Broughton, Eliza, fl. 1796
By Samantha Webb
Critical Essay
Although her real identity remains in doubt, the poet who wrote as "Eliza" (b.?, d. after 1796) was a well-regarded contributor to the London newspaper The Star and Daily Evening Advertiser from 1788 to the early 1790s. Before she published her only volume of poetry, Poems and Fugitive Pieces, her works received laudatory responses from fellow Star contributors who wrote under pseudonyms such as "Henry," "Alphonzo" and "Leander." Unfortunately, when the book was published in 1796, most reviewers dismissed the poems as "trifles." From a surface reading, it is easy to see why critics would have thought this. Occasional, polite, and sentimental, the poems lack the kind of formal experimentation that characterizes the early romantic period, as well as the range of subjects one would expect from over 200 pages of text. "Eliza" generally opts for conventional neoclassical figures and the stately diction of the heroic couplet. Furthermore, her thematic interests don't go beyond the pathos and melancholy associated with the sentimental tradition, a tradition that she self-consciously invokes and celebrates. However, a closer look reveals a number things that should interest the modern reader, not the least of which is her handling of sentimental subjects. For one thing, "Eliza" is surprisingly self-promoting; she includes in her own book those "testimonies of approbation" (2) that appeared in The Star, poems written to her that praise her poetic and sympathetic powers. While it is impossible to know why she included these response poems, they certainly remind us that the original publication context in the newspaper was a dynamic and dialogic community. More significantly, however, these testimonial poems allow "Eliza" and her approving readers to theorize the role of sensibility in social life.
In her use of sentimental conventions, "Eliza" is a poet firmly rooted in the 1790s. She writes about the ferment of the French Revolution ("Evening") and British expansion in India (the "Ramsgate Pier" sequence and "Rural Courtship") in order to show the disruptive effects of politics on the domestic affections. In fact, her work offers a domestic perspective on political issues and social trends, and while she makes no explicit political comment, she shows how family affections suffer when politics take precedence, or when economic trends dictate that young men must go to far-flung parts of the empire to make a living. In this sense, "Eliza" is a poet of feminine sensibility, offering an implicit critique of a masculinized public sphere that suggests that politics corrupts relationship and wreaks havoc in women's lives. Her work reflects the political impulse at the heart of the discourse of sensibility, the notion that, as Claudia Johnson puts it, sensibility is "politics...made intimate" (2).
This feminization of the private sphere, as Marlon B. Ross, Anne Mellor and others have shown, was a common rhetorical move by women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By representing the home as a feminized space that offered a comforting respite from the masculine public sphere of commerce and politics, women could carve out an essential place for themselves within culture (see Ross 203-5). But whereas early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for women's education and an expansion in their public roles, "Eliza" retreats from this kind of explicitly reformist stance. Although her most interesting poems deal in some way with the plight of women in the world of men, she does not offer an alternative social vision. Rather, she submerges her critique in all of the conventional plots of sensibility, shedding tears of pity for her suffering characters, representing their pain, but fundamentally accepting their plight as women's lot.
This resignation, of course, makes for great
sentimental poetry, and "Eliza" is a keen
While she certainly cannot be compared to
Voltaire as a critic of optimism, "Eliza" seems to have absorbed the
lessons of sentimental classics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle
Heloise (1758) and Henry McKenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), as
well as the melancholy lyric mode of her contemporaries, Charlotte Smith and
Helen Maria Williams. These authors explored the ethics of the emotions,
particularly the value of sympathy. Having the ability to feel sympathy for
someone else's misfortunes and to perform that sympathy by weeping and/or
throwing money at the unfortunate meant one was an ethical, moral person
(see Bredvold). Sympathy confirmed the social feelings, a naturalized
interpretation of the enlightenment notion of the social contract. In "Eliza"'s
work, sympathy functions in precisely this way, but it primarily takes the form
of "pity," admittedly not synonymous with sympathy and far more
problematic in terms of its social and ethical possibilities. "Eliza"
never adopts the voice of the suffering character; rather, the sufferers' voices
appear in quotation marks, framed within a primary narrator's sympathetic
consciousness. Such a distancing technique makes possible an interrogation of
the ethics of pity because it positions the primary speaker outside of the
experience of suffering and so able to contemplate it. For example, her poem
about the Queen of France is "an elegy finished on reading the
melancholy Separation of the Dauphin from the Queen of France" (emphasis
mine). The Queen's desperate plea to save her son is constructed within the
sympathetic imagination of the primary speaker, who observes "O, may my
bosom e'er be incli'd, / At least to pity woes I cannot cure" (113). The
Ramsgate Pier poems are inspired by the speaker's having heard a story connected
with the place, not from her experience of loss. While "Rural
Courtship" vacillates between the first- and the third-person, the ballad
form that "Eliza" uses rhetorically distances the reader the events.
