SOURCE: Pascoe, Judith. “The Spectacular Flâneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London.” The Wordsworth Circle 23, no. 3 (summer 1992): 165-71.

[In the following essay, Pascoe suggests that Robinson's poetry offers a romantic, idealized depiction of London that was based upon the poet's limited observations from her carriage, a necessary means of travel that prevented an awareness of the “grubbier exigencies of her surroundings.”]

You know well how great is the difference between two companions lolling in a post chaise, and two travellers plodding slowly along the road, side by side, each with his little knapsack of necessaries upon his shoulders. How much more of heart between the two latter!

(W. Wordsworth to the Rev. Robert Jones, Descriptive Sketches, 1793)

TO WALKING LADIES

Should the impetuosity of a hackney coachman, the jostlings of a loaded porter, or the staggerings of a careless buck, drive you into the mud, on no earthly consideration accept of the aid; or arm of a stranger: tho' he should appear to be a perfect gentleman, he may be one whom nobody knows.

(Hibernian Magazine Feb. 1789: 73)

These two statements highlight the way gender determines how one moves through the world, marking a distinction between the ways men and women poets of the Romantic period wrote about the city. That Wordsworth's more sincere mode of travel, that is, “plodding slowly along the road, side by side,” is not one freely adopted by his female contemporaries is evidenced by Dorothy Wordsworth's defensive response to an aunt, Mrs. Christopher Crackenthorpe, April, 1794, who chastised her for “rambling about the country on foot”: “So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise—but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings” (Letters, ed. Hill [1985], 18). Neither constitutional nor financial advantage served to offset the danger and scandal of a woman walking. Dorothy Wordsworth may have walked, but she did it guiltily.

In an essay responding to Walter Benjamin's use of the flâneur to characterize the experience of modernity, Janet Wolff points to its inadequacy to describe women's experience of the city. She writes, “There is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.”¹ The closest Wolff comes to identifying a female stroller is the figure of George Sand, striding through the city in iron-shod boots and male attire, a kind of female flaneur, or, a flaneuse in drag. Wolff writes, “The disguise made the life of the flaneur available to her; as she knew very well, she could not adopt the non-existent role of a flaneuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city.” (p. 148). Wolff ends her essay by calling for a literature that would address the experience of women in the public arena and by wishing to life the female figure in Baudelaire's famous poem, one who could provide “a poem written by ‘la femme passante’ about her encounter with Baudelaire” (p. 154).

Wolff's comments on the limitations of the figure of the flâneur are to the point—women have never been able to move through cities with the liberty and anonymity Benjamin's stroller possesses—but her conclusion is, perhaps, too conclusive. For the poem, or in fact, poems by “la femme passante” do exist, although to find them one must look outside the purview of Wolff's (and Benjamin's) studies to the London of the 1790s and the street poems of Mary Robinson. The invalid Robinson could not stroll through the city, but she did ride through it in a series of elaborate carriages, both spectacle and spectator, lacking the anonymity of the flaneur, but possessed of that figure's moving perspective of the city. If, as Andrew Bennett has suggested in “‘Devious Feet’: Wordsworth and the Scandal of Narrative Form,” the way Wordsworth walked (or was hindered in walking) had a determinative effect on his verse (ELH 59 [1992]: 145-73), the means by which Robinson moved through the city as surely influenced her poetry. In this essay I approach Robinson's city poems through a consideration of her particular perspective on and place in the London landscape. In these poems, Robinson the public spectacle becomes Robinson the poet-spectator, occupying the position of both object and purveyor of an urban gaze. I preface this discussion of Robinson's urban status and strategies, however, with a return to the London of Wordsworth, a city that Robinson might not recognize.

