Editor's Note: Poet, children's writer, novelist. Brought up partially on Isle of Wight. She had relatives in Norfolk. She claimed her writing was her family's sole source of support from about 1804. She had one child, who died in 1816. Her first husband died in 1824; she was jailed for debts; she then married James Mason. She claims to have written operas and farce as well as poetry. and fiction.

Catherine George Ward (1787- late 1830s)

By Stephen C. Behrendt

Critical Essay

She was a prolific writer, author of novels, poetry, and children's books, and yet Catherine George Ward (1787- late 1830s) is little remembered today, primarily because despite the volume of her literary production, there is little in any of the genres in which she worked that is of a sustained or truly memorable nature. More often than not, her work is formulaic, both in its plots and themes and in its literary devices and techniques. Nevertheless, there are occasional flashes of imagination and insight that should interest the modern reader.

The poems in the 1805 collection reflect Ward's youth at the time of their appearance; they range from far-fetched sensational romantic tales (like the implausible "Baron of Winterside. A Tale") to sentimental lyrics of disappointed love (like "Fair Fanny," "Lovers Vows" or "The Confession" to essays in easy pathos (e.g., "The Orphan" or "The Beggar Girl"). In all these poems an earnest amateurishness combines with the not altogether positive effects of the author's obviously wide reading in a variety of light popular or "fashionable" writing to produce poems that in many cases lack narrative development, psychological insight, or emotional shading.

"The Baron of Winterside," for instance, the first and longest poem in Poems, concerns an avaricious Baron, "crafty and cruel, puffed with pride" (9) whose gentle son Edward is the only living soul who can soften his heart. When Edward is a young man, the baron sponsors a "splendid ball" for his birthday, at which affair the unfortunate Edward sees and is immediately smitten by a lovely and seemingly insubstantial woman who gives her name as Bosalba before disappearing entirely. Mortally infatuated — and infected — "the bloom forsook his manly cheek, / Where once did health and joy bespeak" as Edward vainly pursues his lost love "through woods, thro' wilds, and meadows green" (11). Moved by his son's misery, the baron searches for Bosalba, but when he "found her origin obscure," "he storm'd, he rav'd, his bosom tore" (12). More important, he directs unusual harshness to the one person he actually loves:

"Must you then wed with such a one?
"May dire destruction overtake,
"Whene'er a bride, of her, you make:
"Accurs'd the hour when first she came
"To blast thy health, and damp thy fame!
"But soon this beauty shall repent,
"And from these mountains far be sent."

The two remaining lines of the poem themselves indicate better than any commentary can the nature of the weakness of such tales:

— "Relentless Father!" EDWARD cried,
Sunk at his feet, — where, lo! he died. (12)

Not even the most formulaic of Gothic narratives can engage successfully in such radical telescoping of event, response, and consequence. The reader is given no insight into the roots of the baron's misanthropy, his son's virtue, the means by which the obviously poor Bosalba comes to be at the splendid birthday ball, the over-the-top brutality of the baron's response to Edward's infatuation, and — most tellingly — Edward's almost comical response of falling dead, struck down by his father's rejection of the potential match.

Even Ward must have realized — or had pointed out to her — the insufficiency of this sort of ending, for the revised version of the poem that appears in Miscellaneous Poems (1820) continues for eight more lines in order to bring some more reasonable closure to the tale and to fit in into an elegiac mode whose conclusion recalls poems like Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard":

Now where the willow bends its boughs,
He breathes no more his love-sick vows,
Borne on an angel's wing he flies,
And with an angel mounts the skies.
Stranger, O drop one gentle tear,
Embalm'd with pity on his bier!
And view the sad effects of pride,
In the Baron of Winterside. (47)

