SOURCE: Rumbold, Valerie. “The Alienated Insider: Mary Leapor in ‘Crumble Hall.’” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19, no. 1 (spring 1996): 63-76.

[In the following essay, Rumbold regards Leapor's “Crumble Hall” to be a work of dissent that uses the traditional “country house” poem to convey the perspective of a working-class woman.]

Mary Leapor's ‘Crumble Hall’ constitutes an obviously unusual contribution to the tradition of the country house poem in England.¹ It may even seem not to belong to the tradition at all, if we take seriously the definition proposed by Alastair Fowler: ‘“Country house poems”, so called, are not about houses: a better label is “estate poems”’; for ‘Crumble Hall’ appears to be very much about a house.² Yet Fowler's definition is useful precisely for underlining a reversal of expected procedure on Leapor's part which goes along with her sharing of some of the tradition's major concerns: while a typical estate poem would begin with the grounds and estate, moving only later, and perhaps relatively cursorily, into the house, ‘Crumble Hall’ begins by taking its addressee on a guided tour of the house, and only later—and briefly—turns to the grounds (Fowler, pp.1-8). This turn, moreover, is executed in a manner little short of surreal, with ‘the Muse’ being ‘hurled precipitant’ from the leads of the roof, and dragging the authorial persona down with her (ll.108-109). This bizarre disruption, figuring a complex set of tensions between rootedness and aspiration, implies a radical challenge to the assumptions on which country house poems had usually been based. For Leapor is not an appreciative visitor or recipient of patronage intent on celebrating the owner through an unfolding of the values discerned in his management of property, but a woman who has been dismissed from the post of kitchenmaid in the house she takes for her model—and dismissed, moreover, for writing poetry.³ Malcolm Kelsall has noted the irony that the country house tradition is not the creation of the landowning class itself, but ‘is originated by, and belongs to, outsiders’, giving rise to the ‘paradox […] that the ideal signification […] is created and sustained by those who do not belong to the patrician order’.⁴ Leapor represents a different kind of irony in her relation to her subject: by being the lowliest kind of insider, and one who has been rejected by dismissal even from that position, she becomes an outsider in a more radical sense than any poet invited by the owners could possibly be. ‘Crumble Hall’ therefore offers a rare exception to the poetic refraction of estates through the needs and desires of such interested parties. Instead, it reshapes traditional structures to express what such an estate might mean to one whose labour had helped to sustain it.

To argue in this way is, it might be objected, to import into a reading of ‘Crumble Hall’ biographical and social factors which Leapor chooses to exclude from the text. Although this is a familiar epistle, it is one in which Mira, Leapor's persona, addresses Artemisia, in real life her friend Bridget Freemantle, on the subject of Crumble Hall, which seems to be based on the actual Edgecote House; and a reading of the poem must attend to the fact that Mira is not simply Leapor, Artemisia not simply Freemantle and Crumble Hall not simply Edgecote House.⁵ This is, moreover, an epistle which—even if its poetic personæ were assumed to be simple equivalents—could never draw on any public familiarity with the persons involved (in comparison, for example, with Pope's To Burlington, which Greene identifies as the only country house poem Leapor had certainly read); and the text itself deepens this obscurity by omitting any reference to Leapor's work in, or dismissal from, Edgecote House, or to the prospect which subsequently emerged of mounting a subscription to support her writing.⁶ There are, however, unusual factors in the case of ‘Crumble Hall’ which make contexts and issues which the text does not raise particularly important to an appreciation of the poet's strategies. In contrast, for example, with the use of private friendship to address public ends which characterizes the eighteenth-century verse epistle as described by William Dowling, Leapor is far more concerned with friendship as the enabling context for a potentially risky personal exploration of issues of social and cultural power.⁷ Greene writes that ‘with Freemantle Leapor could easily speak her mind; to have the same confidence with new readers would take time’; and it is clear that much of the verse which so impresses recent rediscoverers of her work was initially considered unsuitable for publication.⁸ There are therefore some grounds for reading the poem as a private document which does not need to labour obvious contexts. Moreover, when ‘Crumble Hall’ was finally published in the second, posthumously conceived volume of Leapor's works, readers came to it via Freemantle's biographical preface to Volume ii and other poems containing elements of autobiography. It was thus never a free-standing epistle aimed through its addressee at the public, but an intimately conceived confidence which the poet's early death allowed the subscribers to read, as it were, over her shoulder. On the other hand, by choosing not to allude to her dismissal or her hopes of literary independence in ‘Crumble Hall’ Leapor is also experimenting with a stance of detachment which might entitle her to a public voice, a dissent superior to the embarrassments of personal circumstance.

