We must pass lightly over what remains to be told of the family history of the Owensons. It is rather confusedly narrated, and seems to imply that the circumstances of the household were generally straitened, and that they either shifted their habitat very frequently, or were often in two places at the same time. We have just ascertained, for example, that on the arrival of Mrs Owenson in Ireland, “my father took a pretty villa for her at Drumcondra.” Yet the authority for this fact relates: “I was born on Christmas Day, in that land where all holy days are religiously celebrated, as testimonials to faith, and are excuses for festivity in ancient ould Dublin.” And here again there is a blank, which we are left to fill up as we please. On the Christmas Day of what year might this memorable event occur? Taking collateral circumstances into account, it might not unfairly be assumed that some Christmas Day about the middle of the last century witnessed the remarkable occurrence. But the inference, we suspect, would be erroneous. Having taken a good deal of pains to settle the matter, we are glad that it is in our power to save Lady Morgan from the reproach of having lived many years beyond eighty. She was born in 1776. “Bells tolled, carols were intoned—the streets resounded with joyous sounds; an uproarious party sat about the board of as fine a type of the Irish gentleman as Ireland ever set forth, when another birth” (another than what?) “was announced by a joyous gossip to the happy father, who instantly disappeared.” We cannot too much commend the taste, not to say the piety, of this whole sentence. No wonder that the guests, waiting, “not with empty glasses,” till the happy father’s return, should have considered the event a “reason fair to fill their glass again,” or that they were with difficulty dispersed on the assurance “that they should all meet again that day month, to be present at the christening of the young heathen.”
The christening of the “young heathen” took place in due time. The ceremony is well described, and the style eminently characteristic, for it is light, airy, graceful, and considerably profane. Then comes a pause, extending, as it would appear, over some years—and after that a graphic account of the lumbering of a post-coach, “on the evening of a dreary winter’s day, up the ill-paved hill of an old street in the oldest part of Dublin, called Fish Shambles Street.” Where the coach came from we are not told, but it conveyed Mrs Owenson and her two daughters (for by this time Olivia likewise had been born, and both she and Sydney were able to take their share in conversation) to the new home which Mr Owenson had prepared for them. And here comes another mystery. The house is evidently a ruin—but why a ruin, and how, if ever, repaired, we never learn. It is enough for us to know that Mr Owenson, in breach of his engagement with Mr Daley of Castle Daley, had taken the National Theatre Music Hall, and that it was opened with the representation of three pieces,—“‘The Carmelite,’ ‘The Brave Irishman,’ and ‘The Poor Soldier.’ A medley of Irish airs made up the overture, which ended with the Volunteers’ March, and my father wrote and spoke the prologue in his own character of an Irish Volunteer.” Now, if we recollect aright, the Irish Volunteers were in their glory about 1782, and as we learn that Miss Sydney, when the “post-coach” set down its burden, had held an interesting conversation with her mother about Handel, it appears to us that on this eventful night she could not have been less than six years old at the least.
Mr Owenson’s theatrical adventure was not a fortunate one. The Government went against him, by granting to Mr Daley a patent for the exclusive performance of the regular drama; and the Dublin gentry, though they took plenty of boxes at the Music Hall, objected or forgot to pay for them. Neither was he more successful in trade. His cousins, the Ffrenches, an old family, of course, exiled on account of their religion, or for some other cause, made him their agent for the sale of wines which they grew at Bordeaux; and though he certainly managed to get rid of large quantities, he was never able to remit to them negotiable bills for the same. He went, in short, to the dogs, his course thither being a good deal accelerated by the death of his amiable but gloomy and Calvinistic wife. And now began in earnest the education of the two Misses Owenson. They were placed under a French emigrée, a Mme. Terson, who kept school first at Portarlington, and afterwards at Clontarf, and learned from her imperfectly a good deal, living at the same time with “many girls of rank, and some of distinguished talent.” How Mme. Terson got paid we are left to conjecture. Probably she never got paid at all; but being a benevolent person, and a sort of sister of mercy, she allowed the player’s daughters to remain with her for four years, and then handed them over to a Mrs Anderson in order to be finished. Mrs Anderson, however, was a different sort of person from Mme. Terson. Her pupils “were the daughters of wealthy mediocrities; their manners were coarse and familiar;” and Mrs Anderson herself had a vulgar desire to receive quid pro quo. The young ladies could not, under such circumstances, remain long with her. Yet “the school in Earl Street had its advantages too, for it brought us constantly in contact with our dear father, who walked out with us every Sunday on the Mall in Sackville Street, where the fashionables of Dublin most did congregate, who seldom passed us without the observation, ‘There goes Owenson and his two dear little girls.’”