Wordsworth's London is the remembered city of a tourist from the country, a fascinating but also frightening realm in which the stable self risks disruption. When in “Michael,” Luke ventures into the “dissolute city,” he seems inevitably to lose his way and give himself to “evil courses.” The urban women in Wordsworth's poems appear sullied by virtue of their geographic situation. Susan, who in “The Reverie of Poor Susan,” stands “[a]t the corner of Wood Street,” is easily associated with prostitution, a fact that led Lamb to implore Wordsworth to leave off a last stanza of the poem.² In book seven of The Prelude, Wordsworth populates London with prostitutes and actresses while, as he acknowledged, leaving out more affluent women:

I glance but at a few conspicuous marks,
Leaving ten thousand others that do each—
In hall or court, conventicle, or shop,
In public room or private, park or street—
With fondness reared on his own pedestal,
Look out for admiration.

(The Prelude, 1805, 7:567-572)

Although the significance of gender and sexuality in book seven of the Prelude has been noted before—a great deal of attention has been lavished on the interposition of the Maid of Buttermere into the cityscape Wordsworth describes—it is worth reviewing some familiar evidence in the service of a new conclusion. One cannot help but be struck by the several ways in which Wordsworth mutes the presence of women on his remembered London streets. The poem conjures up a number of pairings only to lop off the expected female half of these rhetorical couplings. In place of the “woman” that one expects to complete the “man and—” construction, Wordsworth enacts a series of substitutions. He writes of the “endless stream of men and moving things” or of “dramas of living men / And recent things yet warm with life” (emphasis mine, 7.158 and 7.313.-.314). In a similar rhetorical strategy, when Wordsworth does conjure up female entities, he quickly overwhelms them with a barrage of male examples. The “allegoric shapes, female or male” that Wordsworth finds “[s]tationed above the door like guardian saints” are quickly replaced by an abundance of more and more specific examples, all male.

There, allegoric shapes, female or male,
Or physiognomies of real men,
Land-warriors, kings, or admirals of the sea,
Boyle, Shakespeare, Newton, or the attractive head-
Of some quack-doctor, famous in his day.

(7.179-183)

Every rank of man is represented from royalty to charlatan, but there is no elaboration on the first half of the dyad that introduces the listing.

Wordsworth's poem gestures in the direction of affluent sectors of society, mentioning the “aery lodges [of] studious lawyers” and “the dame / That field-ward takes her walk in decency,” but when he seeks relief from the grubby crowds of London's streets, he turns to the Maid of Buttermere, another Mary Robinson, and not to the elegant chambers of respectable society (7.203 and 7.225-226). The country maiden substitutes for or shields against a population of actual urban women gaining influence as writers, readers, and buyers of books. Book seven of The Prelude excludes a literary society increasingly dominated by females represented by the more famous, indeed notorious, Mary Robinson whose first novel sold out on the day of publication and whose 1791 Poems, with its subscription list of 600, was a pre-publication success. Wordsworth's cognizance of this other Robinson as a potential literary rival is marked by his sister's hostile mention of Robinson's 1800 Lyrical Tales.³

Robinson, who moved to London at age ten from England's second largest city, the Bristol Walpole called “the dirtiest great shop” he'd ever seen, was herself part of the spectacle that was late eighteenth-century London. First as an actress, then as the mistress of the Prince of Wales, finally as a literary figure, Robinson was the focus of public attention. Her accounts of public life in the Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson are the reports of a female subject under constant surveillance. She writes of the notice given to her as a young bride—“I was now known by name, at every public place in and near the metropolis”⁴—and as a popular actress: “I was consulted as the very oracle of fashions; I was gazed at and examined with the most inquisitive curiosity” (2.18). Her Memoirs are a record of increasing public exposure. After her notorious liaison with the Prince of Wales, she recalls: “Whenever I appeared in public, I was overwhelmed by the gazing of the multitude. I was frequently obliged to quit Ranelagh, owing to the crowd which staring curiosity had assembled round my box; and, even in the streets of the metropolis, I scarcely ventured to enter a shop without experiencing the greatest inconvenience. Many hours have I waited till the crowd dispersed, which surrounded my carriage, in expectation of my quitting the shop” (2.67-68). The spectacle of Robinson outdraws the other shows of Ranelagh and a glimpse of her person, framed by a shop window, invites more interest than the wares exhibited. By her own account (confirmed by the newspaper record of the period), she becomes the most attractive object in a large urban display.

