[In the following excerpt, Labbe illustrates the way Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith exploited their gender so that their audience saw them as women writing out of economic necessity, rather than as women breaking social expectations.]

Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, two of the many women poets writing during the period we are used to calling Romantic, are both becoming more accessible: Stuart Curran's edition of Smith's poems, published by Oxford, will soon be accompanied by Judith Pascoe's edition of Robinson's work. Their works will therefore be available to our late 20th-century eyes in much the same way that they were to late 18th- and early 19th-century readers. In this paper I suggest that for this earlier group of readers the poems resonate with a certain recognizable power: both Smith and Robinson take advantage of their position as women in a society that expects certain behaviors out of women and men; they exploit, and in the case of one of Robinson's poems, lay bare the idea that women need men's protection for survival, and they do this by inserting their bodies into their poetry so that their readers—at least those who subscribe to the viewpoint they take advantage of—see not just poems, but the poets, not just authors, but women in distress. Now, this may sound as if I am trying to divest both women of authorial autonomy, that I am somehow going to slot them back into a dependent category that both, I think, would have rejected. Rather, I believe that for Smith to be canny enough to turn chivalry into a marketing tool speaks to her intellectual independence, attesting as it does to her ability to capitalize on an attitude that encloses and limits women rather than empowers them. For Robinson, on the other hand, to be bold enough to manipulate the belief that sexual behavior and self-display ruin women forever means that she too refuses to be silenced by convention. For both women, writing for money to support themselves and their families, using themselves—and their own financial woes—means a palpable lessening of those very woes. […]

Mary Robinson takes Smith's strategy further in “London's Summer Morning,” exposing unflinchingly the oppressive sexual basis to chivalry. Her layers of self-presentation in this poem contain her ploy: as one unravels the metaphor central to the poem, one arrives at a picture of the needy female poet as prostitute, selling her wares through an open window on view to the buying public. Because of Robinson's public persona as “Perdita,” once the Prince of Wales's lover and now a popular figure of the demimonde, this image takes on a greater currency (so to speak). Writing, like Smith, to make money—here to replace a bond from the Prince that is never paid—Robinson trades on her image as a “lost woman” to make her poetry more compelling; she simultaneously reveals and conceals her body in this poem, depending on the closeness of the reader's attention to the complex metaphor.

In much of her poetry Robinson, like Smith, explores the contours of sensibility, creating multiple personas such as Laura and Laura Maria and participating in the Della Cruscan circle. Her love poems were immensely popular, their pathos enhanced by Robinson's strategic self-placement as a bereaved woman made all the more attractive by her very bereavement: identifying herself with graceful and pretty images like snowdrops, she encourages her audience's voracious curiosity about her real-life person and appearance and her scandalous yet fascinating lifestyle. Moreover, she, like Smith, relies on her audience's sense of chivalry, portraying her sorrows in soulful and affecting ways. Indeed, she walks a risky and narrow path in so doing, as the scandal of her life seems always about to overshadow the fascination for her reading public; for instance, while her 1792 collection of poems garners a review noting “the elegant effusions of a mind which seems to feel too much for its own peace,” by 1801 a disgruntled reader exclaims, “we surely want not public panegyrics upon characters which have been lost to decency and shame” (A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, ed. Janet Todd, 1987, 271, 272). Robinson herself feels the sting of social criticism and lashes back at the women she sees as willingly giving her up to her troubles because of her unconventional relationships: it is when she accompanies her profligate husband to debtor's prison (from there publishing her first book of poems to raise money, like Smith) that she feels especially abandoned and later writes that “from that hour I have never felt the affection for my own sex which perhaps some women feel. … my bosom has often ached with the pang inflicted by their envy, slander, and malevolence” (Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 1989; 469). Not wishing to downplay Robinson's probably quite justified anger, I would like to suggest that such a characterization of the women around her exaggerates and emphasizes her need for protection and shelter from men and reiterates the self-display in the poems that makes her an attractive damsel in distress. It is up to the open-minded men, she flatteringly implies, to provide her with what a spendthrift husband and her own kind cannot or will not do. Her self-promotion coupled with womanly expressions of despair at that promotion, or at least joined to token efforts to escape notice, make her all the more enticing.