The opening of ‘Crumble Hall’ would have recalled for its original readers much that was familiar from earlier poems in the sequence and from the biographical sketch (ll.1-6):

When Friends or Fortune frown on Mira's Lay,
Or gloomy Vapours hide the Lamp of Day;
With low'ring Forehead, and with aching Limbs,
Oppres'd with Head-ach, and eternal Whims,
Sad Mira vows to quit the darling Crime:
Yet takes her Farewel, and repents, in Rhyme.

The reference to writing as ‘the darling Crime’ would have recalled Leapor's initial conflict with her parents over it, and Mira's narrative of her dismissal, where writing figured once more as the disapproved alternative to conventionally feminine skills:

Go ply your needle: You might earn your Bread;
Or who must feed you when your Father's dead?(9)

In contrast, friendship with women who supported her in the development of her talent became crucial; and in an exemplary instance of Artemisia's liberating influence Mira is able in ‘Crumble Hall’ to turn away from self-blame and launch further out into the creativity that her more conventionally dutiful self would have inhibited:

The Sun returns, and Artemisia smiles […]
Then who so frolick as the Muse and I?(10)

Indeed, the possibility is left open that Freemantle had specifically suggested that Leapor write about the house from which she had been dismissed (ll.11-12):

We sing once more, obedient to her Call;
Once more we sing; and 'tis of Crumble-Hall.

Thus encouraged, Leapor is able to confront the scene of a dismissal which had both compromised her livelihood as a servant and focussed her commitment to poetry, writing with an authority which in itself makes less credible the blaming and belittling of the internalized voices which urge her to seek peace by repression.

The typical progression in country house poetry through grounds to a house presented as the setting for a politically, morally and aesthetically creative owner implied wide claims for the potential of the established social order. Leapor's decision to move directly into the house is, in contrast, an immediate structural sign of her detachment. The move does not depend on her knowledge of the tradition for its significance: whether or not she is explicitly conscious of the convention that estate and gardens display a nurturing order which the house will focus in its idealization of the owner's domestic life, she declares by her decision, as much as by her treatment of landscape at the poem's close, the failure of the estate to figure meaning for her in the conventional way—a failure of meaning which is also to be evident in the absences of her treatment of the house.¹¹ On the other hand, she certainly knew Pope's To Burlington, with its concern for the management of land, a poem which even in its satirical treatment of Timon's Villa preserves the progression through grounds to an interior expressive of the owner's values, a formal allusion which recalls the threatened standard which it falls to Burlington to maintain.¹² Leapor, however, shows no interest in proposing a patrician ideal. It is conceivable too that she could have seen an example of a satire which omits consideration of the grounds, for Joseph Hall had adopted this procedure in his attack on the vogue for pretentious new houses which he blamed for the decay of the old values of charity and hospitality.¹³ The significance of Leapor's formal departures from the tradition does not depend, however, on establishing conscious imitation: the difference between the pattern she chooses and those chosen by poets differently situated with regard to the houses they describe is significant in itself.

According to Fowler, ‘When the early estate poem moves indoors—sometimes at the formal centre—it is usually to praise the lord's hospitality, on which his reputation depended’ (p.8). Leapor is in fact to reserve the numerological mid-point of ‘Crumble Hall’ for a theme more central to her own sense, as aspiring writer, of her relation to the culture represented by the house where she used to work; and her movement into the grounds is reserved for still later in the poem; but she does retain, while placing it at the beginning, the link between the poem's entry to the house and the theme of hospitality. By the 1740s, the keeping of open house, seen as under threat even in early estate poems, was completely obsolete: indeed it had ceased to provide a central topic for estate poems by the mid-seventeenth century (Fowler, p.18). Leapor, sensitive to its practical irrelevance, sets her vision of hospitality firmly in the medieval past (ll.13-16, 23-28):

That Crumble-Hall, whose hospitable Door
Has fed the Stranger, and reliev'd the Poor;
Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires,
Were known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires, […]
Here came the Wights, who battled for Renown,
The sable Frier, and the russet Clown:
The loaded Tables sent a sav'ry Gale,
And the brown Bowls were crown'd with simp'ring Ale;
While the Guests ravag'd on the smoking Store,
Till their stretch'd Girdles would contain no more.

The tone modulates from mild approval at the social inclusiveness of the feast (stressing first duty to outsiders to the household, ‘the Stranger’ and ‘the Poor’, and including too the three orders of medieval society, knights, ecclesiastics and workers) to the comic excess of the guests who ‘ravag'd […] / Till their stretch'd Girdles would contain no more’.¹⁴ Yet although this is a version of the communal meal which had customarily shaped the nostalgia of country house poems, it is not presented as realistic or even desirable as an aspiration for the present.

