The most pretentious and the most aristocratic of the annuals was the ever famous “Book of Beauty,” edited for many years by the Countess of Blessington. Resting on a solid foundation of personal vanity (a superstructure never known to fail), it reached a heroic measure of success, and yielded an income which permitted the charming woman who conducted it to live as far beyond her means as any leader of the fashionable world in London. It was estimated that Lady Blessington earned by the “gorgeous inanities” she edited, and by the vapid tales she wrote, an income of from two thousand to three thousand pounds; but she would never have been paid so well for her work had she not supported her social position by an expenditure of twice that sum. Charles Greville, who spares no scorn he can heap upon her editorial methods, declares that she attained her ends “by puffing and stuffing, and untiring industry, by practising on the vanity of some and the good-nature of others. And though I never met with any one who had read her books, except the ‘Conversations with Byron,’ which are too good to be hers, they are unquestionably a source of considerable profit, and she takes her place confidently and complacently as one of the literary celebrities of her day.”
Greville’s instinctive unkindness leaves him often wide of the mark, but on this occasion we can only say that he might have spoken his truths more humanely. If Lady Blessington helped to create the demand which she supplied, if she turned her friendships to account, and made of hospitality a means to an end (a line of conduct not unknown to-day), she worked with unsparing diligence, and with a sort of desperate courage for over twenty years. Rival Books of Beauty were launched upon a surfeited market, but she maintained her precedence. For ten years she edited the “Keepsake,” and made it a source of revenue, until the unhappy bankruptcy and death of Heath. In her annuals we breathe the pure air of ducal households, and consort with the peeresses of England, turning condescendingly now and then to contemplate a rusticity so obviously artificial, it can be trusted never to offend. That her standard of art (she had no standard of letters) was acceptable to the British public is proved by the rapturous praise of critics and reviewers. Thackeray, indeed, professed to think the sumptuous ladies, who loll and languish in the pages of the year-book, underclad and indecorous; but this was in the spirit of hypercriticism. Hear rather how a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine” describes in a voice trembling with emotion the opulent charms of one of the Countess of Blessington’s “Beauties”:—
“There leans the tall and imperial form of the enchantress, with raven tresses surmounted by the cachemire of sparkling red; while her ringlets flow in exuberant waves over the full-formed neck; and barbaric pearls, each one worth a king’s ransom, rest in marvellous contrast with her dark and mysterious loveliness.”
“Here’s richness!” to quote our friend Mr. Squeers. Here’s something of which it is hard to think a public could ever tire. Yet sixteen years later, when the Countess of Blessington died in poverty and exile, but full of courage to the end, the “Examiner” tepidly observed that the probable extinction of the year-book “would be the least of the sad regrets attending her loss.”
For between 1823 and 1850 three hundred annuals had been published in England, and the end was very near. Exhausted nature was crying for release. It is terrible to find an able and honest writer like Miss Mitford editing a preposterous volume called the “Iris,” of inhuman bulk and superhuman inanity; a book which she well knew could never, under any press of circumstances, be read by mortal man or woman. There were annuals to meet every demand, and to please every class of purchaser. Comic annuals for those who hoped to laugh; a “Botanic Annual” for girls who took country walks with their governess; an “Oriental Annual” for readers of Byron and Moore; a “Landscape Annual” for lovers of nature; “The Christian Keepsake” for ladies of serious minds; and “The Protestant Annual” for those who feared that Christianity might possibly embrace the Romish Church. There were five annuals for English children; from one of which, “The Juvenile Keepsake,” I quote these lines, so admirably adapted to the childish mind. Newton is supposed to speak them in his study:—
Pure and ethereal essence, fairest light,
Come hither, and before my watchful eyes
Disclose thy hidden nature, and unbind
Thy mystic, fine-attenuated parts;
That so, intently marking, I the source