THE INTIMATE LETTERS OF HESTER PIOZZI & PENELOPE PENNINGTON
CHAPTER I
Introductory—Mrs. Piozzi and the blue-stockings—Penelope Weston—The Salusbury family—Early years and education—Marriage to Thrale, 1763—Widowhood—Marriage to Piozzi, 1784—Foreign travel—Return to England, 1788.
In the course of the last hundred years the horizon of woman's work and interests has been extended so widely, and in so many directions, religious, educational, political, economic, and social, that already the Blue-Stockings of the eighteenth century seem almost as far removed from us as the Précieuses Ridicules of Molière. The student of the period takes note of them as products of a social and intellectual movement characteristic of their day; and the general reader knows a few of them by name, though chiefly as satellites revolving round the greater luminaries of the age: but their works are, for the most part, unread and forgotten. This is not, perhaps, a matter for surprise, seeing that they were not profound or original thinkers, and even their works of fiction are too stilted and prolix for our impatient age. Indeed their contemporaries were probably less impressed by the learning, even of the leaders of the movement, than by their brilliant conversational powers, in which, perhaps, they have never been surpassed; though this is a matter on which, from the nature of the case, we have, for the most part, but imperfect materials with which to form a judgment.
If there be an exception, it is to be found in the case of the writer of the following letters. Of the literary society in which she moved she was an acknowledged queen, who hardly yielded precedence on her own ground to Mrs. Montagu herself. Indeed Wraxall was of opinion that she possessed "at least as much information, a mind as cultivated, and even more brilliancy of intellect"; while Madame D'Arblay thought that her conversation was "more bland and more gleeful" than that of either Mrs. Montagu or Mrs. Vesey. "To hear you," wrote Boswell (before their great quarrel), "is to hear Wisdom, to see you is to see Virtue." It may be said that this was merely the partiality of friendship, or an example of the mutual admiration which was rather characteristic of the coterie. But Anna Seward, who roundly condemned her literary style, declared that her conversation was "the bright wine of intellect, which has no lees"; and the great Lexicographer himself, who was not wont to be unduly lavish of his praises, vouchsafed on one occasion to tell her that she had "as much wit, and more talent," than any woman he knew. And what is still more remarkable, her power of pleasing continued, with but little diminution, to the end of her long life. Sir William Pepys, who had known her for many years, writing after her death, says he had "never met any human being who possessed the talent of conversation to such a degree."
And more easily than in the case of most of her contemporaries, the charm of her conversation can be gathered from her letters. To it Fanny Burney's criticism seems to apply as fitly as to the record of her Italian tour, of which it was originally written: "How like herself, how characteristic is every line! wild, entertaining, flighty, inconsistent, and clever!" The spontaneity and freshness of her style is the more remarkable when we remember the taste of the circle in which she moved, and compare her letters with the laboured and formal productions of her friend Anna Seward, the much-admired "Swan of Lichfield," and particularly when we recall her intimate relations with Johnson for a period of nearly twenty years. The fact is that he found her mind already formed, and though it was for a time "swallowed up and lost," as she says, in his vast intellect, it was not absorbed, but emerged later on, strengthened and clarified indeed, but with its original characteristics little changed.
A good many of her letters have already seen the light. Those written to Dr. Johnson she herself published after his death. Her friend, the Rev. Edward Mangin, included about thirty, written for the most part to himself, in his Piozziana; while Hayward, in the so-called Autobiography, gives about a hundred and forty, of which a few were written to the brothers Lysons, and nearly all the remainder to Sir James Fellowes. But these differ in some important respects from those in the present volume. They were nearly all written to men, and though they may possibly be somewhat more brilliant, and make rather a greater show of learning, they are hardly so frank and unaffected, and do not reveal the personality of the writer so clearly as those which she wrote to an intimate friend of her own sex; in whose case she had no temptation to pose, even unconsciously, nor any lurking thought of a reputation as a wit to be kept up.
Their recipient was fully alive to their importance, and in a letter in Mr. Broadley's collection, dated 1821, quotes her as saying that she had "a larger and perhaps better collection of dear Mrs. Piozzi's letters than any other correspondent." And she backs her opinion by that of Dr. Whalley, who had probably seen most of them, to the effect that "was any publication intended, they would be a most rich and valuable addition, and altogether form a collection of letters more eagerly sought after, and more agreeable to the general public than any that have been ever published."
The letters in question, some two hundred in number, begin in 1788, not long after Mrs. Piozzi's second marriage, and continue (though with a break of fifteen years) to within a few days of her death in 1821. The friend to whom they were written first appears on the scene as Penelope Sophia Weston, a friend of Mrs. Siddons, Helen Williams, and Anna Seward, whose published letters contain many addressed to "the graceful and elegant Miss Weston," who was then the leading spirit of "a knot of ingenious and charming females at Ludlow in Shropshire," where Anna paid her a visit in 1787. She was then living with her widowed mother, who had not much in common with the literary proclivities of her daughter. She writes in 1782: "My mother is a very good woman, but our minds are, unfortunately, cast in such different moulds—our pursuits and ideas on every occasion are likewise so—that it is of very little moment our speaking the same language. Indeed I see very little of her; for she is either busied in domestic matters, praying, gardening, or gossiping most part of the day; while I sit moping over the fire with a book or pen in my hand, without stirring (if the weather is unfavourable), for weeks together.... Remember me to your charming Mrs. Siddons." This passage appears in the published correspondence of her "dear cousin Tom," the Rev. T. S. Whalley, D.D., who was not, strictly speaking, related to her at all, but had married her first cousin, Miss Jones of Longford. As he had a house at Bath he may have been the means of making her acquainted with Mrs. Piozzi.
It does not fall within the scope of this work to give a detailed account of Mrs. Piozzi's life: this has been done, though in a somewhat piecemeal manner, by A. Hayward,[1] and more recently by Mr. H. B. Seeley.[2] But for the better understanding of the letters it will be necessary to give a brief outline of her career up to the date at which they begin; and this may fitly be preceded by some account of her family, a matter in which she was keenly interested, and to which she frequently recurs in her correspondence.