Mira turns from this medieval revelry with a dismissive fling at the discursive propensities of—one presumes—other, more conventionally admiring poets ll.29-30):

Of this rude Palace might a Poet sing
From cold December to returning Spring […].

As Landry notes, this is the time of year when the average poet would do anything for a hot meal at someone else's fireside (Landry, p.109). Leapor, however, is writing as if, unlike the poets she mocks, she feels completely independent of landowners like her former employers; and her independence of tone is impressive, since subscription itself—a form of diffused patronage—raised for her a number of anxieties: she doubted whether her work was good enough, hated the idea of having to go through the motions of obsequious dedication, and must have realized that her employers at Edgecote House represented a class of potential subscribers whose support she could hardly dispense with.¹⁵

The irreverence of ‘Crumble Hall’ is ultimately communicated less by particular remarks—striking though some of these are—than by a total refusal of the larger meanings customarily created in estate poems. Far from presenting a view in which ‘Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole’, the promise that Pope had held forth to Burlington, Mira presents Crumble Hall not as an ordered whole ripe for panegyrical or symbolic interpretation, but as an assemblage of features which can be related, if at all, only at the local level.¹⁶ This could be related to an extent to the actual plan of her model, for Edgecote House remained in essence, despite later additions, a medieval house (it had passed through the hands of Henry V, Thomas Cromwell and Anne of Cleves before being acquired by the Chauncy family for whom Leapor worked); and Mira refers explicitly to the inconvenience of having to cross and recross the central hall for lack of connecting corridors.¹⁷ Yet although Leapor probably did share something of the contemporary aesthetic prejudice that dismissed Gothic structures as mere accumulations of unintegrated detail, it would be inadequate to refer her refusal of symbolic unity and resonance simply to disdain for a particular style of architecture. There is nothing to suggest that she would, for instance, have preferred a Palladian house, especially since the poem concludes with outright condemnation of plans for modernization and rebuilding. Leapor's sense of the grand house as a heap of scattered effects instead expresses a systematic and radical refusal to be impressed, a refusal to construct any coherent aesthetic effect which could resonate with idealizing symbolism.

One of the most successful aspects of ‘Crumble Hall’ is Leapor's choice of a formal model which has the capacity to support the poem structurally without implying any celebratory focus, namely the model of the guided tour, in which the addressee is imagined as actually following the speaker though the house, viewing each part in turn as directed. This is also a particularly timely model, since, as Carole Fabricant notes, it was only in the 1740s that guidebooks and the tourism which they both served and helped to create became a major factor affecting attitudes to leisure and to the ownership of land.¹⁸ An earlier example of a comparable method in verse might seem to be provided by Charles Cotton's The Wonders of the Peake (1681), which takes its implied tourist on a markedly unappreciative survey of the established sights of the Peak District.¹⁹ Cotton, however, finally abandons his tone of detachment and reveals his agenda by eulogizing the family which presides over the grounds and house at Chatsworth; and the poem closes by setting their creativity in Edenic contrast with the appalling chaos which he discerns in the surrounding Derbyshire countryside.

While the form of the guidebook can, as Cotton shows, be applied to the praise of the landowner, it does not in itself impose a burden of thematic or symbolic construction: indeed, by its very insistence on conceiving the house as a sequence of different rooms and objects, the guidebook form aptly lends itself to the dissident poet's refusal to concede symbolic unity or resonance to the sum of impressions. Moreover, the motives which induced tourists to view and owners to display their houses form an obvious contrast with the relative lack of interest in the building shown by a poem like Johnson's ‘To Penshurst’, since, as Fowler points out, such poems are posited on the assumption that a building which draws attention to itself implicitly condemns the vanity and extravagance of its owners (Fowler, p.2). However, Leapor adopts the guidebook format without imposing on her implied tourist any duty of admiration, offering instead a disenchanting survey which rises at best to faint praise. Furthermore, an adapted medieval house like Edgecote would not have been considered a showplace in her time; and it would have fallen to a housekeeper, not a mere kitchenmaid, to represent the owner in showing visitors round the house.²⁰ These discordant factors intensify the parody, as Mira proceeds to repudiate the ‘identification with the tastes and interests of the landed rich’, and ‘the illusion of shared participation in a world not in any meaningful sense their own’ which Fabricant identifies as the typical effects of country house visiting on humbler visitors (Fabricant, pp.257, 263-67). Considered as a guide, Mira respects the proprieties, it could be argued, in not showing her employers' private apartments (with the significant exception of Biron's study, to be considered below); but on the other hand she deliberately breaks customary decorum in the opposite direction by showing the kitchen, and in it the individual activities of the servants, thus exposing, on the basis of her creator's privileged knowledge, the exclusivity and bias of the ordinary tour of state rooms and gardens (Fabricant, p.269).

