and family; and in some emotion at heart, for I did not let it be seen, I replied, that nothing would delight me more, if the subject really struck my feelings; for without the sort of inspiration which enthusiasm gives, I could do nothing.—And in this, I said the fact” (HL, POR 2045). Based on her first thoughts of potential future advantage, Porter promised to go home, read the book Halliday had loaned to her treating the archives of Brunswick, and write to him about whether she believed she could manage the subject. She ended the conference with the request not to mention the matter to anyone. The exception to this dictum was, of course, Clarke and the king, to whom Halliday was to bring the matter. Porter was assured that, once an agreement had been reached, the matter would remain a secret until the novel was published.
Porter’s letter to her brother is explicit about the kind of future advantage Porter imagines might result from her taking on the royal assignment: “I have a hope, that hereafter Maria’s old age & mine may be rendered moderately independent by some pension from His Majesty. Indeed, I think, should my work really please him, that he may volunteer such a work in his favour” (HL, POR 2045). In this wish, she claims also to be thinking of Robert. Jane writes, “should we get any pension from the king, then, my beloved Robert, of not another guinea would we ever again so cruelly deprive you.” Her subsequent letters to her brother reinforce her private wishes, adding the additional wrinkle—apparently alluded to by Halliday—that it was the king’s intention to bestow another knighthood on Sir Robert as soon as Jane would present the Royal Library with her work on the Brunswick hero (2047).27
A friendship with Halliday developed quickly, but the historical romance came along slowly. By January 1823, Jane tells Robert that she “shall leave no stone unturned in interest for you” but that her “own work [i.e., Duke Christian] has not advanced”; she then hopes to finish it by May, if she is able to make herself a hermit (HL, POR 2059). By the following November she anticipates its publication in January of 1824, and it was finally published in February. When the work was about to launch, Porter began her attempts to use it to secure herself a pension. She tells Robert, “by the time you could arrive here … I should have fully known whether I am to get anything for ourselves, from the Royal munificence. I mean to consult Lady Anne Barnard about properly presenting the Work, when it is ready; and how to put the K[ing]—in possession of the fact, that a pension would be most gratefully received.—I would briefly give a story of ourselves to H. M.—to Interest, but not to lower us in any way. The Sentiments of my Work, dearest Robert, are loyal to the heart, and they are Magna Charta!—I ‘would not flatter Cesar for his disdain!’ Hence, if I win gold, I may wear it honourably” (2067). She ends her letter feeling optimistic about the possibility of Duke Christian prompting a diplomatic post for Robert and reiterates, “should it yield me a pension too, how it would smooth our paths every where!”
The path did not run smooth. In Porter’s dedication of Duke Christian to George IV, she describes him as “a father in the bosom of his family” in his “comprehensive care” over an empire.28 But he did not immediately take the flattering hint to offer charity to her as a poor relation of the nation. When the work was published, the king was confined to bed with gout (HL, POR 2068–69). Seeing this as a stroke of bad luck, Porter bemoaned the fact that the only way the book could be presented to the king was through the librarian and that she would therefore not have the chance to deliver her plea for a pension or make her case for royal charity directly to the king. Porter heard thirdhand from Halliday that the king was pleased with her book, but she expressed doubt about whether a pension would be the reward for her efforts.
Consoling herself that a warm public reception would compensate for the lack of notice from the king, she writes that she is “perfectly satisfied all will be for the ultimate Best” and believes her “Reputation, seems so heightened by the work itself, that my profits hereafter, can hardly fail of increasing” (HL, POR 2069). It may ring a bit false, but she proclaims herself “a hundred-fold more satisfied with success from the Public, than even a large Income” from the king. Porter overestimated the public; though Duke Christian received several positive reviews, readers did not welcome it as warmly as they had her previous novels. In the end, Porter got neither the wished-for pension to serve her in old age nor the anticipated renewal of public acclaim.
Porter’s Duke Christian is a novel difficult to summarize. It features a signature Porter hero—perfect in filial duty, unlucky in love, fortunate in battle, and universally admired (especially by women) for his moral uprightness. Christian is one of seven brothers, who, at their father’s deathbed, draw lots to see which will carry on the family line, the rest of them to live celibate. Though the father hoped that Christian would draw the lot, it was instead his brother George to whom that honor fell. Christian had been secretly betrothed to the young orphan Adelheid, who had been taken in by Christian’s family and raised as his sister. He is distraught but committed to his promise to his father, rather than to his promise to Adelheid, whom he declared to be the only woman he could ever love. Conveniently, Adelheid dies by the end of volume one, and Christian is free to be hopelessly beloved by other women for the rest of the novel.