By the mid 1780s, primarily from associating with famous men of the period—the future George IV, Charles Fox, Lord North—Robinson has become so integral to London public life that she is a stock figure in print illustrations of London crowd scenes. She appears in Rowlandson's 1785 engraving of Vauxhall Gardens and in Boyle's depiction of an audience attending Dr. Graham, that charlatan immortalized in The Prelude as the “quack-doctor, famous in his day” (7.183).⁵ In caricatures of famous men's follies, she becomes part of the architecture of the city: in a Gillray illustration playing on a presumed rivalry for her affection between the Prince of Wales and the military hero Banastre Tarleton, she is fixed like a sign on a post over the door of the building that forms the backdrop for the two men, her breast bared and her legs and arms splayed as if she were on exhibition.

While the portrayal of Robinson by the press ranged from idolatrous to vicious, she seems always to have situated herself at the center of a stable circle of friends whose composition and location shifted. The manuscript of her Memoirs reveals her central place in London's social network. Motivated by thrift, Robinson composed her narrative on pages previously used by her correspondents to enclose letters. The reverse sides contain the information we would include on the outside of an envelope, Robinson's fashionable addresses as well as the names of distinguished acquaintances who wrote to her. While Robinson was too notorious to gain entrance into the best homes, she seems to have had little trouble in drawing brilliant individuals of her generation to her own. Her Memoirs refer to her London establishment as the “rendezvous of talents,” a place frequented by “Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mess. Sheridan, Burke, Henderson, Wilkes, Sir John Elliot, &c. men of distinguished talents and character” (2.86). William Godwin's numerous references to teas or dinners at Mrs. Robinson's in his unpublished diary provides an objective record of Robinson's social position, noting the eclectic gatherings of writers and artists at her house (Shelley-Godwin Collection of Lord Abingerm, microfilm, 1952).

Robinson's London was the London of the more affluent women of the late eighteenth century, a whirl of social liaisons and fashionable engagements characterized by the title of the contemporary journal targeted at just this female audience, La Belle Assemblée.⁶ Its view of London, a representation that would appeal to female readers, was a London of people and not buildings. “The Beau Monde; or, A History of the New World,” La Belle Assemblée (February, 1806) reports “[By] the fine world; we do not mean the world itself, but the inhabitants of this world. … The Beau Monde, like Swift's Island of Laputa, is for ever changing its place. It is now at London, now at Bath, now at Bristol, now at Brighton: wherever the Emperor is, say the civilians, there is Rome; wherever fashion resides, there is the Beau Monde.” (p. 5).

The vehicle of this mobile society was the carriage, an important signifier of social status. John Wolcot tempted Robinson to return to London from her cottage at Old Windsor by reminding her of “the coach-wheel thunder of the great city of the world” (Memoirs 4.186). And the Hibernian Magazine (October, 1786), commenting on “Fashionable Female Amusement,” describes social visits as a ritualistic circling of coaches: “[M]odern visiting is not spending a social hour together; it consists only in her ladyship ordering her coachman to drive to the doors of so many of her acquaintances, and her footman, at each of them, to give in a card with her name, while the lady of the house, though in the polite phrase, not at home, is looking through the window all the time to see what passes; and in some convenient time after returns the visit, and is sure to be received in the same manner” (p. 538).

It is no wonder that Robinson allowed the keeping of a carriage to consume a disproportionate amount of her income.⁷ It permitted her to present herself as belonging to a particular order of society, despite the fact that her claim to that status, because of her tenuous financial state and personal history, was always contested. Her dependence on carriages was greater than most since she had been severely crippled by a miscarriage in the early 1780s. But it is clear she also reveled in the carriage's potential for capturing attention.

