'Och, Dublin's city, there's no doubtin',
Bates every city on the say;
'Tis there you'll hear O'Connell spoutin',
And Lady Morgan making tay;
For 'tis the capital of the finest nation,
Wid charmin' peasantry on a fruitful sod,
Fightin' like divils for conciliation,
An' hatin' each other for the love of God.'
Our heroine was hard at work at this time upon the last of her Irish novels, The O'Briens and the O'Flaherties, which was published early in 1827, and for the copyright of which Colburn paid her £1350. It was the most popular of all her works, especially with her own country-folk, and is distinguished by her favourite blend of politics, melodrama, local colour, and rough satire on the ruling classes. The reviews as usual accused her of blasphemy and indecency, and so severe was the criticism in the Literary Gazette, then edited by Jerdan, that Colburn was stirred up to found a new literary weekly of his own, and, in conjunction with James Silk Buckingham, started the Athenaeum. Jerdan had asserted in the course of his review that 'In all our reading we never met with a description which tended so thoroughly to lower the female character.... Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Centlivre might be more unguarded; but the gauze veil cannot hide the deformities, and Lady Morgan's taste has not been of efficient power to filter into cleanliness the original pollution of her infected fountain.' Lady Morgan observes in her diary that she has a right to be judged by her peers, and threatens to summon a jury of matrons to say if they can detect one line in her pages that would tend to make any honest man her foe.
There were other disadvantages attendant upon celebrity than those caused by inimical reviewers. No foreigner of distinction thought a visit to Dublin complete without an introduction to our author, who figures in several contemporary memoirs, not always in a flattering light. That curious personage, Prince Pückler Muskau, was travelling through England and Ireland in 1828, and has left a little vignette of Lady Morgan in the published record of his journey. 'I was very eager,' he explains, 'to make the acquaintance of a lady whom I rate so highly as an authoress. I found her, however, very different from what I had pictured to myself. She is a little, frivolous, lively woman, apparently between thirty and forty, neither pretty nor ugly, but by no means inclined to resign all claims to the former, and with really fine expressive eyes. She has no idea of mauvaise honte or embarrassment; her manners are not the most refined, and affect the aisance and levity of the fashionable world, which, however, do not sit calmly or naturally upon her. She has the English weakness of talking incessantly of fashionable acquaintances, and trying to pose for very recherché, to a degree quite unworthy of a woman of such distinguished talents; she is not at all aware how she thus underrates herself.' The Quarterly Review seized upon this passage with malicious delight. The prince, as the reviewer points out, had dropped one lump of sugar into his bowl of gall; he had guessed Lady Morgan's age at between thirty and forty.' Miss Owenson,' comments the writer, who was probably Croker, 'was an established authoress six-and-twenty years ago; and if any lady, player's daughter or not, knew what she knew when she published her first work at eight or nine years of age (which Miss Owenson must have been at that time according to the prince's calculation), she was undoubtedly such a juvenile prodigy as would be quite worthy to make a case for the Gentleman's Magazine.'
Another observer, who was present at some of the Castle festivities, and who had long pictured Lady Morgan in imagination as a sylphlike and romantic person, has left on record his amazement when the celebrated lady stood before him. 'She certainly formed a strange figure in the midst of that dazzling scene of beauty and splendour. Every female present wore feathers and trains; but Lady Morgan scorned both appendages. Hardly more than four feet high, with a spine not quite straight, slightly uneven shoulders and eyes, Lady Morgan glided about in a close-cropped wig, bound with a fillet of gold, her large face all animation, and with a witty word for everybody. I afterwards saw her at the theatre, where she was cheered enthusiastically. Her dress was different from the former occasion, but not less original. A red Celtic cloak, fastened by a rich gold fibula, or Irish Tara brooch, imparted to her little ladyship a gorgeous and withal a picturesque appearance, which antecedent associations considerably strengthened.'
In 1829 The Book of the Boudoir was published, with a preface in which Lady Morgan gives the following naïve account of its genesis: 'I was just setting off to Ireland--the horses literally putting-to--when Mr. Colburn arrived with his flattering proposition [for a new book]. Taking up a scrubby manuscript volume which the servant was about to thrust into the pocket of the carriage, he asked what was that. I said it was one of my volumes of odds and ends, and read him my last entry. "This is the very thing," he said, and carried it off with him.' The book was correctly described as a volume of odds and ends, and was hardly worth preserving in a permanent shape, though it contains one or two interesting autobiographical scraps, such as the account of My First Rout, from which a quotation has already been given. A writer in Blackwood reviewed the work in a vein of ironical admiration, professing to be much impressed by the author's knowledge of metaphysics as exemplified in such a sentence as: 'The idea of cause is a consequence of our consciousness of the force we exert in subjecting externals to the changes dictated by our volition.' Unable to keep up the laudatory strain, even in joke, the reviewer (his style points to Christopher North) calls a literary friend to his assistance, who takes the opposite view, and declares that the book is 'a tawdry tissue of tedious trumpery; a tessellated texture of threadbare thievery; a trifling transcript of trite twaddle and trapessing tittle-tattle.... Like everything that falls from her pen, it is pert, shallow, and conceited, a farrago of ignorance, indecency, and blasphemy, a tag-rag and bob-tail style of writing--like a harlequin's jacket.'