Mira's detachment from the customary values of country house poetry is evident from her first approach to the main entrance and hall, where the impression is of a riot of sculpture which is both arbitrary and questionably violent in its subject matter: why would anyone in their right mind want ‘two grim Giants o'er the Portals’? seems to be the underlying question, as Mira defiantly refuses to naturalize customary forms of architectural swagger. The couplet verse reinforces the sense of arbitrary oddity (ll.39-40):

Strange Forms above, present themselves to View;
Some Mouths that grin, some smile, and some that spew.

Once inside, these carved images of threat and tyranny set the scene for a measuring of the building's scale that suggestively links the size, violence and monstrosity of the Cyclops with the intimidating task—not often considered in country house poetry—of keeping the ceiling clean (ll.41-47):

Here a soft Maid or Infant seems to cry:
Here stares a Tyrant, with distorted Eye:
The Roof—no Cyclops e'er could reach so high:
Not Polypheme, though form'd for dreadful Harms,
The Top could measure with extended Arms.
Here the pleas'd Spider plants her peaceful Loom:
Here weaves secure, nor dreads the hated Broom.

The passage ends with the heraldic symbols of past violence which assure the family's present rank, a theme which, as Fowler points out, is often elaborated in estate poems as a source of imagery and allusion to family history (Fowler, p.8). For Mira, however, this is just another object which someone has to climb up and clean; and the necessity of mispronouncing ‘Honi Soit’, whether deliberate or not, further aids her demystification of the insignia of power (ll.48-51):

But at the Head (and furbish'd once a Year)
The Heralds mystic Compliments appear:
Round the fierce Dragon Honi Soit twines,
And Royal Edward o'er the Chimney shines.

Moving from the hall, the visitor is briefly shown a dark passage leading to the kitchen, which ‘much attention calls’ (ll.59-60):

The Fires Blaze; the greasy Pavements fry;
And steaming Odours from the kettles fly.

Yet at this point the visitor is not invited to linger over this unaccustomed stress on the downside of traditional hospitality, but is shown briefly into ‘a brown Parlour’ where the shabby, old-fashioned furniture encapsulates the lapse of medieval glories: only in the shine of the worn upholstery nails is the gleam of armour recalled. The room is described (ll.62-64), in implicit contrast with the customary guides' detailing of notable objects, as

For nothing famous, but its leathern Chairs,
Whose shining Nails like polish'd Armour glow,
And the dull Clock beats audible and slow.

Yet there is no-one in the room as we look in, and this is to be a characteristic of nearly every room we are shown—at least of the rooms meant for communal use by the family and their guests.²¹ The opening scene of conviviality in the hall was set back in Gothic times: now, even the family have faded from view, perhaps an ominous fading in the context of a tradition which celebrates houses as expressive settings for their masters.

Turning from the old-fashioned parlour, Mira contrasts it with a more fashionable parlour on the opposite side of the passage, whose precise geometry and dimensions she pointedly leaves to ‘learned Quadrus’, passing also over the detail of its ‘Gay China bowls’ and tapestry walls: the ‘long Description would be too sublime’, she claims, perhaps in affected deprecation of her own capacity to deal with such refined subjects, perhaps in mockery of those for whom ‘sublime’ would seem appropriate language for discussing interior decoration (ll.65-72). She next decides to take us upstairs, past tapestries whose noble subjects in ‘gorgeous Colours’ signally fail to impress her. There is a vacuous solidity about ‘doughty George’ as he ‘bestrides the goodly Steed’, and a flat predictability about his triumph (‘The Dragon's slaughter'd, and the Virgin freed’); while Ptolemy and Cleopatra, shown, in a deft display of Leapor's familiarity with such classical personages, ‘but lately rescu'd from their Fears’, strike her as badly drawn, and more suggestive of the cowshed than the palace:

Their aukward Limbs unwiedly are display'd;
And, like a Milk-wench, glares the royal Maid.(22)