Next, he travels to England with his brother George. There he meets the daughter of England’s James I, Princess Elizabeth, who reminds him of Adelheid and whom he admires extremely. She falls in love with Christian, but when she learns that he cannot marry, she ultimately gives her hand to Frederick V. (In volume 3, she becomes the short-lived queen of Bohemia.) The England portion of the novel also features William Shakespeare as a character. Shakespeare and Duke Christian are introduced to each other (by King James’s son Henry) as mutual admirers (2: 268). Christian determines Shakespeare to be “a statesman—a sage, a hero—every thing!” and like a being from another sphere (272). Later, Shakespeare serves as the brothers’ escort to Dover as they return to Germany (388).
Back on the Continent, there are many battles, treacheries, and women who cross-dress to advance the battles and forestall the treacheries. At the end of the novel, Elizabeth, having given birth to a daughter, Sophia, and being reconciled to the foolishly misled Frederick, puts the hand of her husband into Christian’s with a “convulsive sigh” (3: 396). Elizabeth and Christian are described as like brother and sister. Brother George fulfills his promise to reproduce and marries Eleanor of Darmstadt. Their friend Wulfenbuttel marries Isabel de Vere, whom he long thought was a male page but who reveals herself a woman. Elizabeth and Frederick’s daughter, Sophia, is baptized, with the hope that she will “live to take her part in binding both countries in the firmest bonds of peace” (398). As readers would have known, Sophia would grow up to become the mother of Great Britain’s first Hanoverian king, George I.
If the novel is difficult to recap, however, its reception is not. Despite Porter’s best hopes, it was no runaway success. Her publishers prepared a large print run of 3,000, in anticipation of brisk sales that did not materialize, though the book enjoyed an American audience and was translated into French and German (Longman Archives, Reel 39 H11 22).29 Still, for all this, Duke Christian received minimal public notice, primarily in short, mildly enthusiastic reviews. The New Monthly Magazine acknowledges that Porter’s “merits as a novelist” are “well known” but says that Duke Christian “does not … equal some of Miss Porter’s former productions.”30 The plot, the reviewer claims, wants unity, and the love plots are not well managed, though the martial descriptions are complimented. The period Porter has chosen is considered favorable to romance, but some elements of the book are called vapid. An 1825 letter from the Longman publishing house refers to the “non success of Duke Christian,” for which they had negotiated more handsome terms than for Porter’s past productions. As a result of the novel’s modest showing, the Longmans, both long-time publishers and personal friends, indicate that they cannot offer so generous an advance for any of Porter’s future works.31
For some months after Duke Christian’s publication, Porter hung on to the hope that she would emerge a financial winner. She admitted (and then brushed off) a concern that would turn out to be prescient. She acknowledges to her brother Robert that, “had the work sunk in the esteem of the World,” she “might have been branded as a Court-flatterer, & therefore lost the reputation for a High Principle, which is the stronghold of my usefulness as a Writer, and of my eminent station in society” (HL, POR 2069). Porter’s worst fear was realized—posthumously, if not during her lifetime. She emerged in literary history as a royal sycophant, especially when judged alongside Austen.
Porter was nearly fifty years old when Duke Christian was published. One wonders if she would have accepted the royal assignment had she been invited to consider it earlier in her life, when her literary fortunes were greater and her future more promising. Because her family was relatively status conscious, and because they were frequently in debt, it is possible that Porter would have agreed to write such a work even at the height of her popularity. (More interesting to speculate about, perhaps, is whether Austen, were she in Porter’s late-life shoes, would have been so steadfast in her refusal.) Porter’s reputation as a court toady was sealed long before it was known that she took on the project with fervent wishes for financial independence in old age. For this reason, we ought to revisit the Duke Christian episode to examine its context, seeing this moment in her career in the larger framework of British women writers’ late-life challenges and quests for financial independence.
It was not long after Duke Christian was published that Jane Porter’s hopes of obtaining a pension from the king began to dwindle. She writes, “from all accounts, I now think, there is 3 chances in 4, no proposal whatever of any Literary Golden Laurel, will be afforded to me”; she consoles herself that she has “ample fame from the royal House” and that the book may do Robert’s own appearance some good as well (HL, POR 2069). Despite her continued machinations, she received no royal accolades in return for her literary labors. She watched as over the coming years her contemporaries, some of them female, got the pension she so coveted. Ultimately, her dashed hopes turned to anger.