Further, the response poems, what "Eliza" refers to as
"testimonies of
For thou, O Pity, didst inspire
Each gentle thrilling note!
Bads't glow, with thy celestical fire,
Each line Eliza wrote. (16)
"Eliza" is fundamentally a spectator of feeling, and it is her sensitivity as such that garners her praise.
Undoubtedly, these response constitute a kind
of poetical puffery. However, they also contribute significantly to the volume's
theoretical investments. It is through these "testimonies" that pity
is theorized as a social good. The volume's centerpiece sequence, "Lines
Written on Ramsgate Pier by Moonlight," swells from "Eliza"'s
original four poems to become a series of seventeen through the testimonies and
"Eliza"'s responses to each of them. This sequence ran at irregular
intervals in The Star from fall 1790 to the summer of 1791. The plot is simple
enough: Mary's lover William goes to India, presumably as part of a military
operation, and dies in a shipwreck just off Ramsgate Harbor. The poem records
Mary and William's mother's horror when they witness the wreck. While the first
poem tells the story, the others fill in what we might call the emotional
details. They are situationally self-defined from within the couple's
relationship, as in "found wrapped round a Posy of wild Flowers; supposed
to have fallen from the Bosom of hapless Mary" and "found in Mary's
box of little hoarded treasures." On their own, these poems about lives
ruined by shipwreck and suicide would seem a sentimental and sensationalistic
spectacle of the
To pigeonhole "Eliza" as an author of
"trifling" sentimental verse would ignore another interesting aspect
of her work: the ways in which the expansion of the British empire is set
against a contracting domestic and national sphere. India is represented as a
kind of "other woman" who interrupts a romantic idyll. In "Ramsgate
Pier" and "Rural Courtship," the heroines lose their lovers to
India, which in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offered
second sons of prominent families, those who would not inherit the family
fortune, the opportunity to make their fortunes as army officers. The
temptations of wealth are equated in this poem with sexual temptations and
transgression. India, with its "sable charms" seduces the young men of
Britain, those whom Edmund Burke so strongly indicted in his 1787 speech to the
House of Commons. Since the Warren Hastings trial was so widely publicized, it
is possible that "Eliza" derived much of the political background for
this poem from that debate. In "Ramsgate Pier," it is not made clear
why William goes to India, but one of the poems, "Lines to William by
Mary" suggests his interests
"Ramsgate Pier" and "Rural
Courtship" are by far the most interesting pieces in the book. The bulk of
the volume is taken up with familiar poems of address to friends. She wrote
poems to them on even the most ordinary of occasions: to the Countess of A.
"with a Flower Basket" and "with a pair of Woodstock Scissars and
Gloves, after having seen Blenheim," and to a Mrs G "for a Bouquet
of Roses and other Flowers," and to "a lady" "with an empty
honey jar" and "with a calendar for the new year." The volume
also contains many impromptus with subtitles like "Occasioned by a young
lady hiding a French Half-crown in her Friend's Handkerchief, as they could not
settle at Cards who had won it." Virtually any subject inspires
"Eliza," particularly those
This spectatorial quality reaches its climax in the last poem, "A Tour of the Glaciers of Savoy; An Epistle to John Waller, Esq.," which should be contrasted to later, more well-known poems on the same subject, Coleridge's "Hymn at Sunrise" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc." "Eliza"'s poem is interesting for its resistance to the sublime. Her concern is with the long, uncomfortable ride she and her party took to get there, and only tangentially with the sublime scenery. The poem is explicitly comical, meant to amuse her correspondent, and it marches along in a jaunty ballad stanza. "Eliza" writes as a harassed tourist rather than a lyric poet, complaining about the rain, the tour guides, and the accommodations. (Mary Shelley, to be sure, makes similar complaints in her History of a Six-Week's Tour, but this does not filter into her descriptions of the mountain or into Percy's poem.) "Eliza"'s perspective on the scene is the fairly conventional one of a tourist writing home, whereas the Shelleys had intellectual investments that distinguished them from other tourists. It would be easy to view this failure to engage the sublime as a result of "Eliza"'s lack of poetic vision. However, the tourist's perspective is ultimately the unifying theme of the volume: "Eliza" is never in the experience depicted in poem, only watching it. This spectatorial impulse accounts for her dominant rhetorical strategies, the depiction of suffering in quotation marks and the setting of most of the poems in a domestic context.