A comparable sort of emotional and dramatic shorthand appears in other 1805 poems as well. The little three-stanza lyric, "The Sea-Boy" (reprinted in 1820), which features an interesting stanza form, presents a "ragged and torn" but nevertheless healthy and cheerful boy who (like William Blake's Chimney Sweeper in the Songs of Experience) pursues his difficult life without complaint and "whistles when the ship glides smooth along" or "tunes his song / With youthful jollity" (20). Unlike Blake's sweep, however, Ward's sea-boy appears not to have been sold into slavery, although the poem hints that he may have been seized or impressed for service. More important, unlike most of the unfortunate protagonists in Ward's poems, he is spared a tragic end and given instead a happy one. For after his long travels the boy returns safely to his native land "where from his mother's arms he last was tore" and with the vessel moored in port "he drops a joyful tear, / And fondly clasps again that mother dear / With transport to his heart" (21). Sentimental resolutions of this sort anticipate the tone and tenor of some of the most widely popular (albeit contrived) poems of later writers like Felicia Hemans and reflect already at this early date themes of filial affection, domesticity and motherhood typically associated with the Victorian ethos of some two or more decades later.

When in 1820 Ward published her Miscellaneous Poems she carried over ten of the 1805 poems, as she had in an intervening collection published in 1812, in most cases revising them only slightly by altering their stanza forms or some inconsequential wording — or both. Only "The Baron of Winterside," "To the Morning Star, and "Moonlight" received substantive revisions of their content that involved shortening, recombining, or (in the case of "The Baron of Winterside") adding to the original material. In virtually every case (including the most minor), the alterations improved the poetry at the same time they reflected the relatively more modern poetic diction and typographic conventions of early Victorian poetry.

Ward dedicated her 1820 collection to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, the widower of the late Princess of Wales, Charlotte Augusta, who had died suddenly in November 1817 after an extraordinary difficult and extended labor that had yielded a stillborn infant son. This event had at once deprived the nation of the presumptive heir(s) to the throne (since the Prince of Wales — the Prince Regent — who had separated from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, had no other child) and of a young and attractive royal family whose thoroughly moral lifestyle represented for many in Britain a welcome contrast to the disreputable behavior of the widely unpopular Prince Regent and his estranged wife. Princess Charlotte's death triggered a remarkable national outpouring of grief and public mourning that included among its many cultural artifacts a great number of memorial poems through which the British people were able at once to lament the princess's (and the nation's) loss and, through the rituals of public mourning, to "possess" Charlotte and her associated attributes, in the process ennobling themselves by sharing in her humanity (Behrendt). Ward herself contributed to this literature of national mourning with the poem that opens Miscellaneous Poems, "A Tributary Poem. On the first Confirmation which was received on the sudden and lamented Death of our beloved and amiable Princess, Her Royal Highness the PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF SAXE COBOURG." Like most such poems, Ward's begins with formulaic and melodramatic exclamations of grief:

What herald comes, — all breathless — drown'd in tears,
To speak at once our agonizing fears;
In mournful accents gives the fatal blow,
And melts all hearts with sympathetic woe!
All tongues to faulter [sic], as they cry 'tis o'er!
An Angel's gone! our Princess is no more! (1)

Ward then catalogues Charlotte's public attributes, as other poets did, itemizing her virtues first as woman, as mother, and as wife, and only then as princess. This was a common procedure in the memorial poems for Charlotte, for despite her station as princess, her death as a consequence of childbirth bore immediate significance for ordinary Britons, and in particular for women, for whom the death of a child (and often its mother) was a depressingly familiar occurrence. Indeed, the underlying rhetorical strategy of Ward's poem is typical of majority of the poems on Charlotte's death. In cataloguing and celebrating the many ways in which the princess might be perceived to be like the ordinary British citizens (unlike her parents, who were in every way unlike them), poets like Ward revealed how much the people were therefore like Charlotte, so that their ritualized mourning permitted the citizens to ennoble themselves and their situation by participating in Charlotte's life, experience, and symbolic significance (Behrendt). Moreover, Charlotte and Leopold provided an alternative model of married life to those represented by most younger members of the royal family, whose infidelities and extravagances — particularly in light of the national tragedies of a war with France that lasted nearly a quarter century and, after 1810, the madness of George III — were a source both of scandal and of public contempt. This is one reason why the loss of princess and child struck such a blow in Britain, for as Ward puts it,

Faultless and fair, a blessing from above,
She liv'd to estimate domestic love! (2)

This is precisely the image of domesticity — the "angel in the house" — in which Victorian British culture would invest so heavily in subsequent years.