In the urban mythology of Mary Robinson promulgated by political cartoons, newspaper accounts, her own Memoirs, and those of her peers, her carriages take on a special significance. A large number of caricatures depict her riding in various kinds of coaches, accompanied by one or several of the public men with whom she was associated. One of the spurious editions of letters exchanged between Robinson and the Prince of Wales takes its title from her mode of transportation: The Vis-a-Vis of Berkley Square. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of June 12th, 1781, referring to Robinson by the name she became associated with after her performance in The Winter's Tale, reports on her equipage: “Fortune has again smiled on Perdita; on Sunday she sported an entire new phaeton, drawn by four chestnut coloured ponies, with a postilion and servant in blue and silver liveries. The lady dashed into town through Hyde-Park turnpike, at four o-clock, dressed in a blue great coat prettily trimmed with silver, a plume of feathers graced her hat, which even Alexander the Great might have prided himself in” (p. 3). Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins' memoirs also depict Robinson in a carriage, passing daily in St. James's Street, Pall Mall, and Hyde Park, dressed to great effect and enjoying the homage of passers-by: “[T]he hats of the fashionable promenaders swept the ground as she passed” (Memoirs … 2 vols. [1824] 1.24).

A caricature published in the Rambler's Magazine in 1783 depicts Robinson being driven in a carriage by the Prince of Wales while her husband, riding behind, hands her a grant for £60,000, an allusion to the £60,000 due to the Prince upon his coming of age. While the cartoon pokes fun at the mercenary aftermath of Robinson's association with the Prince, it illustrates her position as both spectacle and spectator. The window of the coach with its decorative trimming resembles a picture frame enclosing Robinson emphasizing her status as an object of attention for those passing or driving by. But the window also provides Robinson with a protected vantage point from which to look out over the city. Robinson is both observed and observer, spectacle and spectator, object of the public gaze and purveyor of a gaze that she fixed on the public world around her. While Robinson, as female and public figure, can never step outside the range of the public gaze (and her self-promotional strategies would argue she has no desire to do this), she is able to move from being the object of the gaze to having the power to see—while still occupying the same position. Robinson's urban poetry represents exactly this kind of doubling of positions.

“London's Summer Morning,” in particular, is preoccupied with looking. Robinson presents many eyes without providing a guiding “I”:

                                                                                Now the sun
Darts burning splendour on the glittering pane,
Save where the 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.

(PW [The Poetical Works of the Late Mary Robinson] 478)

Robinson moves from the macro- to the microscopic, from the world outside to the world within the window. Even the “eye minute” of observed insects carry on with their own observations. This is a Foucauldian realm where everyone is subject to the focus of another's gaze. The girl in the shop window being peeped at by passers-by calls to mind Robinson's story of her own entrapment in a store, hemmed in by hoards of onlookers. As retold in this poem, the moment is rendered less terrifying by repetition. Everyone in the poem is entrapped in a similar thrall. If no single individual can evade the gaze, it is equally true that none of them are excluded from training their own gaze on others. Everyone becomes “gay merchandize” in the glittering display of Robinson's poem, but each is embroiled in a marketplace that, as Robinson describes it, is more inviting than alienating.

The visual exchange in Robinson's poem parallels its preoccupation with social and financial exchange. The poem is preoccupied with business, and the word “busy” repeatedly appears. A housemaid “twirls the busy mop,” the poor poet awakes from “busy dreams,” and the noise of the poem is the product of “busy sounds.” Robinson's poem is full of people all differentiated by occupations: tinmen, cork-cutters, chimney-boy, housemaid, shop girl, pot-boy. Similarly, the separate noises serve as advertisements or announcements of trade: “At the door / The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell / Proclaims the dustmans's office” and “the hunger-giving cries / Of vegetable venders, fill the air.” The poem portrays a companionable kind of commerce, where even the most sinister practitioner, “the old-clothes man” who “cries / In tone monotonous, and side-long views / The area for his traffic” is entertaining.