Her rancor is evident in a biographical essay she appears to have written for the Edinburgh Literary Gazette in 1829. The draft copy, in her own hand with corrections, differs in significant ways from what was ultimately published in the journal, so that even if the memoir was not written by her, we might conclude that it had her approbation. The essay outlines her long literary career, and when describing in the third person Porter’s authorship of Duke Christian, it includes an appended note in a more rushed hand:
Note—We are sorry to learn that Miss Porter has never yet received even the slightest mark of approbation from our own Sovereign—Though written with the avowed purpose of making the renown of his Majesty’s illustrious Ancestors more familiar to the British Public “Duke Christian” has hitherto escaped the Royal Notice—so we must suppose—and we account for it in this way. Dr. Clarke had left the Royal Library before it was published—His successor was too anxiously engaged in seeking his own advancement to care much for the views or feelings of authors and the present Librarian has neither health nor temper to become an available Patron of Literature.32
What this appended footnote sets out to accomplish is unclear, though it does vent frustration with George IV and his librarians. An attempt to blame the librarians would seem to open up a space for the king to right their alleged wrongs. Disappointments from Duke Christian—financial and otherwise— continued to affect Porter’s career many years hence. As the draft memoir’s angry footnote suggests, Porter (or some supporter of hers) acutely felt the failure of that project five years later. For a myriad of reasons, she did not enjoy fame or fortune from any single-authored, full-length work after Duke Christian.33 Was she trying to prod the king into belatedly recognizing her efforts?
The note was not published as written in the “Memoir of Miss Jane Porter,” whether because of its author’s second thoughts, the editor’s judgment, or some other reason. The printed version includes this more tempered statement: “We are not aware, however, that Miss Porter has ever received for [Duke Christian] even the slightest mark of approbation from our own gracious monarch, whose reign has not been more distinguished by the overthrow of Napoleon, than by the patronage so unweariedly extended to the arts and sciences.”34 If George IV ever read this sentence, there is no record of its having spurred him to action. The anonymous memoir of Jane Porter was published in late September of 1829; by late June 1830, George IV was dead.
For Porter, more worrying deaths were to follow. She no longer needed to struggle to secure the financial futures of her sister and her elderly mother; both died in the early 1830s. Jane Porter would live for more than twenty-five years after the publication of Duke Christian, earning an irregular income through miscellaneous writing. Her next best option for financial support would have been her brothers. She must have known, as her contemporaries would not have, that this avenue was not a promising one. She received modest assistance from her diplomat darling brother, Robert, by then a widower living in South America, himself in chronic financial trouble. Jane spent significant amounts of time wrangling with his debtors throughout his life and as his executor after his death in 1842, when he left debts in excess of £1,500.35
Ultimately, she lived with her physician and author brother, William Ogilvie Porter (1774–1850), with whom she had a conflicted relationship and whose existence she often did not acknowledge in her correspondence. In her late middle age, he frequently disappointed her through what she saw as his greed and miserliness and his shirking of filial duty. Though she had joined him in Bristol by 1844, she says he made it clear to her that his “tied-up circumstances” meant that his only assistance to her would be a roof over her head; she claims he never inquired into her circumstances or what she calls her “ways and means.”36 Unless she wanted to or could keep producing written work—something she felt the pressure of and increasingly found exhausting—Porter needed to find another route to support herself.
British Women Writers, Pensions, and the Royal Bounty
Though described by a contemporary and well-wisher as “totally destitute or nearly so,” Porter was not among the truly hard-luck cases among the elderly in her own day.37 Before and after she moved in with her brother William, she often found shelter as a houseguest, circulating for weeks and months at a time among her wealthy friends, presumably joining them at table, asking them to frank her letters, and relying on their servants. This was a kind of genteel poverty. For the less fortunate, few of these advantages were possible. Many of the impoverished English elderly received financial help through the parish Poor Law authority. Small payments of two or three shillings per week were the nineteenth-century norm, a modest amount equivalent to the average income that workers in rural areas earned.38 An astounding “seventy percent of all women in England, married or unmarried, rich or poor, who were seventy years of age or more were receiving regular cash assistance … during any one week” via Poor Law assistance, along with about half the men from that group. For people in their sixties, the proportion fell to half of women and a lesser proportion of men.39 Those not receiving Poor Law aid, as David Thomson points out, included “the wealthy, the propertied and the salaried; persons with pensions, superannuations, allowances or annuities from former service to government, military or private employers; persons who remained in employment … and persons sheltered at community expense in hospitals, charity housing, asylums, and workhouses” (268). Jane Porter assiduously sought to join the pensioners and just as assiduously worked to remain out of the category of laborers or the publicly maintained. Her former fame shielded her from the fate of the majority of the elderly poor, as she received more exceptional forms of financial help.