Ward's poem concludes, as many did, with an address to Prince Leopold that blends flattery with condolence. In commemorating his dead wife and child and extending her sympathies to the suffering husband, the poet ingratiates herself as well, placing upon him an implied debt (of gratitude but also of favor):

My honor'd Prince! — with sympathy sincere,
Accept the tribute of a nation's tear:
Should these sad pages ever meet thine eye,
Believe that gratitude can never die!
What though departed worth be silent laid,
Still gratitude shall hover near its shade;
Shall strew unfading flowers around its urn,
With ceaseless love lament — with ardour burn:
Her sacred name a magic charm shall bear
Long in our hearts — and reign for ever there! (5)

Indeed, Ward's dedicatory address to the prince echoes both the sentiments and the rhetorical strategy of her poem:
When I consider the spirit of benevolence which reigns in your Royal Highness's character, I am unequal to the task of expressing my admiration or my gratitude, and wish for greater powers than nature has allotted to me, that I might then pour forth my heartfelt thanks, and in all the languages of the world pay homage to the virtues which adorn your mind, to that urbanity of disposition which leads you to befriend genius, and to that universal goodness for which all ranks in life (whether humble or exalted) reverence you . . . . should the following pages meet one approving smile from your Royal Highness, it will be to me a gem of intrinsic value, for it will be enriched by sensibility, it will be ennobled by humanity, and its generous influence will long be reflected on the grateful heart of [the author]. . . . (i-iii) While this sort of language may strike a modern reader as unnecessarily — even embarrassingly — self-promoting, it is nevertheless typical of many of the dedications to Leopold, in books of all sorts, that appeared in the years following Charlotte's death. Moreover, given Ward's own difficult personal circumstances, including the death of her own only child just a few years previously, the very personal appeal of her language should not surprise us.

The celebration of "domestic love" in the poem on Charlotte resonates also with a poem that Ward published as a pamphlet in 1819. Maid, Wife, and Mother; or, Woman! A Poem was dedicated to Princess Caroline Augusta of Wales, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales (then Prince Regent). The dedication is an even more extravagant exercise in self-promotion under the (transparent) guise of praise for the princess who is lauded for "those qualities which endear you to the warm glow of maternal affection," for

It is these qualities, striking so forcibly on the female heart, which has [sic] ever rendered you the Idol of English People! and which never yet failed to add to the most exalted rank, a sentiment of grateful adoration! They cannot be forgot! and while the name of the deeply lamented Princess Charlotte is remembered -- that of her amiable and illustrious Mother will be dear as the representative of departed excellence, fled too soon to her native skies. (v-vi) Caroline was subsequently to become a figurehead in the political side-show that attended the elevation of the Prince Regent and his coronation in 1821 as George IV, from which event in Westminster Abbey Caroline was forcibly barred, to the chagrin of partisans like Lord Byron, Henry Brougham, and the opposition Whigs. But it is surely an exaggeration present her in 1819 as widely honored in England, either as woman or as mother, even among those who appreciated her role in defending her daughter, Princess Charlotte, against the strictures imposed upon her personal life by her father and his circle. As with the dedication to Prince Leopold a year later, this one is clearly designed to elicit favor -- and presumably support -- for its author.