The precursors of “London's Summer Morning” and Robinson's other city poems are perhaps Swift's “A Description of the Morning” and “A Description of a City Shower,” poems built on accumulated urban detail. Tellingly, for a poet noted for prosodic ingenuity, Robinson in writing poems about the city (with the exception of the poem cited above) tends to employ rhyming couplets, perhaps drawn to the favored poetic mode of an earlier, more urbane era. But the view of the city her poems provide is more cheerful than Swift's; the “dung, guts, and blood” swept from butchers' stalls at the end of “A Description of a City Shower” do not intrude upon her vision of the marketplace.

Robinson's tendency to depict the city as a place of amusement is evidence of her limited view, the social and material remove of a carriage rider. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note the significance of the balcony in nineteenth-century literature and painting: “From the balcony, one could gaze, but not be touched. … [T]he bourgeoisie on their balconies could both participate in the banquet of the streets and yet remain separated.” (p. 136). As carriage rider, Robinson enjoys a similar proximity to and isolation from the street she describes, which helps explain her erasure of the grubbier exigencies of her surroundings. The London of her poem, like the shopgirl, is “spruce and trim,” and everyone who populates the street is gainfully employed. But while Robinson perhaps romanticizes the London marketplace, she grants to women a centrality in the urban street that had historically been denied them.

Critical writing about women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tends to assume their exclusion from the world of commerce. Wolff writes that in the public world of work, politics and city life, “women were excluded” or “practically invisible” (p. 141). Patricia Meyer Spacks in “Women and the City,” an examination of eighteenth-century fictional heroines in their confrontations with the city, writes: “For women, the ‘public’ does not imply a locale for commerce or profession, for political or military action. A woman's business was to marry as well as possible.” (Johnson and His Age, ed. Engell [1984], 488). The session papers of the Old Bailey recording the occupations of witnesses and prisoners and their wives call these assumptions into question. Among the statements of female occupation recorded from the 1780s and 1790s are “keeps a green shop,” “barrow-woman,” “hawks old clothes,” “keeps a chandler's shop,” “sells fish,” and “poultry dealer.” One woman was purported to be a “butcheress in Petticoat Lane;” another the proprietor of the Feather public-house in Broadway-Westiminster. One woman simply stated, “I deal in the streets” (Appendix VI, Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century [Rpt. 1985], 425-28).

Robinson's poems reflect this commercial involvement as a liberating fact, exhibiting none of the ambivalence toward a market economy associated with male writers. Even in “Windfield Plain,” a poem purporting to describe “a Camp in the Year 1800,” she depicts a municipality in miniature, a natural expanse transformed into a clogged metropolis whose most salient feature is noisy exchange. Robinson writes:

Mingled voices, uncouth singing,
Carts full laden, forage bringing;
Sociables and horses weary,
Houses warm, and dresses airy;
Loads of fatten'd poultry; pleasure
Serv'd (to nobles) without measure;
Doxies, who the waggons follow;
Beer, for thirsty hinds to swallow;
Washerwomen, fruit-girls cheerful,
Ancient ladies—chaste and fearful!!
Tradesmen leaving shops, and seeming
More of war than profit dreaming;
Martial sounds and braying asses,
Noise, that ev'ry noise surpasses!(8)

The actual soldiers and the camp's raison d'être—the war—are almost lost in the whirl of monetary and social exchange, and the prominence of a variety of busy women. The accuracy of this depiction as an extension of the London social milieu, is verified in the Morning Post (Aug. 5, 1800), reporting on a camp that Robinson, probably witnesses at first hand from her daughter's cottage: “On Wednesday last, a public breakfast was given at Sunning-Hill Wells, by the Officers in Windsor Camp … the Company consisted of about two hundred persons, the principal of whom danced in a room very cool” (p. 2). While one can find a similar enthusiasm for the urban marketplace in Charles Lamb, the native Londoner, both in his essay “The Londoner” and in his deliberately provocative rejection of an invitation to join the Wordsworths in Cumberland, Lamb's enthusiasm for “the obliging customer, and the Obliged tradesman,” has altered the prevailing representation of the period little more than the poems of Robinson.⁹