Royal charity (which one scholar dubs the “welfare monarchy”) expanded during the reign of George III and exploded during Victoria’s rule, although across that period Parliament worked to rein in the Crown’s civil list expenditures, including pensions.40 Civil list monies (established under George III, with the surrender to Parliament of income arising from hereditary land revenues) included the sum assigned by the government to cover both the expenses of the sovereign and his or her family and some expenditures of the state, such as pensions. The history of royal pensions is a complicated one, as, after George III and before Queen Victoria, pensions could derive from four sources: the civil list pensions of England, the civil list pensions of Ireland, the pensions charged upon the hereditary revenues of Scotland, and the pensions charged on the 4½ percent duties. In short, during the reign of George III and thereafter, certain kinds of royal preferment became increasingly more difficult to get, as the government capped the amount sovereigns could spend annually.
Under George III, the government also curtailed the practice of discharging royal debts incurred from civil list expenditures, something that had routinely been done previously, often to the extent of hundreds of thousands of pounds. During the Regency, an auditor was put in place for the civil list for the first time. By the time William IV came to the throne in 1830, English civil list pensions had been reduced from nearly £100,000 pounds to approximately £75,000.41 At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, “in lieu of the pension list of £75,000, her Majesty was empowered to grant pensions annually to the extent of £1,200” (May 1: 166). The 1837 formation of the Select Committee on Pensions meant close scrutiny of how such monies were being spent, something that apparently prompted many to resign their pensions. This period of increased pension regulation roughly corresponds with Porter’s lifetime, as well as with the late lives of the first generations of professional women writers. Porter gained her knowledge of pensions during what in retrospect seem to have been their boom years, but with each successive monarch, she witnessed the pension system undergo further belt tightening.
Civil list and royal pensions were the most sought after of the available options for royal charity. As Victorian historian Thomas Erskine May put it, “No branch of the public expenditure was regarded with so much jealousy as that arising out of the unrestricted power of granting pensions by the Crown” (May 1: 173). Under George III, when there was “no limit to the amount of the pensions so long as the civil list could meet the demand,” pensions were awarded to several noted intellectual women. Writer Elizabeth Hamilton was awarded a royal pension in 1804, and before her, Bluestocking artist and letter writer Mary Delany (1700–1788) received a pension of £300 per annum and a house at Windsor.42 Pension monies could be quite generous—the celebrated Corsican politician Pasquale Paoli (1725–1807) received a civil list pension estimated at £1,500 per annum—and they could be transferred to spouses or kin; for example, military man and courtier Sir Herbert Taylor (1775–1839) received a pension of £1,000, which passed after his death to his widow.43
In her initial quest for a pension, Porter dealt not with the generous pension-giver George III but with his dissolute son. Despite his early spendthrift ways, however, George IV had kept up some of his father’s charitable impulses, as a patron of artists and a friend to widows and orphans (Porchaska 39). Some of them he knew personally. In 1825, he offered a royal pension to the playwright John O’Keeffe (1747–1833). According to reports given to the king, O’Keeffe was “stone blind,” and George IV acknowledged he “knew a little of him formerly.”44 The king did not limit his support of needy authors to pensions; he gave the Literary Fund for Indigent Authors (the Royal Literary Fund) a total of £5,000 over twenty-five years (Porchaska 39). His personal spending was great, however, and “applications for royal favour bombarded the Palace from all sides” (41). Porter had good reason to hope for preferment from him after writing her royal historical novel, but her case may have come at the wrong time, or perhaps her personal circumstances or even her writings (despite Halliday’s account) did not appeal to the monarch.
It was not merely the fact that she was a female author that prevented her success, as other women were more fortunate in their supplications. Anne MacVicar Grant (1755–1838) succeeded where Porter had failed. In 1825, Grant secured a royal pension from George IV, with the assistance and support of her powerful male friends among the Scottish literati. According to her son, Grant’s path to the royal pension was cleared by the “joint representation of Sir William Arbuthnot, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, Mr. Henry Mackenzie (author of the Man of Feeling), Sir Robert Liston, and Principal Baird, who, in the memorial presented on the occasion in Mrs. Grant’s behalf, which was written by Sir Walter Scott, attest their opinion that ‘the character and talents of Mrs. Grant have long rendered her not only a useful and estimable member of society, but one eminent for the services she has rendered to the cause of religion, morality, knowledge, and taste.’”45 Though her son’s memoir of his mother does not acknowledge it, Anne Grant’s case was also presented directly from her own pen in a petition to George IV. Grant’s compellingly told life story was far more moving than anything Porter could narrate.46 Porter’s situation—that of an “old maid” novelist, with a celebrated brother and an equally well-known author-sister—pales in comparison to Grant’s challenging circumstances. In addition, Porter did not or could not assemble the pantheon of male power that Grant attracted in old age.