Indeed, wherever Mira takes us she seems either to be unimpressed by what is meant to be impressive, or to be disparaging of what is homely and unpretentious. If country house writing in general betrays, in Kelsall's Spenserian formulation, a tension between a House of Pride and a House of Holiness, between false ostentation and wholesome comfort, in Mira we have a commentator who can be pleased by neither (Kelsall, p.35). The only other upstairs rooms she shows us are ‘more familiar’, but are not commended for it (ll.81-84). They have only commonplace hangings, and the only furniture noted is ‘the soft Stools’ and ‘lazy Chair’, which ‘To Sleep invite the Weary, and the Fair’. The coupling may suggest Mira's suspicion that beauty and gentility might entail a high price in cultivated feebleness—in contrast with the Mira who in another poem images herself as a bizarre scarecrow figure, trudging through an otherwise idyllic landscape to the consternation of the polite tourist (Leapor, ii, pp.294-98).

Mira is quick to draw attention to one of the drawbacks, seldom so explicitly pointed out, of living in a truly traditional country house. Having looked at the upstairs sitting room, and curious to go on, the tourist is forcibly interrupted by the architecture (ll.85-86)

Shall we proceed?—Yes, if you'll break the Wall:
If not, return, and tread once more the Hall.

In effect, the centrality of the hall so celebrated in the country house tradition for its communality entails a constant trailing back and forth through the main room for lack of corridors: Mira's parading of the inconvenience is reminiscent of Pope's letter describing the oddities of Stanton Harcourt, which she may well have known.²³ Yet in place of Pope's whimsical enjoyment there is a strong sense of a building planned for the purposes of the owners, not the servants. As she heads through the hall again, up steps and down a ‘brick Passage’, she notes (ll.89-90):

Here the strong Doors were aptly fram'd to hold
Sir Wary's Person, and Sir Wary's Gold.

Yet if chivalry and wealth constituted the power of a former age on which the house was built, it is the privilege constituted by education in the modern world which most concerns Mira now; for it is here, in the only private room included in the tour, and at the poem's mid-point (ll.91-94 of a poem of 187 lines) that we at last glimpse that shy creature, a member of the gentry, undisturbed in his natural habitat:

Here Biron sleeps, with Books encircled round;
And him you'd guess a Student most profound.
Not so—in Form the dusty Volumes stand:
There's few that wear the Mark of Biron's hand.

Instead of the traditional transition from grounds to house for the celebration of hospitality and community, Leapor places at the centre of her poem a neglected library (Fowler, p.8). The eldest son of the household in which she had served, Biron's likely original, went up to Oxford in 1744 but never took a degree: the opportunities that Mira yearns for are wasted on the heir of Crumble Hall (Greene, p.16).

With this crucial glimpse of intellectual torpor asleep in the space once consecrated to the Gothic stronghold of ‘Sir Wary's Person, and Sir Wary's Gold’, Mira has more or less finished with those parts of the house that concern the gentry - indeed with those parts of the house that generally concern the country house poem. She moves on, again emphasizing the inconvenience of Gothic irregularity (ll.95-98):

Would you go farther?—Stay a little then:
Back through the Passage—down the Steps again;
Thro' yon dark Room—Be careful how you tread
Up these steep Stairs—or you may break your Head.

All there is to see up these stairs are attics, infested with ‘Sheep-ticks’ bred in bales of stored wool, and full of broken farm implements: items which, if in good repair, might characterize the house as the heart of a living, working landscape speak only of inefficiency, vermin and clutter (ll.99-102). And yet, beyond this, just when the visitor indicates a desire to turn back, Mira produces what might seem to be the climactic moment of the poem (ll.103-109):

No farther - Yes, a little higher, pray:
At yon small Door you'll find the Beams of Day,
While the hot Leads return the scorching Ray.
Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish'd Eye:
Meads, Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie.

Although the heat of the leads is vivid, the ‘gay Prospect’ seems to have nothing much to say to Mira: she is not of a rank to find in the ‘beauteous Order’ of a high viewpoint that unites disparate landscape features any inspiring image of her own relation to the world (Greene, pp.125-26, 140). Although enclosure had come early to Northamptonshire, and although her father was a supplier of landscaping services to improving gentry, her preferred viewpoint is invariably the lower angle and more detailed focus of one actually accustomed to working with plants and soil. And as far as the artifice of created landscapes is concerned, she shows herself elsewhere a sceptic: notably in ‘The Month of August’ she associates grounds contrived by wealth with sterile oppression, in contrast with the warmth and fruitfulness of productive market gardens (Leapor, i, pp.34-38). Mira's perfunctory praise of the landscape's ‘beauteous Order’ offers the culminating—and typically understated—example of the poem's detachment from a symbolic tradition which celebrates, in effect, the power over land and community of people like Leapor's former employers. Yet what is most striking about Mira's brief excursion onto the leads is its conclusion (ll.108-109): after only one couplet about the view,

From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl'd,
And drags down Mira to the nether World.

