Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

In November Willis returned to London, and took lodgings in Vigo Street. During the next ten months he seems to have done a good deal of work for the magazines, and to have been made much of in society as a literary celebrity. His stories and articles, which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine under the pseudonym of Philip Slingsby, were eagerly read by the public of that day. He was presented at court, admitted to the Athenacum and Travellers' Clubs, and patronised by Lady Charlotte Bury and Lady Stepney, ladies who were in the habit of writing bad novels, and giving excellent dinners. Madden, Lady Blessington's biographer, who saw a good deal of Willis at this time, says that he was an extremely agreeable young man, somewhat over-dressed, and a little too démonstratif, but abounding in good spirits. 'He was observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation, having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old and young, dégagé in his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself.'

Not only had Willis the entrée into fashionable Bohemia, but he was well received in many families of unquestionable respectability. Elderly and middle-aged ladies were especially attracted by his flattering attentions and deferential manners, and at this time two of his most devoted friends were Mrs. Shaw of the Manor House, Lee, a daughter of Lord Erskine, and Mrs. Skinner of Shirley Park, the wife of an Indian nabob. Their houses were always open to him, and he says in a letter to his mother: 'I have two homes in England where I am loved like a child. I had a letter from Mrs. Shaw, who thought I looked low-spirited at the opera the other night. "Young men have but two causes of unhappiness," she writes, "love and money. If it is money, Mr. Shaw wishes me to say you shall have as much as you want; if it is love, tell us the lady, and perhaps we can help you." I spend my Sundays alternately at their splendid country-house, and at Mrs. Skinner's, and they can never get enough of me. I am often asked if I carry a love-philter with me.'

At Shirley Park, Willis struck up a friendship with Jane Porter, and made the acquaintance of Lady Morgan, Praed, John Leech, and Martin Tupper. Mrs. Skinner professed to be extremely anxious to find him a suitable wife, and in a confidential letter to her, he writes: 'You say if you had a daughter you would give her to me. If you had one, I should certainly take you at your word, provided this exposé of my poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in England, and I feel every day that my best years and best affections are running to waste. I am proud to be an American, but as a literary man, I would rather live in England. So if you know of any affectionate and good girl who would be content to live a quiet life, and could love your humble servant, you have full power to dispose of me, provided she has five hundred a year, or as much more as she likes. I know enough of the world to cut my throat, rather than bring a delicate woman down to a dependence on my brains for support.'

In March of this year, 1835, Willis produced his Melanie, and other Poems, which was 'edited' by Barry Cornwall. He received the honour of a parody in the Bon Gaultier Ballads, entitled 'The Fight with the Snapping Turtle, or the American St. George.' In this ballad Willis and Bryant are represented as setting out to kill the Snapping Turtle, spurred on by the offer of a hundred dollars reward. The turtle swallows Willis, but is thereupon taken ill, and having returned him to earth again, dies in great agony. When he claims the reward, he is informed that:--

'Since you dragged the tarnal crittur
From the bottom of the ponds,
Here's the hundred dollars due you
All in Pennsylvanian bonds.'

At the end of the poem is a drawing of a pair of stocks, labelled 'The only good American securities,' Willis seems to have been too busy to Boswellise this season, but we get a glimpse of him in his letters to Miss Mitford, and one or two of the notes in his diary are worth quoting. On April 22 he writes to the author of Our Village in his usual flattering style: 'I am anxious to see your play and your next book, and I quite agree with you that the drama is your pied, though I think laurels, and spreading ones, are sown for you in every department of writing. Nobody ever wrote better prose, and what could not the author of Rienzi do in verse. For myself, I am far from considering myself regularly embarked in literature, and if I can live without it, or ply any other vocation, shall vote it a thankless trade, and save my "entusymussy" for my wife and children--when I get them. I am at present steeped to the lips in London society, going to everything, from Devonshire House to a publisher's dinner in Paternoster Row, and it is not a bad olla podrida of life and manners. I dote on "England and true English," and was never so happy, or so at a loss to find a minute for care or forethought.'

In his diary for June 30, Willis notes: 'Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Talked of Mrs. Butler's book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked critics, and said that as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure that you possessed substance. Coleridge said of Southey, "I never think of him but as mending a pen." Southey said of Coleridge, "Whenever anything presents itself to him in the form of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it."' On July 9 we have the entry: 'Dined with Dr. Beattie, and met Thomas Campbell.... He spoke of Scott's slavishness to men of rank, but said it did not interfere with his genius. Said it sunk a man's heart to think that he and Byron were dead, and there was nobody left to praise or approve.... He told a story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend, who, when Campbell proposed the health of Mr. Burns, said, "Sir, you will always be known as Mr. Campbell, but posterity will talk of Burns." He was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water.'

While staying with the Skinners in August, Willis met his fate in the person of Miss Mary Stace, daughter of a General Stace. After a week's acquaintance he proposed to her, and was accepted. She was, we are told, a beauty of the purest Saxon type, with a bright complexion, blue eyes, light-brown hair, and delicate, regular features. Her disposition was clinging and affectionate, and she had enjoyed the religious bringing up that her lover thought of supreme importance to a woman. General Stace agreed to allow his daughter £300 a year, which with the £400 that Willis made by his pen, was considered a sufficient income for the young couple to start housekeeping upon.

Willis, who had promised to pay Miss Mitford a visit in the autumn, writes to her on September 22, to explain that all his plans were altered. 'Just before starting with Miss Jane Porter on a tour that was to include Reading,' he says, 'I went to a picnic, fell in love with a blue-eyed girl, and (after running the gauntlet successfully through France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Asia Minor, and Turkey) I renewed my youth, and became "a suitor for love." I am to be married (sequitur) on Thursday week.... The lady who is to take me, as the Irish say, "in a present," is some six years younger than myself, gentle, religious, relying, and unambitious. She has never been whirled through the gay society of London, so is not giddy or vain. She has never swum in a gondola, or written a sonnet, so has a proper respect for those who have. She is called pretty, but is more than that in my eyes; sings as if her heart were hid in her lips, and loves me.... We are bound to Paris for a month (because I think amusement better than reflection when a woman makes a doubtful bargain), and by November we return to London for the winter, and in the spring sail for America to see my mother. I have promised to live mainly on this side of the water, and shall return in the course of a year to try what contentment may be sown and reaped in a green lane in Kent.'

While the happy pair were on their honeymoon, Lady Blessington had undertaken to see the Pencillings by the Way through the press. For the first edition Willis received £250, but he made, from first to last, about a thousand pounds by the book. Its appearance in volume form had been anticipated by Lockhart's scathing review in the Quarterly for September 1835. The critic, annoyed at Willis's strictures on himself in the interview with Professor Wilson, attacked the Pencillings, as they had appeared in the New York Mirror, with all proper names printed in full, and many personal details that were left out in the English edition. Lockhart always knew how to stab a man in the tenderest place, and he stabbed Willis in his gentility. After pointing out that while visiting in London and the provinces as a young American sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy, the Penciller was all the time the regular paid correspondent of a New York Journal, he observes that the letters derive their powers of entertainment chiefly from the light that they reflect upon the manners and customs of the author's own countrymen, since, from his sketches of English interiors, the reader may learn what American breakfast, dinners, and table-talk are not; or at all events what they were not in those circles of American society with which the writer happened to be familiar.