Porter’s senior by twenty years, Grant was already an old woman in the 1820s. She had turned to writing after her husband’s death, enjoying great success with her Letters from the Mountains (1806), Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland (1811), and poetic works. The proceeds from this writing were said to have allowed her to raise, educate, and set up in life her eight children. As it turned out, all but two of them had died by the early 1820s, two sons in military service and several daughters from illness. (Another daughter, ill at the time of Grant’s petition, would also pass away.) As a final stroke of personal tragedy, Grant had been made lame from a fall. After communicating these details in her petition to the king, she modestly declares reluctance to approach him for assistance. She writes that she “could hardly be in any circumstances reconciled to it, otherwise than by the consciousness that in circumstances of great affliction and successive calamity, she has hitherto neglected no means within her power to avert such a necessity; and that it is not until it has pleased God in so many respects to diminish her powers of exertion and to deprive her of the natural supports to whom she looked for assistance in her declining age, she now prefers her claim for such share of the Public Bounty as your Majesty’s Generosity may think proper to assign” (BL Add. 38300 f. 11).47 The result of her request was a pension of £100, which Grant collected for the remaining dozen years of her life (Grant 1: 29). Scott’s correspondence demonstrates that Grant may have been less humble—and more designing—than she declares in her petition. She apparently balked at the sum she was being offered. Scott expresses surprise, as he tells a friend that securing a pension is like “hunting a pig with a soap’d tail, monstrous apt to slip through your fingers.”48
That Scott was among those who led the charge for Grant—and that George IV would choose to reward Grant when he continued to pass over Porter—must have been a hard pill for Porter to swallow. To make matters worse, in 1837, the relatively well off Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) (1776?–1859) was granted a generous civil list pension of £300 per year.49 Lord Melbourne is said to have written that he “had much pleasure in doing that which may in some degree alleviate the pressure of the infirmity under which, I very deeply lament to hear that you are suffering” (Morgan 2: 420). Lady Morgan’s infirmity was her failing eyesight, though it improved enough for her to read and write, most notably her Woman and Master (1840), which one reviewer described as “a work without one claim to notice except the antiquity of its author.”50 It is said that even on the last day of her life, Morgan had “called for her desk and papers and begun to write a letter on business but on the entrance of her doctor reluctantly gave up her pen” (547–48). Porter—despite her greater financial need—was again passed over for a pension in favor of an acquaintance and rival.
Porter’s quest, which had begun in 1821 with Duke Christian, continued to within a month of her death, in 1850. From the late 1830s onward, she regularly appealed to the crown and the government for financial assistance. Aware that June was the month in which new pensions were generally bestowed, her campaigns would begin some months earlier.51 Each year she wrote a series of letters to a dizzying number of powerful people, some of her accounts more accurate than others and all highly pathetic. Typical among them is her 1844 letter to Prince Albert, with a petition to Queen Victoria, describing her “lonely and enfeebled age” and asking for “some small annual Pension, from any public Fund under your Majesty’s benign control for such benevolent purposes,” that would “afford a simple but respectable shelter and subsistence, to the last days, of a once honoured contributor to the literary service of her country during a period of above Fifty years!”52 To add insult to injury, given the Duke Christian episode, Porter received one reply from Sir Robert Peel informing her that such pensions were awarded only to those who had given “personal Service to the Sovereign, Eminent public Service, and distinguished literary or scientific merit.”53
We might say now that it was foolish of Porter to set her sights on a royal or civil list pension—that it was akin to hoping to win the lottery—but her hopes were not outlandish. Her celebrity was on a par with that of those selected, even if her literary stock had fallen sharply after Scott turned novelist. Also, Porter had some knowledge of the workings of the patronage system, which she may have come by as a result of her work on behalf of her diplomat brother, Robert. (Porter’s mother had a widow’s pension, from her husband’s military service, so the family knew well the stability that regular income promised.) In the 1830s and 1840s, Porter even spearheaded successful campaigns for funds from the Royal Bounty for at least two needy women friends: Sarah Belzoni (1783–1870), widow of the famed Egyptologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823). (In a strange twist of fate, Mrs. Belzoni was awarded a civil list pension the year after Porter’s death.)54 Porter’s correspondence mentions Mrs. Belzoni having been paid in excess of £600 pounds in one-time assistance from the Royal Bounty; this was more than Porter herself would ultimately receive.55 The second woman Porter championed was Mrs. Dwyer, the widowed half-sister of naval war hero—and Porter’s lifelong unrequited love—Sir Sidney Smith (1764–1840). Porter organized the campaign to raise funds for Dwyer, netting £400, a good portion of it donated by Queen Victoria; it was apparently used to purchase an annuity.56 Sir Sidney Smith himself had enjoyed a £1,000 pension granted from the 4½ percent duties.57