Not surprisingly, however, reviewers were not impressed. The Critical Review said "Eliza" would have done better to have left the testimonies out, and while some praised her powers of pathos, most complained that the poems were too insignificant to be taken seriously. By far the biggest slam came from the Annual Register for 1796, who complained that "Eliza" could have foregone publication entirely "with no harm to her reputation" (264). What reviewers disliked about the volume, it seems, were the comical poems, and indeed, they are the weakest in the book. The question remains just how committed "Eliza" was to a poetic career. Although her London publisher was the well-known Cadell and Davies firm, Poems and Fugitive Pieces was her only book. One comical piece is written in Scottish vernacular, suggesting her familiarity with the idiom. But she mentions no contemporaries of note, and only a few predecessors: Frances Greville (whose "Ode to Indifference" became a classic of sentimental poetry), Alexander Pope, and interestingly, Fingal of Ossian fame. We know, of course, that she read The Star, a comparatively small London newspaper that covered a wide range of subjects and featured poetry two or three times a week. "Peter Pindar" was a regular contributor, and there are the occasional contributions from Charlotte Smith. "Eliza" apparently remained personally unconnected to the literary scene, except through her pseudonymous newspaper correspondents. It seems likely, therefore, that she was encouraged to publish by her friends, as she says in the preface, and that she sought no further for literary fame.
There is also some ambiguity about who she was.
She may have been Eliza Broughton (Jackson 41), but she is most often identified
as Esther Milnes Day (Davis and Joyce 75). The latter may or may not be wife of
the eccentric children's writer Thomas Day (see Blain, et. al., 273). It seems
unlikely that she would be the latter, given Thomas Day's requiring temperament
and his strict educational program. Moreover, Milnes Day died in 1792, and
"Eliza"'s contributions to The
With our modern critical sensitivity to women's
strategies of subversion of patriarchal standards, it is tempting to see "Eliza"'s
suffering sentimental heroines and her interrogation of the ethics of pity as
precisely this kind of subversive commentary. However, such a perspective misses
the tenor of the volume as a whole. "Eliza" is more interested in
eliciting pathos for its own sake than to anatomize the political causes that
lead to women's suffering. In terms of her similarities with other women writers
of the 1790s, "Eliza" fits somewhere in between the conservative,
anti-feminism of Hannah More and the social reform feminism of Mary
Wollstonecraft. More plausibly, we might view her work in the context of what
Stuart Curran termed "the I Altered," the specifically feminine focus
on domesticity as a radically charged response to masculine romanticism. This
would especially account for "Eliza"'s poems of address, which
critics notwithstanding she herself refers to as "trifles" (see
"Lines To Mrs. R. with a plaited Work Basket," "A Card of thanks
to Mrs. G for a Bouquet of Roses and other Flowers"). These poems have
the comic, intimate flavor of Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Washing Day"
and Charlotte Smith's "Thirty-Eight"
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic
Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
Blain, Virginia, et. al., eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in
English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Bredvold, Louis I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1962.
Davis, Gwenn and Joyce, Beverly A. Poetry by Women to 1900. A Bibliography of
American and British Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
"Eliza." Poems and Fugitive Pieces. London: Cadell and Davies;
Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1796.
Fulford, Tim and Kitson, Peter, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and
Empire, 1780-1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Jackson, J.R. de J. Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography 1770-1835.
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Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in
the 1790s. Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: The
University of Chicago, 1995.
McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style.
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Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, Chapman and
Hall, 1993.
Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of
Women's Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Reviews: Analytical Review 23 (1796): 613-614; British Critic 8
(1796): 178; Critical Review n.s.18 (1796): 102; English Review 27
(1796): 584; Monthly Review n.s. 20 (1796): 224; New Annual Register
17 (1796): 264.