Silent shall I receive the welcome Boon?
Boon indeed:
He spoke; he prais’d, I hearken’d with delight
And found a strong Propensity to write.
The humility of the women authors and the implied condescension of the men were at their acutest during the eighteenth century. Poetesses, however, were far more numerous than before. There were (though Scotswomen wrote some immortal songs) no very notable ones; and the spread of authorship did not greatly affect women of the upper classes. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was an exception: but her salutation to the Alps will certainly not be reprinted by me. The cultivated relatives of dons and clergymen, widows driven to a subscription for a living, elderly spinsters, aspiring housekeepers and governesses composed and published volumes of respectable couplets. Now and then a considerable financial success was made. Mrs. Barber, the pushing widow of a Dublin tradesman, published in 1733 a handsome, even luxurious quarto, which is still very common. The most noticeable thing in the book is the prefatory poem by Constantia Grierson: ‘To Mrs. Mary Barber, under the name of Sapphira, occasioned by the encouragement she met with in England to publish her poems by subscription’.
Provincial ladies began to have volumes locally printed, and talent by poverty depressed was studiously unearthed. Mary Leapor, who had a strain of genius, was a domestic servant. Stephen Duck, the inspired Thresher, had his analogue, though not his equal, in Mrs. Yearsley, the Bristol Charwoman. This woman ought to be remembered for the most astounding apostrophe on record. She addressed a poem to the Bristol Channel in which she broke forth with
Hail! useful Channel....
The phrase, unique as it is, was significant of the age. It might be used as a text for that prevailing (though, of course, not universal) complacency of the middle Georgians, who often seemed to regard the Universe as a laudably well-meaning branch of the lower orders, and were quite capable of ‘Hail, gamesome Thunder’ and ‘Hail, pleasing Lightning’. For prosiness and bathos Mrs. Yearsley was surpassed by another lady whose work will not be found on succeeding pages. This was Miss Jane Cave, whose Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac and Religious were printed at Winchester in 1783, with a remarkable frontispiece showing the author quill in hand and wearing a sort of beribboned tea-cosy on top of a towering coiffure. Her volume is dedicated to the Subscribers: ‘Ye gen’rous patrons of a female muse.’ And with some reason. There were nearly two thousand of them, grouped by localities, ‘Oxford’, ‘Southampton’, ‘Bath’, &c. She, or the family which employed her in some unnamed capacity, must have systematically scoured the South of England for victims. Her character was evidently forcible, if unattractive; but her powers did not justify her evident self-complacency. She was especially fond of writing obituary poems on deceased clergymen. Here are characteristic extracts from two of these:
Hark! how the Heav’nly Choir began to sing,
A song of praise, when Watkins entered in.