Henry Crabb Robinson, Bury St. Edmunds, to Catherine Clarkson,1 Penrith, Cumberland, 23 January 1800.2
Sarah Jane3 has kindly
lent me a side of her paper as the subject on which I wish to write, will
interest you too little & has indeed too much of the form & appearance
of Impertinence to permit my wasting a whole sheet about it. Since the long suspension
of our Intimacy, tho’ many changes must have taken place in our characters, I
trust I have not lost what I then felt strongly, a zeal for the reputation of
my ffriends And you I hope respect the ffeeling enough to excuse my
troubling you with a few words in vindication of my ffriend Miss Hays against
the wilful calumnies of a man to whom I should ^apply^ an appropriate epithet
if I did not understand I must not encroach on
Miss Maling’s Paper by entering on a subject relating to ourselves nor should I
wish it As I would ^not^ blend a confidential ffriendly
communication with a Letter of general concern And which you may communicate to
any one They ought not to be compared in their general influence on happiness. You are enabled to participate in the happiness of domestick life; whilst I am capable only of Amusement – ffarewell, excuse the haste & incorrectness with which I have written, be not displeased with the intrusive freedom with which I have ^written^ founded on a regard on my part not yet obsolete And believe me to be Your sincere ffriend H. C. Robinson
Bury 23d Jany 1800
1 Clarkson Papers, British Library, Add. MS. 41267 B, f. 18. 2 Catherine Buck Clarkson (1772-1856), originally from Bury St Edmunds and a close friend of HCR from his early teens until her death in 1856. She married the famous abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) in 1796 and remained a close friend of Crabb Robinson, as well as his friends, the Wordsworths, the remainder of her life. 3 Sarah Jane Maling was the daughter of Abraham Maling of Bury and she, like Catherine Buck, was a childhood friend of Crabb Robinson (all of them were Dissenters as well). 4 That same year Lloyd, like many radicals from the early- and mid-1790s, turned away from certain political opinions he had previously shared with Hays, Robinson, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others; as he did, he turned against some of his former friends, including Hays. In his novel Edmund Oliver (1798), Hays served as Lloyd’s model for the naive, freedom-loving, Emma Courtney-quoting Lady Gertrude Sinclair, a character recast two years later as Bridgetina Botherim in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Not even a review by her friend John Reid in theJune, 1798, issue of Johnson’s Analytical Review (638-41) could provide much cover for Hays. Despite Lloyd’s harsh fictional criticism of Hays, the two writers saw each other often during the summer of 1798 and resumed their interviews after Lloyd’s return to London from Cambridge that December, about the same time the Reids arrived from Leicester. Not long thereafter the infamous escapade involving Hays, Lloyd, and their friend Stephen Weaver Browne occurred, in which Lloyd accused Hays of making unwarranted advances upon him.41 Letters passed between them, not a wise thing on Hays’s part, for Lloyd not only circulated stories of her showering him with sentimental pleas, tears, confessions – even declarations of love and sexual desire – but also publicly humiliated her by reading her letters aloud to gatherings of his friends. Various accounts of the affair by Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb have survived in their correspondence, mostly negative toward Hays (Southey is somewhat sympathetic because of his guilt for having introduced them to each other) and culminating in the oft-quoted line by Coleridge that Hays was “a Thing, ugly and petticoated.”42 Hays was nearly forty at the time and sixteen years older than Lloyd, but she possessed enough pride and self-respect to declare that she would no longer have any contact with him. Lloyd supposedly recanted, but the content (and sincerity) of his apology is unknown, since neither his letters to Hays nor hers to him have survived. Consequently, Hays’s voice has remained silent in an affair that proved to be a defining moment in the public’s estimation of the pronounced feminist and friend of Godwin and Wollstonecraft.43 Even without the gossip circulated by Browne, Lloyd, and others within their circle of friends in the spring of 1799, the damage already done to Hays’s reputation by caustic reviews and uninformed readings of Emma Courtney, condemnations of her friendship with Mary Wollstonecraft (now considered the beau ideal of decadent Jacobin feminine morality), disparaging lines in Richard Polwhele’s poetic pantheon of “unsex’d Females,”44 and the damaging fictional portrayal of her in Edmund Oliver were sufficient to ensure an irreversible decline in public opinion, despite the best efforts of John Aikin and John Reid at the Monthly Magazine and, after the spring of 1799, Crabb Robinson, to defend her talents and reputation. 5 Dr. John Reid, brother of Mary Hays's friend, Mary Reid (see Biographical Index). 6 Robinson may have taken this term from an article titled “Retrospect of Domestic Literature,” which appeared in the Monthly Magazine for July 1799. The writer (most likely John Aikin, the primary editor) describes a recent poem by Lloyd on the February 1799 Fast Day as a “whining, metaphysical rant” (7: 536). 7 For Coleridge's response to Southey about the Hays-Lloyd affair, see below, Coleridge to Southey, 25 January 1800, in Miscellaneous Letters. Jane Gibbs appeared in court at the Old Bailey on Saturday, September 21, 1799, having accused Jeremiah Beck of assaulting and robbing her. In his defense, he declared that she had first taken the money out of his pocket, returned it to the pocket, then screamed for help, declaring he had robbed her of the exact amount of money she had seen in his pocket. When caught by the authorities, he confessed out of fear and desired to give her the money at that time, even though the money was his, if she would drop the charges. That was probably her design, but the officer took him to Bow Street nevertheless and a trial was held. During the trial, eight men, including a clergyman, spoke against the character of Gibbs, declaring her to be a prostitute by trade, half-crazed, and an expert at crying foul in public when no foul was committed. Beck was acquitted, with one of the attorneys being none other than John Gurney, and one of the speakers for the defense another friend of Crabb Robinson, a young lawyer named Andrews who had previously been a debating companion of Robinson and Pattisson at the Quintilian Society in 1796 (Reminiscences, 1796, 1: f. 82). Gibbs was reprimanded, put under watch, and told to desist such conduct. The next month, however, she was back in court, this time facing charges herself for having falsely accused another man, a Mr. Evans of the Admiralty, by using a similar trick to which she used on Beck. She was placed in Bridewell in solitary confinement, but at her trial the jury acquitted her! The account of the first trial in the London Chronicle, September 21-24, 1799 (292-93), along with a broadside of her printed after her October trial, must have impressed Coleridge, fresh from his sojourn in Germany and about to set off for his first visit to the Lake District. If the Chronicle’s description of Jane Gibbs is what Coleridge had in mind for Lloyd, it was truly a damning comparison, a caricature of her appearance and language aimed at Lloyd that made his caricature of Hays seem tame. The writer described Gibbs (and the broadside clearly mimics this) as “tall, bony, thin-visaged, and masculine; her face is somewhat marked with the small-pox, and her features are very coarse; she wants one or two of her front teeth; she has a turn-up nose, and squints most horribly . . . Her language was extremely low and vulgar; and the very tone of voice in which she delivered herself was disgusting. She seldom attended to the questions which were put to her; but poured forth a heap of words without much connection or meaning; and without any endeavour to guard herself against inconsistencies and contradictions” (292). 8 In the same review of Lloyd’s Fast Day poem mentioned above, the writer also adds: “Mr. L. seems to be one of the many sentimentalists, who, feeling themselves animated by the rich poetry of Mr. Southey, fancy themselves endued with his genius, his taste, and his talents: this is a miserable delusion, and ought to be done away” (536).
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MARY HAYS: LIFE, WRITINGS, AND CORRESPONDENCE > MARY HAYS CORRESPONDENCE > LETTERS RELATED TO HAYS >