In the context of a poem spent in fussy movements of up three steps and down a few more, down a passage, back through the hall and out the other side, this surreal move is one of unprecedented directness, expressing as it does the alienation which makes this insider poet a radical outsider to the vistas of ‘beauteous Order’ focussed, to the consenting eye, on the country house and its exemplary owners. It catches something of the violence of feeling associated with Leapor's own subjection to the labour of the kitchens, and with her ejection from Edgecote House; but at the same time it enacts the detachment necessary to the working out of her vocation as writer. This turn, whose importance is hard to overstate, therefore underlines the significance of Leapor's reversal of the traditional estate poem's movement through grounds to house: the house is what she knows, what she can relate to; but the social context of her knowledge makes impossible the resonance of the usual composing and unifying conventions.

A further aspect of Leapor's articulation of the transition between house and grounds remains to be noted. What may seem like formal indecision at this point is actually a way of forcing attention to a subject usually passed over in estate poetry (ll.110-11):

Thus-far the Palace—Yet there still remain
Unsung the Gardens, and the menial Train.

Again, the effect is understated; but the juxtaposition suggests the artificiality—if not the effrontery—of a tradition which by its very form denies recognition to the people whose labour sustains the estate. The traditional country house poem had never evolved a context in which the human realities of labour could be imaginatively addressed: the nearest approximation was, significantly, the motif of the creative supervision exercised by the proprietor (Fowler, p.17). Leapor's very obviously signalled pause for choice at this point, with the diversion from customary subjects which follows from it, thus asserts against the tradition the importance of work and workers, not simply as undistinguished menials or personified Labour, but as individuals (l.112):

Its Groves anon—its People first we sing.

So in the end it is ‘the menial Train’ who are presented as the ‘People’ of the house which had felt so empty as Mira led the tour. To name them as such is to acknowledge their importance in a very striking way, in the context of a tradition primarily concerned with the tastes and values of landowners; and to characterize them as individuals is, in a sense, further to dignify them, although Leapor's treatment tends more to the satirical than to any idealization of the dignity of labour. Sophronia the housekeeper, for example, is exercising her ‘learned Knuckles’ (an ironic allusion to the ‘wisdom’ implied by the name Leapor coins for her) in all kinds of creatively tactile kneading and squeezing; Colinettus is dashing between dinner and hayrick in constant apprehension of rain; and ‘surly Gruffo’ is dispensing beer warily to the haymakers ‘As tho' he fear'd some Insurrection nigh’ (ll.114-30). Most memorably of all, Urs'la delivers an extended lamentation on the insensibility of Roger to her charms—an insensibility not unconnected with the beef, cabbage and dumpling she has lovingly stuffed into him, to the detriment of the pigs hopeful of their accustomed swill (ll.131-56). Landry has focussed on the ironies of Urs'la's articulation of wifely anguish and idealism in the light of her labouring condition: far from being a bourgeois wife maintained by her husband, she is a servant paid to cook for her masters (Landry, pp.113-17). Her marked detachment from this fact (‘I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart, / Because I know my Roger will have Part’) effectively underlines the detachment of all the servants from any consciousness of their contingent status in the scheme of things: although, as Fowler emphasizes, it was a test of a well-managed household that it should run smoothly and be capable of entertaining distinguished guests in proper style even in the owner's absence, the self-absorption of these servants seems independent of any conception of higher purpose—which is entirely in keeping with a poem whose keynote is precisely the failure of parts to come together into a resonant whole (Fowler, p.11). Whether these individuals are making cheesecakes, making hay, serving dinner, washing up after it or merely digesting it, they are apparently doing what they are doing either for its own sake or for their own purposes, without a thought of the masters who employ them. It is a poem in which the gentry seem to have evaporated, leaving the only vibrant part of the house to those whose energies maintain it. And yet we cannot visualize these people, either, as an ideally harmonious community: the status-conscious Sophronia must, as Mira jokes, ‘keep her Station’ even ‘in Mira's Rhyme’; Gruffo suspects impending mutiny by ‘the fierce Crew, that gaping stand a-dry’; Urs'la loves but is nonetheless neglected by Roger. Leapor, whether considered as the daughter of a nurseryman and market gardener or as a prospective published poet, occupies a social position too complex in its affiliations to allow her any simple replacement of idealized owners by idealized workers.²⁴

