Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

'Though living in a palace,' wrote Sydney to Mrs. Lefanu, early in 1812, 'we have all the comfort and independence of a home.... As to me, I am every inch a wife, and so ends that brilliant thing that was Glorvina. N.B.--I intend to write a book to explode the vulgar idea of matrimony being the tomb of love. Matrimony is the real thing, and all before but leather and prunella.' In a letter to Lady Stanley she paints Sir Charles in the romantic colours appropriate to a novelist's husband. 'In love he is Sheridan's Falkland, and in his view of things there is a mélange of cynicism and sentiment that will never suffer him to be as happy as the inferior million that move about him. Marriage has taken nothing from the romance of his passion for me; and by bringing a sense of property with it, has rendered him more exigent and nervous about me than before.'

The luxury of Baron's Court was probably more than counterbalanced by the inevitable drawbacks of married life in a patron's household, where the husband, at least, was at that patron's beck and call. Before the end of the year, the Morgans were contemplating a modest establishment of their own, and Sydney had set to work upon a novel, the price of which was to furnish the new house. Mr. Owenson had died shortly after his daughter's marriage, and Lady Morgan persuaded her husband to settle in Dublin, in order that she might be near her sister and her many friends. A house was presently taken in Kildare Street, and Sir Charles, who had obtained the post of physician to the Marshalsea, set himself to establish a practice. Lady Morgan prided herself upon her housewifely talents, and in a letter dated May, 1813, she describes how she has made their old house clean and comfortable, all that their means would permit, 'except for one little bit of a room, four inches by three, which is fitted up in the Gothic, and I have collected into it the best part of a very good cabinet of natural history of Sir Charles's, eight or nine hundred volumes of choice books in French, English, Italian, and German, some little curiosities, and a few scraps of old china, so that, with muslin draperies, etc., I have made no contemptible set-out.... With respect to authorship, I fear it is over; I have been making chair-covers instead of systems, and cheapening pots and pans instead of selling sentiment and philosophy.'

In the midst of all her domestic labours, however, Lady Morgan contrived to finish a novel, O'Donnel, which Colburn published in 1814, and for which she received £550. The book was ill-reviewed, but it was an even greater popular success than The Wild Irish Girl. The heroine, like most of Lady Morgan's heroines, is evidently meant for an idealised portrait of herself, and the great ladies by whom she is surrounded are sketched from Lady Abercorn and certain of the guests at Baron's Court. The Liberal, or as they would now be called, Radical principles inculcated in the book gave bitter offence to the author's old-fashioned friends, and increased the rancour of her Tory reviewers. But O'Donnel found numerous admirers, among them no less a person than Sir Walter Scott, who notes in his diary for March 14, 1826: 'I have amused myself occasionally very pleasantly during the last few days by reading over Lady Morgan's novel of O'Donnel, which has some striking and beautiful passages of situation and description, and in the comic part is very rich and entertaining. I do not remember being so pleased with it at first. There is a want of story, always fatal to a book on the first reading--and it is well if it gets the chance of a second.'

The following year, 1815, France being once again open to English travellers, the Morgans paid a visit to Paris, Lady Morgan having undertaken to write a book about what was then a strange people and a strange country. The pair went a good deal into society, and made many friends, among them Lafayette, Cuvier, the Comte de Ségur, Madame de Genlis, and Madame Jerome Bonaparte. Sydney, whose Celtic manners were probably more congenial to the French than Anglo-Saxon reserve, seems to have received a great deal of attention, and her not over-strong head was slightly turned in consequence.

'The French admire you more than any Englishwoman who has appeared here since the Battle of Waterloo,' wrote Madame Jerome Bonaparte to Lady Morgan, after the latter had returned to Ireland. 'France is the country you should reside in, because you are so much admired, and here no Englishwoman has received the same attentions since you. I am dying to see your last publication. Public expectation is as high as possible. How happy you must be at filling the world with your name as you do! Madame de Staël and Madame de Genlis are forgotten; and if the love of fame be of any weight with you, your excursion to Paris was attended with brilliant success.'