While the London depicted in Robinson's poems is different from the one represented by her canonical male peers, her city is also a selectively rendered one with substantial gaps and elisions. Robinson's work, placed beside Wordsworth's, highlights the latter poet's discomfort with the social world in which she maintained an enduring celebrity. But equally, Wordsworth's poetry, read alongside Robinson's, reveals an evasion on Robinson's part of the harsher exigencies of an urban economy. That the beggars and prostitutes of Wordsworth's London maintain a very low profile in Robinson's city can partly be attributed to Robinson's perception of the city as a thriving marketplace offering considerable opportunities to a female writer. But Robinson's cheerful cityscapes populated by busy workers may also be explained by her awareness of the tenuousness of her own economic position.

A caricature from 1784 provides a material figuration of what was for Robinson a constant, low-grade anxiety. Published in the aftermath of Robinson's affair with the Prince of Wales, the drawing depicts Robinson as a beggar soliciting money from the Prince. She stands abjectly, debased, dressed in rags, stooped-over on a city street in front of a brick wall where play-bills advertising her former roles are displayed. The Prince, attired in customary elegance, hands her a pouch of money. The caption reads, “Perdita Upon her Last Legs.” While the caricature directly satirized Robinson's financial reliance on the Prince—the annuity she attained from him upon Charles Fox's intercession—it also provides an oblique commentary on Robinson's tenuous social status. Stripped of her carriage and fine clothes, she is indistinguishable from other female street walkers. Although she is on her “last legs” because of her physical infirmity and her now lowly place in the Prince's affections, to be on her legs at all is to be considerably debased.

It is no wonder that Robinson in her poetry tends to gloss over the grittier realities of the city, depicting a London of clean and busy workers, rather than a London of beggars, prostitutes, and freaks. When Robinson writes in “The Poet's Garret,” of an impoverished denizen of Grub Street, the poverty she depicts is rendered quaint:

                                                            At the scanty fire
A chop turns round, by packthread strongly held
And on the blacken'd bar a vessel shines
Of batter'd pewter, just half fill'd, and warm,
With Whitbread's beverage pure. The kitten purrs,
Anticipating dinner; while the wind
Whistles through broken panes, and drifted snow
Carpets the parapet with spotless garb,
Of vestal coldness. Now the sullen hour
(The fifth hour after noon) with dusky hand
Closes the lids of day. The farthing light
Gleams through the cobweb'd chamber, and the bard
Concludes his pen's hard labour.

(PW 484-84)

While Robinson attends carefully to the material minutiae of her poor poet's surroundings, her descriptive archaisms suggest her distance from the exigencies of his life. Although the poem depicts the unappreciated writer's “hard labour” and straitened conditions (the farthing light and the single chop), it participates in a romantic—and Romantic—construction of the artist as leading a charmed life, poor in material goods, but rich in inspiration. The poet's work space is strewn with “Sonnet, song and ode, / Satire, and epigram, and smart charade; / Neat paragraph, or legendary tale” (PW 483).