When Mira finally turns to the surroundings of the house, she views them from a congenial, low-level viewpoint sharpened by her professional familiarity with plants and gardens, devoting the ordering rhetoric of the couplet, which she had denied to the overview of the composed landscape, to the patterning of precise shapes and textures on the ground:

Soft flow'ry Banks the spreading Lakes divide:
Sharp-pointed Flags adorn each tender Side.(25)

The park is described as a place where Mira's ‘frolick Fancy’ may ‘rove’, where ‘the pleas'd Swans’ glide in the shade of willows, and where ‘the hapless Swain’ may sleep under oaks which ‘have known a hundred Springs’, an appeal to continuity markedly associated not with the prestige of the owner's family, but with the use of the landscape to its lowlier inhabitants (ll.157-79). This unusually approving motif comes into perspective, however, when it is disclosed that Diracto plans to cut down the trees in favour of ‘Slopes, and modern Whims’, and to build a new Parlour, perhaps with the ‘aged Limbs’ of oak carried away by ‘the slow Carr’ (ll.166-87). If he does so, Mira warns, the ‘injur'd’ dryads will haunt the plain—though the servants will perceive the omens in terms of more traditional portents (ll.182-85):

Strange Sounds and Forms shall teaze the gloomy Green;
And Fairy-Elves by Urs'la shall be seen:
Their new-built parlour shall with Echoes ring:
And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing.

So, curious and inconvenient as Mira finds the Gothic house, innovation is no answer. The gentry are vaguely absent or at best inertly present in the house they have: their only alternative is to rebuild, in which case the powers that protect the established amenities will be impotent to insinuate their unease, restricted as they are to a traditional language that only the servants will be inclined to take seriously. Mira's closing plea seems to recognize its own futility, meeting Diracto's obstinacy half way even as she speaks (ll.186-87):

Then cease, Diracto, stay thy desp'rate Hand;
And let the Grove, if not the Parlour, stand.

In fact, insofar as Crumble Hall is a response to the real Edgecote House, Mira foresees only a fraction of the innovation of which the Chauncy family proved capable: by the end of the century they had pulled down both the medieval house and the adjoining village, thus achieving an elegance uncluttered by any evidence of the existence of their inferiors (Greene, p.16). Leapor, having accepted dismissal as the price of rebellion against the subservience expected of her as a servant, had cast off any vested interest she might have had in trying to sustain traditional country house values. She was beginning, however tentatively, to aspire to a career in which writing would be a legitimate activity in itself, rather than allowing herself to be intimidated into seeing it as a ‘darling Crime’ punished by headaches and mental turmoil; and she was contemplating doing this by a distinctively contemporary appeal not simply to individual patrons but also to the taste of a wider, more commercial literary market. Thus she gained the privileged view of the alienated insider who can, from her combination of knowledge and independence, risk a dissenting vision.

Fabricant discusses, with reference to the literature of guidebooks, the shoemaker James Woodhouse's laudatory ‘The Lessowes. A Poem’, a moving illustration of a lower-class poet's contradictory feelings about his patron's property and of his difficulties in confronting those feelings in verse.²⁶ Woodhouse admires the landscapes contrived by the proprietor whose favour he enjoys; but when his desire for land of his own breaks in, it can only do so in violently resentful language at variance with the smooth flow of imaginative compliance which sets the tone of the poem as a whole. His sense of himself as ‘a landless boor’, a ‘skeleton’ in ‘ragged’ clothes, pent up in ‘murkey walls’, unable to escape the ‘leaden senseless chat’ of his neighbours and the ‘shrill clamours’ of his children is too disconcerting to integrate into his account of his pleasure in landscapes owned and contrived by others. He can only back off with perfunctory gestures in the direction of resignation and hope in a life to come. In contrast with such emotionally and aesthetically unresolved resentment, Leapor's ‘Crumble Hall’ presents an impressive articulation of dissent from the assumptions of country house and guidebook writing, reshaping the traditional country house poem into a form boldly and precisely expressive of her scepticism.

Notes

1. Mary Leapor's poems are quoted from her Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols (London, 1748-51). ‘Crumble Hall’ appears in volume ii, 111-22.

2. Alastair Fowler, The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh, 1994), p.1.

3. Leapor's ‘Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’ gives, as narrated by her persona Mira, what appears to be a circumstantial account of the conflict over her writing with a superior (named as Sophronia, apparently based on the housekeeper at Edgecote House: the character recurs at lines 114-21 of ‘Crumble Hall’) which led to her dismissal (Leapor, ii, 43-54). Her employment at Edgecote House (near her home at Brackley in Northamptonshire), its relation to Crumble Hall, and the reasons for her dismissal are discussed in Richard Greene, Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry (Oxford, 1993), pp.15-17, 117-19, 153.

