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Romancing the Stone: "Perdita" Robinson in Wordsworth's London

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.1997.0022

1080-6547

Betsy Bolton,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Romancing the Stone: “Perdita” Robinson in Wordsworth’s London Betsy Bolton Apart from any more general indebtedness of the romantics to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale is particularly apt in relation to their themes of reawakening or revival, as for example entering into the figure of the six-year-old boy of Wordsworth’s Intimations ode and the ode’s idea of the adult’s world as “remains,” as of corpses. . . . Now here at the end of The Winter’s Tale a dead five- or six-year-old boy remains unaccounted for. —Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge 1 Twas at a theatre That I beheld this pair; the boy had been The pride and pleasure of all lookers-on In whatsoever place, but seemed in this A sort of alien scattered from the clouds. —William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seven 2 From that hour A maniac wild, the Alien Boy has been; His garb with sea-weeds fring’d, and his wan cheek The tablet of his mind, disorder’d, chang’d, Fading, and worn with care. —Mary Darby Robinson, “The Alien Boy” 3 While now discussed primarily as a woman poet of the early Romantic period, Mary Darby Robinson was perhaps best known to eighteenth-century audiences for her doubled role as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and real-life mistress to the Prince of Wales. Perhaps for this reason, recent discussions of her poetry have tended to focus on Robinson’s magazine and newspaper verse, reading Robinson as a producer (and figure) of popular culture. 4 I want to draw on this work in order to suggest that the relations between popular culture (associated with “feminine Romanticism”) and what we now think of as canonical writing (associated with “masculine Romanticism”) were more fluid and contested than is frequently acknowledged. 5 More specifically, I hope to [End Page 727] further the ongoing revaluation of Robinson’s work, and of her importance to the period, by considering the mingled effect of her poetry and public persona on the work of a more canonical male contemporary: William Wordsworth. In the pages that follow, I first sketch the general constellation of concerns that might link Book Seven of Wordsworth’s Prelude with the late Shakespearean romance of The Winter’s Tale; I then consider the ways Wordsworth’s portrayal of Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere, may also lead to reflections on the public persona of Mary Darby Robinson, actress and poet. The latter sections of the essay focus on the kind of conversation established by the Lyrical Ballads, Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, and Wordsworth’s musings (in Book Seven) on the commodified London culture of ballads, spectacular stage shows, and prostitution. I will suggest throughout that each poet responds to and actively disputes the aesthetic for which the other might be said to stand. I The first two epigraphs to this essay trace an odd and eccentric genealogy of romance, leading from the lost boy of The Winter’s Tale, through Wordsworth’s “Intimations” (woven as they are around the figure of a boy at once Pigmy-actor and a “mighty Prophet! Seer blest!”) to the embalmed boy, an “alien scattered from the clouds,” frozen in time amid the tumult of The Prelude’s London. But where Cavell suggests Mamillius and his death are forgotten in the wonder produced by his mother Hermione in her return to life, Wordsworth, lost in his wonder at the lovely boy, preserves the child and forgets the mother. Indeed, he goes to some effort to cancel her out. The mother, too, Was present, but of her I know no more Than hath been said, and scarcely at this time Do I remember her; but I behold The lovely boy as I beheld him then, Among the wretched and the falsely gay, Like one of those who walked with hair unsinged Amid the fiery furnace. (P, 392–99) The boy’s survival in this passage depends not on the poet’s knowledge (he knows no more of the boy than of his mother) but on his imaginative investment in the child’s existence. In the poet’s eyes, the boy becomes a triumphant martyr, surviving...