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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington

Too clever for her own good

Claire Tomalin reviews Norma Clarke's biography of Laetitia Pilkinton

Things went wrong when Swift got an English chaplaincy for Pilkington. He set off eagerly to savour the delights of London, and when she followed him made it clear she was an encumbrance. He was involved with other women, she felt herself entitled to her own freedoms, and once back in Ireland he accused her of adultery, sued for divorce, and got it. Laetitia’s father was dead, she had no protector and her life immediately became chaotic and terrifying. She found herself the prey of any man who chose to attack her and had to defend herself against rape as well as calumny. Her chief defence was her wit, with which she ridiculed the aggressors. Swift did nothing to help her but, alarmed by scandal, simply scratched out her name in his papers.

Hoping to publish her poetry, she returned to London, where she took rooms close to White’s club and became for a while a favourite of its members, entertaining them with her conversation and writing to their commands. It was a precarious business, financially and for her reputation. She was helped by two good men, Colley Cibber, the aged poet laureate, who admired and pitied her, and raised considerable sums for her relief; and by Samuel Richardson, who entertained her and with whom she corresponded. At one point she begged him to spare Clarissa from rape. ‘Consider, if this wounds both Mr Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity) what must it do with those who possess that inestimable treasure?’ Clarke points out that Richardson supplied Pilkington with paper and encouraged her to write to him — he collected letters from women in order to understand them better — and that she in turn learnt from Richardson’s fiction when she came to write her memoirs.

There was never enough help for her, and the arrival of her son Jack, out of work and dressed in rags, and a daughter she scarcely knew, pregnant and penniless, made things desperate. She was driven from her lodgings and trudged the wintry streets searching for a roof for the birth of her grandchild. Richardson helped again, but Pilkington was exhausted. She had had a spell in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and thought of suicide, and in 1747 she decided to crawl back to Ireland. At the end of one of her last letters to Richardson she did not even put her name, saying it was ‘lost, barebit and gnawn, by Slander’s canker tooth’.

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