4. Malcolm Kelsall, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature (London, 1993), p.40.

5. The identification of Bridget Freemantle as the author of the biographical letter prefaced to Volume ii of Leapor's Poems is made by Betty Rizzo; and from Freemantle's preface and the letters included at the end of the volume it emerges that she was the original of Artemisia, and the prime mover in encouraging Leapor to mount a subscription (see Betty Rizzo's two articles: ‘Christopher Smart, The “C. S.” Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph’, in The Library, sixth series, v (1983), 22-31 (p.25); ‘Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence’, in The Age of Johnson 4 (1991), 313-43 (p.321-23)). For the development of Freemantle's friendship with Leapor, see Greene, pp.17-22 and passim.

6. For Leapor's knowledge of country house poems, see Greene, p.137; for the chronology of her dismissal and the subscription project, see pp.18-19, 21-24.

7. William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, 1991).

8. Greene, p.125. For the exclusion from the subscription project as originally conceived of the more challenging poems on social, sexual and economic matters which finally appeared in Volume ii, see Greene, pp.152-54. For recent appreciation of poems relegated to Volume ii, see the highlighting of ‘Crumble Hall’ in Donna Landry's The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge, 1990), pp.107-19, and the selection offered by Roger Lonsdale in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford, 1990), pp.194-217, which is taken for the most part from Volume ii.

9. Leapor, ii, xxix-xxx; p.52.

10. For the support given to Leapor by Susannah Jennens, a previous employer who addressed her playfully as ‘the successor of Pope’, and for the wider importance to her of her women friends, see Greene, pp.10-14, 77. The quotation is from ‘Crumble Hall’, ll.8, 10.

11. For the difficulty of establishing Leapor's knowledge of country house poetry, and for the relation of ‘Crumble Hall’ to the tradition, see Greene, pp.137-45.

12. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt et al., 11 vols (London, 1939-69), iii, ii, To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, ll.99-176 and 191-204.

13. Virgidemiarum, anonymous, by Joseph Hall, 2 vols (London, 1597-8), Book 5, Satire 2. The relevant passage is reprinted in Fowler, pp.39-42.

14. For a harsher reading of the passage (contested by Greene, pp.139-40), see Landry, p.109.

15. For Leapor's anxieties, see ii, pp.xxvi-xxvii, 315; for subscribers, see Rizzo, ‘Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence’, pp.324-27; Greene, pp.16, 24.

16. To Burlington, l.66.

17. For the history of Edgecote House, see Greene, p.16; for the awkwardness of movement around Crumble Hall, see particularly ll.52-57, 85-98.

18. Carole Fabricant, ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property’, in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London, 1987), pp.254-75, 310-13 (pp.254-64).

19. Charles Cotton, The Wonders of the Peake (London, 1681). The section on Chatsworth is given in Fowler, pp.373-82.

20. For the role of upper servants in showing houses, see Adrian Tinniswood, A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste (Oxford, 1989), pp.40, 65, 97.

21. For the transition from the earlier sense that tourists, being by implication guests of the owner, should be entertained as such to the modern custom of advertising set opening times and issuing tickets, see Tinniswood, pp.63-65, 91-93.

22. Presumably the tapestry showed Ptolemy and Cleopatra's relief at being rescued by Julius Caesar from the enemies who had deposed them, an early incident in Cleopatra's involvement with the Roman Empire. Given our ignorance of the books available to Leapor, the source of her knowledge remains obscure: she may simply have asked someone to explain the subject of the tapestry to her. The quotation is from ll.75-80.

23. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford, 1956), i, 505-509.

24. From Freemantle's preface to Leapor's second volume, it appears that had she lived, she would have spent some of the subscription money on paying a servant to take over her father's housework (ii, xxii-xxiii), and Greene, qualifying any impression of Leapor's absolute identification with an oppressed servant class, points out that servants seem already to have been employed in the Leapor household (pp.117-23). Rizzo suggests that her father, who received the subscription money after her death, may have used it to buy out the freehold of his premises, thus attaining a rank which entitled him to vote (‘Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence’, p.323).

25. ‘Crumble Hall’, ll.161-62. For an account of the relevance to Leapor of the politics of point of view implicit in ideas of landscape, see Greene, pp.125-26.

26. James Woodhouse, Poems on Sundry Occasions (London, 1744), pp.63-65; Fabricant, pp.269-71.