I wish to end by considering another guise in which Robinson looks over the city of London, a guise to which Wolff's title phrase, “the invisible flâneuse,” originally used to describe the absence of a flâneuse, could be applied in a more literal sense. Between October 29, 1799, and January 2, 1800, Robinson published anonymously a series of essays in the Morning Post in the guise of “The Sylphid.” The series quite deliberately imitates and responds to a periodical called The Sylph, published between September 22, 1795, and April 30, 1796, by one of Robinson's publishers, Thomas Longman. The masculinist narrator of The Sylph is fashioned after Pope's Aerial, preoccupied with observing and criticizing human, and particularly female, behavior. He announces in an advertisement: “The LADIES are hereby desired to take notice that their time will be up on the 15th instant, after which day the SYLPH will be more exact in noticing their conduct, and more vigilant in holding them to their good behavior” (Oct. 13, 1795; 56). Interested in ways of looking in general, one issue is devoted to describing an ogling match in which both sexes participate and in which the ogle is anatomized, broken down into its various manifestations—the sweep, the peep, the glance, the leer, the ogle oblique, and the ogle direct. But The Sylph is most concerned with and alarmed by the female gaze. He suggests that pretty women only be allowed to walk in “private and retired walks” and that “they do carry their eyes in no other direction, than is avowedly necessary for enabling them, as they walk, to keep in their path” (Nov. 29, 1795: 143).

Robinson's Sylphid essays provide a retort both to the Sylph's criticisms of women and his strictures on the female gaze: in response to his diatribes on women she inserts a catalogue of “those enlightened females for which this country is so justly celebrated.”¹⁰ Her rebuttals, however, are most interesting for the subject position from which they are narrated. Like the writer of The Sylph, Robinson presents herself as an all-seeing roving eye/I, who differs from her predecessor in her emphasis on untrammeled movement. Although she focuses her gaze most often on the metropolis, she depicts herself as traveling all over the world, from the North Pole to Paris, from the “wild Euphrates” to London: “I will … explore the most intricate mazes of this sublunary world; traverse the bland regions of the southern hemisphere; brave the wild tumults of the boisterous north; flit in the eastern radiance of the sun's emerging orbit; and burnish my filmy wings in the golden splendours of the day-closing west” (3.51).

Robinson facilitates this range of movement by adopting various insect guises. She literally presents a fly-on-the-wall view, taking on the resemblances of fly, wasp, night-beetle, mosquito, and cricket. Robinson's miniaturist stance is announced by her variation on the title of The Sylph: “sylphid” is a diminutive of “sylph,” used to indicate a smaller or younger version of an already ephemeral entity. She proposes to report “what I have already done in my journey of observation, since the summer morning when I first found myself newly awakened to life, in the painted recesses of a tulip, to that dawn when I rested my airy form on the white cliffs of this wave-circled island” (3.9). One can read Robinson's adoption of the “airy form” of the Sylphid with her unlimited range of movement as an escape from the body, both her own body, so crippled at the time she wrote these essays that she had to be carried by servants, and the spectacular body of the female subject with its inescapable quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Laura Mulvey, Visual and other Pleasures [1989], 25).

However useful a compromise the carriage was for a female desiring untrammeled movement, it was in the end a compromise and not at all the same thing as striding about unencased by a mechanical contraption and unaccompanied by driver and horse. Marie Bashkirtseff, an aspiring flâneuse of the Victorian period, wrote in her diary, “Do you imagine that I get much good from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion, my family?” (Journal of …, trans. Hall and Heckel [1890], 416). Robinson's final literary foray about the city in the guise of the Sylphid can be read as a reaction to the limitations of the carriage view. It can also be read as an attempt to literally transcend a female subject position, both by situating the authorial self at a distance from which it cannot be observed, and by diminishing the body to the point of near invisibility. As Robinson moves farthest away from her former spectacular subject position, however, she comes closest to approximating the imperialistic gaze of the Romantic male writer, who situates himself on a mountain top, the master of all he surveys. For Robinson, the aggression associated with this choice of position must be read against very real defensive needs.