Madame de Genlis, in her Memoirs, gives a more soberly-worded account of the impression produced by Lady Morgan on Parisian society. The author of France is described as 'not beautiful, but with something lively and agreeable in her whole person. She is very clever, and seems to have a good heart; it is a pity that for the sake of popularity she should have the mania of meddling in politics.... Her vivacity and rather springing carriage seemed very strange in Parisian circles. She soon learned that good taste of itself condemned that kind of demeanour; in fact, gesticulation and noisy manners have never been popular in France.' The spoilt little lady was by no means satisfied with this portrait, and Sir Charles, who was away from home at the time the Memoirs appeared, writes to console her. 'You must not mind that lying old witch Madame de Genlis' attack upon you,' says the admiring husband. 'I thought she would not let you off easily; you were not only a better and younger (and I may say prettier) author than herself, but also a more popular one.'

Over the price to be paid for France, to which Sir Charles contributed some rather heavy chapters on medical science, political economy, and jurisprudence, there was the usual battle between the keen little woman and her publisher. Colburn, having done well with O'Donnel, felt justified in offering £750 for the new work, but Lady Morgan demanded £1000, and got it. The sum must have been a substantial compensation for the wounds that her vanity received at the hands of the reviewers. France, which made its appearance in 1817, in two volumes quarto, was eagerly read and loudly abused. Croker, in the Quarterly Review, attacked the book, or rather the author, in an article which has become almost historic for its virulence. Poor Lady Morgan was accused of bad taste, bombast and nonsense, blunders, ignorance of the French language and manners, general ignorance, Jacobinism, falsehood, licentiousness, and impiety! The first four or five charges might have been proved with little difficulty, if it were worth while to break a butterfly on a wheel, but it was necessary to distort the meaning and even the text of the original in order to give any colour to the graver accusations.

Croker had discovered, much to his delight, that the translator of the work (which was also published in Paris) had subjoined a note to some of Lady Morgan's scraps of French, in which he confessed that though the words were printed to look like French, he could not understand them. The critic observes, à propos of this fact, 'It is, we believe, peculiar to Lady Morgan's works, that her English readers require an English translation of her English, and her French readers a French translation of her French.' This was a fair hit, as also was the ridicule thrown upon such sentences as 'Cider is not held in any estimation by the véritables Amphitryons of rural savoir faire.' Croker professes to be shocked at Lady Morgan's mention of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, having hitherto cherished the hope that 'no British female had ever seen this detestable book'; while his outburst of virtuous indignation at her mention of the 'superior effusions' of Parny, which some Frenchman had recommended to her, is really superb. 'Parny,' he exclaims, 'is the most beastly, the most detestably wicked and blasphemous of all the writers who have ever disgraced literature. Les Guerres des Dieux is the most dreadful tissue of obscenity and depravity that the devil ever inspired to the depraved heart of man, and we tremble with horror at the guilt of having read unwittingly even so much of the work as enables us to pronounce this character of it.'

Croker concludes with the hope that he has given such an idea of this book as might prevent, in some degree, the circulation of trash which, under the name of a 'Lady author,' might otherwise have found its way into the hands of young persons of both sexes, for whose perusal it was, on the score both of morals and politics, utterly unfit. Such a notice naturally defeated its own object, and France went triumphantly through several editions. The review attracted almost as much attention as the book, and many protests were raised against it. 'What cruel work you make with Lady Morgan,' wrote Byron to Murray. 'You should recollect that she is a woman; though, to be sure, they are now and then very provoking, still as authoresses they can do no great harm; and I think it a pity so much good invective should have been laid out upon her, when there is such a fine field of us Jacobin gentlemen for you to work upon.' The Regent himself, according to Lady Charleville's report, had said of Croker: 'D----d blackguard to abuse a woman; couldn't he let her France alone, if it be all lies, and read her novels, and thank her, by Jasus, for being a good Irishwoman?'

Lady Morgan, as presently appeared, was not only quite able to defend herself, but to give as good as she got. Peel, in a letter to Croker, says: 'Lady Morgan vows vengeance against you as the supposed author of the article in the Quarterly, in which her atheism, profanity, indecency, and ignorance are exposed. You are to be the hero of some novel of which she is about to be delivered. I hope she has not heard of your predilection for angling, and that she will not describe you as she describes one of her heroes, as "seated in his piscatory corner, intent on the destruction of the finny tribe."' 'Lady Morgan,' it seems, replies Croker, 'is resolved to make me read one of her novels. I hope I shall feel interested enough to learn the language. I wrote the first part of the article in question, but was called away to Ireland when it was in the press; and I am sorry to say that some blunders crept in accidentally, and one or two were premeditatedly added, which, however, I do not think Lady Morgan knows enough of either English, French, or Latin to find out. If she goes on, we shall have sport.'