Ward's poem, which runs only some 192 lines, is a curious production. It is in some respects the straightforward celebration of women's domestic experiences that the title appears to indicate. But the rhetorical and typographical arrangement of the title (with its exclamation point and its black-letter Gothic descriptor) suggests a satirical work that is in fact borne out by the nature and tone of the poem's text. For the poem at once celebrates women in their roles as maidens, wives, and mothers and chastises the men who brutalize and betray them. Indeed, the concluding lines drive this point home:

. . . by nature she [woman] is kind,
In men alone, 'tis BRUTES we find;
Bound by no tie divine or human,
His sacrifice -- is -- hapless woman!
Thro' all stages of her life,
The maid, the mother, and the wife. (18-19)

This is a message that resonates also in Ward's fiction. In The Daughter of St. Omar (1810), for instance, the protagonist finds a happy marriage only after first enduring a forced marriage to a cruel husband who takes a sadistic delight in seducing other women. The point that Ward makes forcefully at the end of her poem is set up by the previous 186 lines, which detail the course of a woman's life from infancy and childhood through adolescence and womanhood, including courtship, marriage, and motherhood.

According to Ward, her perilous way through the world leads the starry-eyed and impressionable young woman through the transports and the catastrophes of romantic love, until, seeming to have made a safe and secure match, she finds herself caught in a catastrophe of far greater dimensions:

The darling now becomes a wife,
The happiest stage of all her life;
Protected now from all alarms,
Seeks refuge in a husband's arms.
And this would be a blissful state,
But evils still attend her fate;
And woman's race it is not run,
Alas! 'tis only just begun.
For sometimes rich, and sometimes poor,
She dreads the wolf that's at the door;
That bane of all in married life. (15-16)

Married now, and despite her unpromising home life, the young woman quickly begins to produce children in a passage that further reflects Ward's thoroughly gendered attitudes:

For scarce another year had past,
Ere woman crowns her work at last!
Delightful climax! called to prove
A mother's joys, and a woman's love!
Her new-born treasure sees the light,
She smiles transported with the sight;
Forgets the perils of that hour,
Destined by almighty power!
To make a woman feel and know
Her station: — her breast to glow
With pleasures soft and sweetest thrill,
And bow submissive to his will! (17)

This is very much the ideology of the domestic that characterizes subsequent Victorian thought and that became a standard element in at least part of the poetry written throughout the British Isles in the several decades following the appearance of Ward's poem. That such gendered views about the roles (and the behavior) of women and men alike — and about the "almighty power" whose "will" permits and therefore apparently sanctions them while requiring the woman's submission — appear both in Ward's poetry and in her fiction already by 1820 indicates the extent to which her work reflects the developing ideology of the separate spheres that characterizes Victorian thinking in Britain. In that respect, Ward's literary work contributes importantly to the picture we are able to draw today of the culture of her times, and of how that culture was changing irreversibly during her own lifetime.

At the same time the modern reader is struck by the clear and abiding love of Scotland and "Scottishness" reflected in effective poems like "On the Author's Visiting the Grave of Robert Burns, In Dumfries Church-Yard, Scotland, in the Year 1804" and "Lines Written in Kelsoe Abbey, Scotland" (both from Miscellaneous Poems, 1820). Ward's Scotland, for all the disappointments of the modern world, is itself eternal and noble — and noticeably masculinist — both in its land and in its people, as is clear from the latter poem:

Dear Caledonia! at whose early birth,
Came blithsome [sic] health, and peace, and joyous mirth,
Genius and strength thy hardy sons first knew,
And deeds of valor first belonged to you:
Blest be your hills, for ever blest your shades,
Your lofty mountains and your peaceful glades,
Where happy shepherds feed their flocks secure,
On grounds their aged fathers trod before.
Immortal chiefs! though long to dust consign'd,
Ye'll live eternal on the grateful mind!
Fight o'er your battles in your sons again,
And Scotia mourn her chiefs no longer slain. (21-22).

Works Cited

Behrendt, Stephen C. Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. London: B. T. Batsford, 1990: 1129-30.
Ward, Catherine G. Maid, Wife, and Mother; or, Woman! A Poem. London: Matthew Iley, 1819.
—. Miscellaneous Poems. London: for the author: Gold and Northhouse, Taylor and Hessey, and Chapple, 1820.
—. Poems. Edinburgh: John Moir, 1805.