And it is this kind of simultaneous display and cover that she writes into the heart of “London's Summer Morning.” The poem catalogues the morning routines of the workers of London, such as chimney-boys, housemaids, dustmen, and various wagoners, carters, and cabbies, marking the passage of time with repeated “nows” that indicate the commencing of yet another morning duty: “Now begins / The din of hackney-coaches, wagons, carts; /. … / Now every shop displays its varied trade, /. … / Now the sun / Darts burning splendour on the glittering pane, /. … / Now, spruce and trim, / In shops … / Sits the smart damsel” (9-10, 15, 20-21, 23-25), and so on. She takes us from very early morning through to at least noon (although it can be argued that she ends the poem with the day's end) in the space of 42 lines, including the duties of all who must wake and start their day's work while others sleep. The image that is most intriguing, however, and that with which I would like to conclude this essay, occurs midway through the poem:

                                                                                                    … Now the sun
Darts burning splendour on the glittering pane,
Save where the canvas awning throws a shade
On the gay merchandise. Now, spruce and trim,
In shops (where beauty smiles with industry)
Sits the smart damsel; while the passenger
Peeps through the window, watching every charm.
Now pastry-dainties catch the eye minute
Of humming insects, while the limy snare
Waits to enthral them.

(20-29)

Robinson gives us three successive images: the awning shading the shop window from the burning sun, the damsel within the shop being ogled by a passerby, and sweets on display attracting insects who will soon perish in the “limy snare.” As the reader delves farther into this succession, she is put in the position of omission, first, the distant sun shining down on—looking at—the shop awning, then the greedy-eyed passenger looking at the shopgirl, and, finally, the equally greedy-eyed insect about to meet death in the form of lime. Robinson links these disparate images quite clearly with the theme of looking, or spectating, and deliberately frames the shopgirl with the sun—light—and the insects—corruption. Her position in the window is echoed by the sweets, and the reader, in the shape of the passerby, becomes the insect about to be ensnared. Robinson is making a point about female shop clerks and how they are perceived, but she also exposes the foundations of the very readerly chivalry she makes successful use of in her love poems. Robinson herself, the distressed poet, is a product on display, just like the shop girl: as a female poet, as a notorious member of the demimonde, as a woman whose life events are discussed regularly in the press along with “descriptions of her ravishing wardrobe” (British Women Writers, ed. Janet Todd, 1989; 576), as an actress. She inhabits the public sphere to the point of saturation, and “London's Summer Morning” shows us her awareness that the position she exploits—her attractively needy status—is simultaneously her downfall. Moreover, however, it is also the reader's, so attracted by the dainty pastry that he cannot see the limy snare set by a system that prizes female dependence but disregards her support outside its sanctioned ways. Robinson may be for sale, but her revenge lies in the limy snare that implicates the masculine consumer whose demand for feminine helplessness ensures the continued supply of embodied “pastry dainties.”

Writing to support herself, Robinson makes that self as attractive as possible, but in “London's Summer Morning” she dispenses with the respectability Smith utilizes in her sonnets. The result of such defiance can be seen in a review of Robinson's Poetical Works written just six years after her death (1806): Arthur Aiken, the reviewer, observes that “Before a tender-hearted young lady has committed to memory the invocation to ‘Apathy,’ or learned to recite with tragic emphasis the ‘Ode to Ingratitude,’ let her at least be aware from what reflections the author wished to take shelter in insensibility, and for what favours her lovers had proved ungrateful” (Eighteenth-Century Women Writers 470). In 1794, however, when she writes the poem, Robinson simultaneously and adroitly appeals to the reader's chivalry and piques that reader's prurient attention. Only a few years earlier, Smith chooses to remain “pure” but equally, and sometimes violently, on display. Yet both women capitalize on the interest they arouse, while encoding in the strategies by which they market their poetry the difficulties that can make a woman write and the difficulties of being a woman writing, selling their sorrows to sell their poetry.