Lady Morgan bobbed up as irrepressibly as ever from under this torrent of (so-called) criticism, made a tour in France and Belgium for the purpose of writing more 'trapessing tittle-tattle,' and on her return to London, such were the profits on blasphemy and indecency, bought her first carriage. This equipage was a source of much amusement to her friends in Dublin, 'Neither she nor Sir Charles,' we are told, 'knew the difference between a good carriage and a bad one--a carriage was a carriage to them. It was never known where this vehicle was bought, except that Lady Morgan declared it came from the first carriage-builder in London. In shape it was like a grasshopper, as well as in colour. Very high and very springy, with enormous wheels, it was difficult to get into, and dangerous to get out of. Sir Charles, who never in his life before had mounted a coach-box, was persuaded by his wife to drive his own carriage. He was extremely short-sighted, and wore large green spectacles out of doors. His costume was a coat much trimmed with fur, and heavily braided. James Grant, the tall Irish footman, in the brightest of red plush, sat beside him, his office being to jump down whenever anybody was knocked down, or run over, for Sir Charles drove as it pleased God. The horse was mercifully a very quiet animal, and much too small for the carriage, or the mischief would have been worse. Lady Morgan, in the large bonnet of the period, and a cloak lined with fur hanging over the back of the carriage, gave, as she conceived, the crowning grace to a neat and elegant turn-out. The only drawback to her satisfaction was the alarm caused by Sir Charles's driving; and she was incessantly springing up to adjure him to take care, to which he would reply with warmth, after the manner of husbands.'
In 1880 Lady Morgan published her France (1829-30). This book was not a commission, but she had told Colburn that she was writing it, and as he made her no definite offer, she opened negotiations with the firm of Saunders and Otley. Colburn, who looked upon her as his special property, was furious at her desertion, and informed her that if she did not at once break off with Saunders and Otley, it would be no less detrimental to her literary than to her pecuniary interest. Undismayed by this threat, Lady Morgan accepted the offer of a thousand pounds made her by the rival firm. Colburn, who was a power in the literary market, kept his word. He advertised in his own periodicals 'LADY MORGAN AT HALF-PRICE,' and stated publicly that in consequence of the losses he had sustained by her former works, he had declined her new book, and that copies of all her publications might be had at half-price. In consequence of these and other machinations, the new France, which was at least as good a book as the old one, fell flat, and the unfortunate publishers were only able to make one payment of £500. They tried to get their contract cancelled in court, and Colburn, who was called as a witness, admitted that he had done his best to injure Lady Morgan's literary reputation. Eventually, the matter was compromised, Saunders and Otley being allowed to publish Lady Morgan's next book, Dramatic Scenes and Sketches, as some compensation for their loss; but of this, too, they failed to make a success.
The reviews of France were few and slighting, the wickedest and most amusing being by Theodore Hook. He quotes with glee the author's complacent record that she was compared to Molière by the Parisians, and that she had seen in a 'poetry-book' the following lines:--
'Slendal (sic), Morgan, Schlegel-ne vous effrayez pas--
Muses! ce sont des noms fameux dans nos climats.'
'Her ladyship,' continues Theodore, 'went to dine with one of those spectacle and sealing-wax barons, Rothschild, at Paris; where never was such a dinner, "no catsup and walnut pickle, but a mayonese fried in ice, like Ninon's description of Seveigne's (sic) heart," and to all this fine show she was led out by Rothschild himself. After the soup she took an opportunity of praising the cook, of whom she had heard much. "Eh bien," says Rothschild, laughing, as well he might, "he on his side has also relished your works, and here is a proof of it." "I really blush," says Miladi, "like Sterne's accusing spirit, as I give in the fact--but--he pointed to a column of the most ingenious confectionery architecture, on which my name was inscribed in spun sugar." There was a thing--Lady Morgan in spun sugar! And what does the reader think her ladyship did? She shall tell in her own dear words. "All I could do under my triumphant emotion I did. I begged to be introduced to the celebrated and flattering artist." It is a fact--to the cook; and another fact, which only shows that the Hebrew baron is a Jew d'esprit, is that after coffee, the cook actually came up, and was presented to her. "He," says her ladyship, "was a well-bred gentleman, perfectly free from pedantry, and when we had mutually complimented each other on our respective works, he bowed himself out."'