Having thus early established for herself an interest in the esteem and admiration of “the fashionables,” it is not to be wondered at that Sydney Owenson’s after-career should have been brilliant. She went with her father to Kilkenny, where he built “a beautiful little theatre,” and mortgaged it, before it was roofed in, “to a wealthy and fashionable attorney.” The usual results followed—Mr Welch, the wealthy and fashionable attorney, “foreclosed his mortgage suddenly” (we have heard that he never could get a farthing of interest), “and bills to an enormous amount were presented.” They were accepted as a notice to quit. Mr Owenson carried his daughters back to Dublin, where he placed them in lodgings under the care of their faithful maid Molly, and then bolted. The truth seems to be, that everybody came down upon him. The players were clamorous for their salaries; the workpeople insisted upon having their accounts settled; the attorney claimed the amount of his mortgage; and the Ffrenches required that some portion at least of the value of the wine which Mr Owenson had undertaken to sell for them should be accounted for. What could the poor manager do under such circumstances? He hid himself till a commission of bankruptcy could be taken out, and then, like many a wiser if not better man, walked at large again, as if nothing particular had happened.
From this date, about 1794, Mr Owenson ceases to be the prominent figure in the family tableau. His daughter Sydney assumes her proper place. Though barely eighteen, she has already had lovers without end at her feet. The first is a poor scholar called Dermody (a thorough scamp, by the by, who abused everybody’s patience, and died at last of delirium tremens in the purlieus of Westminster), to whom her father had been kind. It is by no means certain that he ever seriously proposed, but he wrote many letters full of nonsense, most of which are printed in this collection. Then came the officers of the garrison of Kilkenny, two of whom at least fairly died because beautiful Sydney was cruel.
“Captain White Benson and Captain Earl” (says Miss Jewsbury, writing from Lady Morgan’s memoranda) “were two young officers quartered in Kilkenny during the period when Mr Owenson had his daughters with him, while his theatre was being built. She refers to the young men in one of her Dublin letters to her father, telling him that they had called....
“Molly was a very dragon of discretion, and the two girls might have had a worse guardian. Lady Clark often told of the Kilkenny days, when she, an unformed lump of a girl, whose greatest delight was to go rambling about the fields, armed with a big stick and followed by a dog, once returned from her rambles covered with mud, and her frock torn from scrambling over hedges and ditches, her hair all blown over her face (she had the loveliest long golden hair that ever was seen), and found her sister Sydney and these two young officers sitting in the parlour, talking high sentiment, and all three shedding tears. Molly came in at the same moment to lay the cloth for dinner, and thinking they had stayed quite long enough, said, in her most unceremonious manner, ‘Come, be off wid yez! an’ the master will be coming in to his dinner, and what will he say to find you here fandangoing with Miss Sydney?’ Sydney, who the moment before had been enjoying her sorrows, burst out laughing at this sally, and, shaking her black curly head, danced away like a fairy.”
What an exquisite piece of word-painting! What a charming scene! Who can wonder that the results should have been so serious? Of Captain Earl, to be sure, we hear nothing more, but Captain Benson wrote two letters at least to his lady-love, both of which, dated in 1798, are given in extenso. Miss Jewsbury’s remarks concerning them are edifying:—
“These two letters,” she says, “are much worn and torn, as though from frequent reading and handling. On the back of the latest of them is written, ‘This elegant-minded and highly-gifted young man drowned himself near York a few months after I received this letter.’”
Tender as her heart was, Miss Owenson had something else to do than to indulge its weaknesses. She determined, as soon as she became acquainted with the real state of her father’s affairs, to earn her own livelihood; and however ridiculous her vanity may be, however gross her many breaches of truth and common propriety, we are bound to acknowledge, and we do it with hearty goodwill, that she went gallantly through with that purpose. Her first impulse was to turn authoress; her next and wiser, to go out as a governess or companion, if any lady, young or old, would have her. She was now about twenty-one, but looked considerably younger. There was difficulty, therefore, in finding a place for her, though her old music-master, M. Fontaine, did his best to make her merits known, and the Countess O’Haggerty, an emigrée and a distinguished harpist, took her up. Accident, however, introduced her at one of Fontaine’s parties to Mrs Lefanu, a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who behaved to her then and ever afterwards with marked kindness. The result was, that a Mrs Featherstone sought her out, and, after a little preliminary negotiation, it was settled that she should proceed on a visit to Bracklin, near Castletown, in the county of Westmeath, and, if approved and approving, that she should undertake the education of two young ladies, the daughters of her new friend. If we are to believe Lady Morgan, she seems to have won the hearts and clouded the judgments of all whom she approached.