Porter came to know a good deal about who had been recognized with a pension. She more than once named their names in the hopes of being placed among them. She asked Prime Minister Peel in 1842 to consider her “not undeserving of some share in the munificent provision which has at different times been dispensed to the merits, or necessities, of British authors and authoresses;—and in my own time, on Mr. Thomas Campbell, Mr. Thomas Moore, Mrs. Somerville, Lady Morgan, and several others.”58 Science writer Mary Somerville (1780–1872) had been awarded a civil list pension of £200 in 1835, increased to £300 in the face of further financial difficulties.59
Poet Moore (1779–1852), who struggled with late-life financial difficulties, outlived all of his children, and by his own account was “sinking into a mere vegetable” in the late 1840s, had been given a royal pension in 1835 (£300; Select 69) and a civil list pension in 1850.60 Other names might have been added to Porter’s list, as they were published in the 1838 Select Committee on Pensions report, along with their ages, pension amounts, and details about why they were considered worthy. A section of the report is devoted to describing “Pensions Connected with Literary and Scientific Eminence, and with Useful Inventions and Attainments in the Arts” (66). Named there, and unnamed by Porter, is Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855), “authoress,” age 51, receiving £100 per year (69). Most of the women included in the 1838 list are described as worthy because they are daughters or widows of eminent men, but several were authors in their own right.
Porter regularly asked the prime minister “to award to her, what ever donation of Pension, his goodness may deem proper to bestow” (BL Add. 40510 f. 76). Peel’s repeated rejections inform her that he cannot recommend her for a pension, that the whole amount of the Pension Fund is spoken for during the current year, that there is no opening, and that he never makes promises for the future (40522 ff. 188). She became more bold in 1844, writing to a friend asking him to take up her case with Peel. She pleads, “I feel that you take a too sincere interest in the final result of my recently inspired Hopes towards some little Establishment, from a certain High Quarter for my future comfort in Life—Lonely, and desolated, as it has become in my old age!—not to excuse the present expression of an awakened anxiety concerning it.”61 Porter’s idea is to have her friend work behind the scenes to secure for her the pension of the recently deceased poet, Campbell (1777–1844): “Yesterday, I saw in a Newspaper of the Day, a Notice of the Death of Mr. Thomas Campbell, the Well-known Poet of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ & C. at Boulogne—I believe he for many years possessed a Pension from Government, in honour of his Poetical Works:—What its amount was, I do not know.—But it has struck me, that if, with Propriety!—The Premier, at this favourable moment, of a Literary Vacancy having thus occurred in the Pension Lists, this Goodness might probably embrace the occasion to bestow it upon me.”62
Porter’s reasons for considering herself deserving are then detailed. It is unclear whether Porter knew more of Campbell’s situation than she lets on here, as the two authors had been friendly. The 1838 report published his pension amount as £184 (Select 67), a sum he had been awarded long before, apparently used to support his widowed mother and sisters.63 In giving her reasons for thinking herself worthy to replace Campbell on the pension list, Porter tells her friend that “Time, does indeed wear on me!” and calls herself “a Sojourner with Friends alone!” (neglecting to mention that her miserly brother William was still alive). She writes that she is in the decline of life as well as in a decline of health (BL Add. 40547 f. 147). She speaks of her fear that she may “perhaps die under some one of [her friends’] kind roofs (not having one of my own!).” This last was a repeatedly voiced worry in her letters.
Ultimately, Porter claimed she was no longer able to earn a living by writing. Throughout the 1820s she was doggedly pursuing authorship, but by the 1840s, she writes about being physically unable to continue what had been her livelihood. She frequently reports in her letters that she is no longer able to take up her pen. The fact that so many of her letters survive from this time may prompt us to question her veracity, but she obviously felt more able to compose short, formulaic begging letters or to work toward republishing her earlier novels than to engage in writing new, full-length imaginative works. Begging may not be the appropriate term for Porter’s efforts, however, as she refused to become a public charity case. When some supporters tried to organize a subscription to raise money for her shortly after her brother’s death, she recoiled. She replied that a public subscription campaign would “destroy all my future comfort in life” because it would not allow her to live by her fixed principle of “self-dependence, under God.”64 In the same letter, though, she reiterates her desire for a “humble home” (HL, POR 2171). Porter wanted charity, without being made a visible charity case.
