[In the following essay, Van de Veire points out a 1751 notice of Leapor's work in The Magazine of Magazines that had not been described by previous critics.]

Roger Lonsdale, Betty Rizzo, Richard Greene, and Donna Landry have all drawn attention to various notices of the contemporary reception and reputation of the poet Mary Leapor (1722-46).¹ In addition to these it may be worthwhile to point out a notice of Mary Leapor's work which, to my knowledge, has not been described before.

The Magazine of Magazines, run by the London bookseller William Owen (d. 1793), devoted three pages to Mary Leapor in its issue of April 1751 (Number 10, the fourth of the second volume, 369-71).² The ‘Short Account of Mrs. Leapor’ followed by ‘two of her Poetical Pieces’ and a ‘Sonnet on the late Mrs. Leapor’ was probably occasioned by the advertisement in the same issue of ‘the second and last volume of Mrs. Leapor's poems, sold for the benefit of her father’ in the Magazine of Magazines's index of ‘Books published in March and April’ (380). The section about Leapor follows a short review of Gilbert West's recently published first canto of Education, a Poem: In Two Cantos. Written in Imitation of the Style and Manner of Spenser's Fairy Queen (London, 1751):

The company agreed in commending in general Mr. West's design, though Sir LIONEL justly remark'd, that they could not well form an opinion of it 'till he had compleated his plan, and publish'd his other canto. For my part, said POLITIAN, if I am not partial to my countrywoman, I can promise the company at least equal pleasure from the native wood-notes wild of Molly Leapor. She indeed seems to me a remarkable exception to Mr. West's position, being the daughter of a gardener at Brackley in Northamptonshire, and unassisted by art or culture, was indebted for most of her sentiments and poetry to the strength of her own genius, and the flights of her own imagination.

(369)

As it turned out, West never completed his plan for Education, a Poem: In Two Cantos, and only the first canto was published.³ That Leapor is ‘a remarkable exception to Mr. West's position’ is based on the Magazine of Magazines' quotes from West's poem in which Britannia argues for the moral reformation of the ‘noble, opulent and great’ who, because of their superior cast, are destined to be ‘the head, the intellectual mind / Of this vast body politick, whose base / And vulgar Limbs, to drudgery consign'd, / All the rich stores of science have resigned / To you’ (368). Mary Leapor's native genius and poetical talents are then substantiated by full quotation of two poems, ‘the one of a serious, and the other of a humorous turn’ (369) from Poems upon Several Occasions. By the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley in Northamptonshire. The Second and Last Volume (London, 1751).

The serious poem is the first one in the volume, ‘On Patience, To Stella’ (369-70). The humorous poem is ‘Corydon. Phillario. Or, Mira's Picture. A Pastoral’ (370-1), a self-portrait of the author and probably the most satirically self-mocking poem in the volume. The Magazine of Magazines emphasized the sensational nature of the publication by dwelling at length on the proviso which accompanied this poem upon publication. A postscript to the introduction of the volume had added a caveat against printing ‘Mira's Picture’ because 'tho she may be suppos'd to have made very free with herself … it may give the Reader a worse Idea of her Person than it deserv'd, which was very far from being shocking; tho' there was nothing extraordinary in it’ (Poems upon Several Occasions, xxxi-ii; quoted in the Magazine of Magazines, 370). The Magazine of Magazines also quotes but does not acknowledge the final part of the postscript which reads:

The Poem was occasioned by her happening to hear that a Gentleman who had seen some of her Poems, wanted to know what her Person was.

(ii; quoted, 370)

Finally, the Magazine refers to the editor's note at the end of the poem: ‘Note, This Description of her Person is a Caracature’ (Poems upon Several Occasions, 298).

Like the second volume of Poems upon Several Occasions which ends with an epitaph (attributed to Christopher Smart) on Mary Leapor, the notice in The Magazine of Magazines ends with its own (rather inferior) tribute a ‘SONNET on the late Mrs. LEAPOR’ which echoes Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy’ in its appraisal of secluded genius:

What pity, Mira, that on rural plains
From cities far remote thy tuneful tongue
In artless guise its dapper ditties sung,
Unheard, unheeded, save by Brackley's swains;
Since now (ah me!) an early urn contains
That lyre dame nature's boon, which thou among
The courtliest bards right deftly could'st have strung.
With strength unknown to learning's polish'd strains
Thus of hy-tinctur'd hue the violet dwells
In some sequester'd vale, alone reveal'd
To ruddy milkmaids, yet no tulip shows
Such beautoous tints, and thro' the neighb'ring field.
It scatters a perfume that ev'n excells
The boasted fragrance of the garden rose.

Notes

1. R. Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford, 1990), 194-5, 525; B. Rizzo, ‘Christopher Smart, the “C.S.” Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph’, The Library, Sixth Series, v (1983), 22-31, and ‘Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence’, The Age of Johnson, iv (1991), 313-43; R. Greene, Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry (Oxford, 1993), 22-37; D. Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge, 1990), 78.

2. The copy which I consulted is kept in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. I wish to thank the Librarian, David McKitterick, for his kind assistance.

3. See ‘Gilbert West’ on the ESTC, Record 21 of 22. Thanks to Librarian Robert Petre, of the Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, for assisting me by researching the ESTC database.