In Naomi Schor's fascinating study of Parisian postcards in 1900 she includes two postcards that depict harbingers of a new female urban mobility: women coach drivers, “the secular goddesses of nouveau Paris” (“Cartes Postales …,” Critical Inquiry 18 [1992]:216). Schor's essay begins by sketching two prevailing and diametrically opposed views of the everyday: the quotidian realm of the female domestic sphere and the masculine public space represented by the street. The fact of the women coach drivers suggests a confusion of public and private, masculine and feminine spheres, a disruption already apparent in the London of Mary Robinson. Robinson's city poems bring women into the public realm and domestic detail into the street. In doing so, they demonstrate an enthusiasm for the city that was shared by her female peers. Priscilla Wakefield's Perambulations in London (1809) conveys the excitement of a young woman's first experience of the city, while Jane Austen, writing, Sept. 18, 1796, to her sister of a trip she was planning to take to London, imagines herself as flâneuse: “My Father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal Daughter from Town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the Hospitals, Enter at the Temple, or mount Guard at St. James” (Letters, R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. [1952],17).

Robinson, in the guise of the Sylphid, writes: “Behold me at the close of the Eighteenth Century, in the Metropolis of England. Here I pause to replenish my shattered wings, and to obtain new sources of important information” (3.16). In this confident address to her readers, one finds the key to Robinson's authorial presence. Robinson uses her position as spectacle (“Behold me”) to draw attention to her position as spectator, finding within the metropolis a sustaining, rather than alienating, vision.

Notes

1. Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” The Problems of Modernity. ed. Andrew Benjamin (1989) 154. See also Deborah Epstein Nord, “The Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991): 351-375.

2. For a skillful reading of this poem and its critical history, see Peter Manning's “Placing Poor Susan: Wordsworth and the New Historicism,” Reading Romantics (1990) 300-320.

3. Dorothy Wordsworth writes: “My brother William is going to publish a second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads with a second volume. He intends to give them the title of ‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’ as Mrs. Robinson has claimed the title and is about publishing a volume of Lyrical Tales. This is a great objection to the former title, particularly as they are both printed at the same press and Longman is the publisher of both the works” (Sept., 1800; EY [The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years 1787-1805], rev. Shaver [1967] 297).

4. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. 4 vols. (1801) 1.128. Hereafter cited in text.

5. Robinson also makes an oblique appearance in Gillray's “New Morality,” her novel, Walsingham, falling out of the cornucopia of ignorance carried by poets.

6. Robinson's early poetry includes the poems she wrote specifically to honor the shifting alliances which constituted, however fleetingly the unity of this world, poems like “Impromptu Sent to a Friend who had left his Gloves, by mistake, at the Author's house on the preceding evening.” This poem is a kind of grace-note written to honor and flatter perhaps a slight acquaintance. Robinson writes of the mislaid gloves:

                       So fare you well:
   This pair shall tell,
   And tell with lungs of leather,
                       That friends who part,
                       Must know the smart
   They never feel together.

   In Robinson's poetry, in the poetry written by women and in the popular poetry of the period such as John Wolcot's [“Peter Pindar”] there is a veritable flood of these calling card poems, poems that by Romantic standards are too slight for careful examination but that as a whole, reconstitute an urban community held together by elegant expressions of regard. See The Poetical Works of Mary Robinson (NEH Women Writers Project, 1990) 478, based primarily on The Poetical Works of the Late Mary Robinson (1824). Hereafter cited in text as PW.

7. To John Taylor, Oct. 5, 1794: “Let common sense judge how I can subsist upon £500 a year when my carriage (a necessary expense) alone costs me £200.” Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents. Formed by Alfred Morrison (1891) 5: 287.

8. There is some question over Robinson's authorship of this poem. It first appears in the Morning Post under the signature of “Oberon,” one of Robinson's pseudonyms, but her daughter attributes it to herself in The Wild Wreath, a collection of poetry edited by Maria Elizabeth Robinson and comprised mostly of her mother's poems. See PW 527.

9. Lamb to Wordsworth: “Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects” (January 30, 1801, Letters, ed. Marrs [1975], 1.267.)

10. “The Sylphid” essays were reprinted in their entirety in the third volume of Robinsons's Memoirs. 3.61-62.