Her epistolary requests did prove profitable, even if not in the way she had first envisioned. Countless hours netted her several one-time funds from the Royal Bounty and the Royal Literary Fund, which she appears to have accepted without scruple. The first was apparently a grant of £100 from Queen Victoria made to her in 1839.65 In a stroke of very bad luck, Porter lost the money when the bank in which she deposited it failed.66 In 1842, after her brother’s death, she received £50 from the Royal Literary Fund.67 In 1845, Peel awarded her a one-time grant of £150 pounds, while refusing the pension request.68 In October 1846, new Prime Minister Lord Russell wrote that he intended to ask Queen Victoria to grant Porter another one-time amount of £200 and wrote in terms more encouraging than Peel ever had to say that this would not prevent her from being considered for a pension in the future.69 It appears that the sum was not made available to her until May 1848, unless Russell provided her with a second such amount, which seems unlikely.70
During this period, Porter explored other avenues for financial independence. Letters and memos from the 1840s describe her business affairs. Early in the decade, prior to moving in with her brother William, Jane wrote letters looking for a place to live rent free. She asked Leopold I, King of the Belgians, “for a Free Cottage, at Esher, or Claremont,” or for an apartment, when one becomes vacant, at Hampton Court Palace.71 Other documents speak of her holding a life annuity on government security. It was perhaps this annuity that was purchased in the mid-1840s for £400, at a return of £40 a year, possibly with her Royal Bounty and republishing monies.72 This may have been the first time in more than three decades that Porter was not struggling to repay family debts. The annuity purchase indicates clearly the importance Porter placed on having a regular sum paid out to her twice yearly.73
Other aged authors were more inventive—or more fortunate—in their quests for financial independence. Among the fortunate, we might count Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). When she became a widow, Bluestocking writer Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800) settled a pension on her friend, as she had on Sarah Fielding (1710–68).74 The idea of wealthy women settling annuities on admired authors had entered the public imagination to a significant enough degree that it features in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, when Edward Ferrars teases Marianne Dashwood that if she were to come into money, “the bulk of your fortune would be laid out in annuities on the authors or their heirs.”75 Porter seemed to have no friends willing to settle a pension on her, though they were generous in offering her places to stay with them, even long term.
More inventive approaches include William Hayley’s, about whom we heard in chapter 3. Hayley, poet and author of the Essay upon Old Maids, worked out a deal with a publisher to sell his then-unwritten memoirs, to be published posthumously, in return for an annuity until his death. Poet Robert Southey called Hayley “perhaps the only person who ever dealt with his posthumous reputation as a post-obit, and converted it into a present income.”76 The aforementioned actor John O’Keeffe, also a playwright, sold his remaining copyrights and unpublished plays in return for an annuity from Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden.77 Notable women writers of the era apparently did not or could not broker similar deals. In any case, Porter, though she annotated her papers in late life, did not have the where-withal to write a memoir and apparently had little unpublished work she was willing to sell.
She was more successful in adding new prefaces and postscripts to her still well-regarded novels. This effort was not without obstacles in that Porter found herself battling for the return of her copyright. After protracted legal wrangling, she settled with Richard Bentley (of the Standard Novels series), and she saw the revised texts of Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Scottish Chiefs, and The Pastor’s Fire-Side through to new illustrated editions. Her new publisher, George Virtue, paid her £200 for a preface to The Scottish Chiefs and for her remaining life interest in the copyright.78 In 1844, she even looks forward to the year 1852, when the copyright for Duke Christian will revert to her.79 Some months later, she writes of selling to Virtue the whole, entire, and exclusive copyright of three novels (presumably Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Scottish Chiefs, and The Pastor’s Fire-Side) for £300 pounds, except for rights to the works in the Standard Novels series.80 A new market for old novels was helped by the genre’s rise in status, as well as by Porter’s ability to claim that she was offering to the public improved, corrected versions. The extras included her collected recollective prefaces, postscripts, and appendices.
As well as financial vehicles, Porter’s paratexts served by her own admission as a substitute for writing an autobiography.81 They also kept her books in the public eye and gave her a platform to argue for her importance to literary history, as we saw earlier in her self-comparisons to Scott. But Porter’s attempts to keep her name before readers were not merely an act of personal vanity or even, as we saw in Piozzi’s case, a way to ensure future readers. Porter’s efforts were, if not a matter of life or death, a matter of relative comfort versus dependent genteel poverty. Fighting to regain the copyright to her novels and writing seemingly endless prefaces to her works, Porter was no doubt trying to resuscitate her once shining literary star. In monetary terms, her republication efforts seem to have been equally as successful as her quest for royal funds, each netting her several hundred pounds over the course of a decade. Some of this money, as we saw, was lost in a bank failure, and a portion of it likely went to pay off debts contracted years earlier, by herself and her brother. Neither the Royal Bounty nor the republications delivered the financial stability she sought.
Although a beneficiary of the “welfare monarchy,” Porter’s success was relatively modest. It was certainly because of these monies that Porter was able to continue to employ a maid, Elizabeth Bullen, to the end of her days. But when the novelist experienced a collapsed lung, she went into debt getting the medical treatment she was ordered to seek—a removal to the fresh air of Clifton.82 More than providing a context for these personal financial travails, however, what we see in Porter’s late-life attempts to support herself as an author is that producing new works in old age was not the only way for a woman writer of this era to make money. Porter poured her energies into trying to profit from her reputation. She capitalized on emerging methods and markets for doing so, demonstrating that even a literary star on the wane could turn old work into new capital. Trading on their former fame, elderly authors like Porter employed new tactics to try to make a living. Porter may well have been in the (until now, hidden) vanguard, with her indefatigable efforts to secure a pension and to revise and republish her novels. Others—more fortunate, pluckier, or more skilled—would serve as the visible exemplars.
Posthumous Porter
After her death, Porter’s novels enjoyed frequent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reprintings. Thaddeus of Warsaw went through at least eighty-four nineteenth-century editions and printings, and Scottish Chiefs went through roughly seventy-five editions and printings (Adams 264). Even The Pastor’s Fire-Side enjoyed some thirteen editions by 1892 (Jones 136). Duke Christian was not revived after 1824. The work that was to have made her late life financially easy failed even to enhance her literary reputation. Still, enough of her work survived for Porter (like Macaulay before her) to join the ranks of those authors repeatedly remembered as forgotten.
In 1897, Ina M. White, publishing portions of Porter’s diary, tells readers, “Few of us in the present remember the name of Jane Porter, and still fewer have ever read her works. The copies of Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, over which our parents bestowed their tears and enthusiasms, are now relegated to shelves in the lumber-room.”83 In 1905, Thaddeus of Warsaw was edited by E. A. Baker, for a series titled, “Half-Forgotten Books.”84 In 1924, Mona Wilson included a chapter on Porter in These Were Muses, which sets out to tell the stories of “all these ladies whose renown has faded.”85 Wilson concludes, “If Miss Porter’s ghost is still anxious about her fame, she must not expect a fresh outburst of enthusiasm for her works” (142). In 1931, Herbert Vaughan began his chapter on Jane, Anna Maria, and Robert Ker Porter by noting that it is “somewhat curious that the high reputation of the Porters should have collapsed so completely. The novels of Jane and Maria are absolutely unknown to the present generation, though, as a schoolboy, I can remember [Jane Porter’s novels] … being sold and read in cheap editions by young folk.”86 In a 1940 Notes & Queries article, a critic writes that “Jane Porter’s romance of The Scottish Chiefs … is now, perhaps, forgotten.”87 In one of the only successful attempts to date to write Porter’s biography, a 1942 master’s thesis, Robert Tate Irvine Jr. indicates that he has chosen to trace the comet trail of Porter’s fame, “to record its fast fading light before it goes out entirely” (3). These comments, made over such a long period, offer evidence of Porter’s tenuous staying power, mirroring the rhetoric of her supplicating letters and the republications of her novels in late life. It is possible that the republications themselves, implicitly admonishing readers not to lose sight of her, contributed to this perpetual “half-forgetting” over a century and a half.
Regardless, the twentieth century was not as bleak for Porter as it was for many of her female contemporaries. In 1921, the edition that would secure Porter’s twentieth-century endurance was published. The Scottish Chiefs was issued as a Scribner’s Illustrated Classic, featuring the illustrations of the renowned N. C. Wyeth.88 In 1950, the novel was featured in the Classics Illustrated comic book series as no. 67, several times reprinted over the next twenty years.89 Some claim that Porter’s novel served as an inspiration for Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995).90 Pickering and Chatto published a series, Varieties of the Female Gothic (2002), edited by Gary Kelly, which includes The Scottish Chiefs.91 In what might be termed Porter’s breakthrough in the twenty-first century, a paperback edition of The Scottish Chiefs (2007) has been edited by Fiona Price and published for classroom use.92 It seems that Porter’s posthumous luck is beginning to turn. Though her vision for creating a financially comfortable, independent life in old age while resting on her literary laurels was thwarted, her corollary efforts to ensure that the celebrity she enjoyed in her youth would be revived may well be—surprisingly—realizable.
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