Editors Note: Said to have been a governess (Jackson). Original Poems is dedicated to "Miss Ann Henderson, and Jackson reports that it is dedicated to Margaret, countess of Moray and is subscribed to by "half a dozen other countesses." Some editions of her book describe her as "the Author of The Hubble-shue."

Carstairs, Christian

By Pam Perkins

Critical Essay

The few readers of Christian Carstairs' poetry have been more or less in agreement in their reactions to it: bewilderment and bemusement at its sheer oddity. While Carstairs is in no conventional sense a good or even a particularly original poet, the eccentricities of her style catch a reader's attention in a way that mediocre competence would not. In any discussion of her work that attempts to treat it seriously, it is necessary to concede immediately that her Original Poems (1786) does not stand up to evaluation by traditional methods of close reading. What makes it worth discussion more than two hundred years after its publication is its historical interest. Carstairs, with striking enthusiasm, wrote on just about every fashionable topic of the day, and her volume of poems is an index of the literary tastes of her era. As a result, the volume's contents - and perhaps even the simple fact of its publication -- give some insights into women's place in the late eighteenth-century Scottish literary world.

There is very little known about Carstairs to explain either why she wrote or why she published, although there are indications that financial problems might have played a role in her decision to go into print. A handwritten note in the National Library of Scotland copy of Carstairs' Original Poems identifies the dedicatee of the first part of Queen Mary as "James Bruce Carstairs -- of Kinross father to the author."[1] He was dead by September 1768, but he was presumably a relative, perhaps the father, of the James Bruce Carstairs who was involved in a property dispute with the Bruce Arnots, a dispute that Bruce Carstairs lost on appeal in the House of Lords in 1772. (It was a case of sufficient interest for James Boswell to make a point of attending the sessions in which the Lords heard the appeal.) These and other details that survive about Christian Carstairs, sketchy as they are, suggest a familiar story: the well-educated daughter of a family with good connections but little money falls on hard times following the death of her father and, possibly, the loss of family property. As a result, she turns to the few acceptable ways for a lady of her era to earn a living. She might have tried teaching; James Maidment, who wrote the preface of a privately printed nineteenth-century edition of her brief farce The Hubble-Shue, states that she was the Miss Carstairs who advertised her establishment of a school in 1767, which, if true provides evidence to support arguments that she wrote from financial necessity.[2] Yet the advertisement describes a woman who trained as and who was training milliners rather than elegant young ladies:

Misses LYON and CARSTAIRS have taken up a School, at their house in Bailie Fyfe's-close, where they take Apprentices and Scholars at the most reasonable rates, and do the following Works in the most neat and elegant way, viz. White Seams, coloured Work, Dresden on Muslain and Gauze, Embroidery of all kinds, Drawing, working of Lace, Gum-flowers of Silks and Cambrick, Shell-work, Washing and Dressing, and making them up in the millinery way.

N.B. Miss Carstairs was apprentice to the late Mrs. Wilson, and one of her Factorix's till her death.[3]

If this Miss Carstairs was indeed the poet, she had evidently not lived a life of genteel leisure for at least some years, if ever, even though Carstairs' poems present a picture of gentry life, not that of a middle-class wage earner. While such pictures might not, of course, be autobiographical, there can be no doubt that Carstairs had some connection with the aristocracy, either directly or indirectly, as she was able to find an impressive array of aristocratic support for her foray into print. While her subscription list is very small -- only ninety-seven names -- an entirely disproportionate number of subscribers are aristocrats. Carstairs, or her friends, managed to find three duchesses, six countesses, six wives of men with lesser titles, and ten daughters of earls, marquesses or dukes to buy her poems. In all, more than a quarter of her subscribers were titled women.

This fact conveys an impression of genteel poverty alleviated, at least to some degree, by charitable patronage, an impression that is further supported by Maidment's manuscript annotations in the National Library of Scotland copy of The Hubble-Shue. In a long note, dated December 1833, Maidment explains that the play has been reprinted at the suggestion of "The Countess Duchess of Sutherland ... [who] had some acquaintance with Miss Carstairs -- perhaps she was under her when young."[4] While the note makes it clear that the Duchess was interested in the play only because she found it amusingly absurd, the mere fact that she knew Carstairs well enough to remember her up to half a century or more after she was likely to have encountered her suggests that Carstairs was not a casual object of charity, unknown to the aristocratic families that supported her. However eccentric and however financially unstable she might have been, the evidence suggests that she was able to draw on the support of people in or on the upper fringes of her own circle when she chose to publish her poems.

The poems themselves would probably not have found a publisher had it not been for that aristocratic patronage. They are, by any ordinary aesthetic standards, impossible to criticize. As one bewildered reader commented in a manuscript note in the British Library copy of Carstairs' poems,

These productions of a female pen are called poems, otherwise I should have been at a loss to say what description of composition they come under, being neither prose nor verse, rhyme, nor reason. I can seldom perceive in them even a glimpse of common sense, but they deserve to be preserved as a curiosity .... To have good sense, say the critics, is above all things essentially requisite in an author ... but some people, both authors and readers, seem to think the greatest recommendation of poetry is to be unintelligible. In their estimation, the fair author of the Hubble-shue and the Poem on Queen Mary, and the other pieces in this rare Miscellany, is, no doubt, a much better poet than Pope, or Cowper, or even Milton....

He concludes, moving away from the heavy-handed irony, that these "productions of insanity" should be "preserved as the ravings of a disordered imagination."[5] Reading the volume as a manifestation of insanity is, however, almost as unsatisfactory as reading it straightforwardly as poetry. The poems lack the sort of visionary intensity that twenty-first century readers have long been led to associate with the art of the insane; instead, they read like conventional eighteenth-century verse fractured by an casual lack of interest in anything like rhythm or metre, as well as by a disinclination to accept the limitions of any particular lyric style. A poem with the lengthy title "A Lady in the Character of a Nymph. To the CORSICAN WARRIOR at Shakespeare's Jubilee" might seem, for example, to promise little other than a polite compliment to a fellow Scot. (The Corsican warrior was James Boswell, as Carstairs is careful to explain in a note.) What it gives instead is a confused and rather breathless attempt to balance the claims of British interest in supporting the Corsican independence movement against reluctance to see Britons fighting overseas, all set against the underdeveloped background of Garrick's famous Jublilee at Stratford. Refusing to remain content with graceful occasional verse, Carstairs veers off into didactic moralizing and topical political commentary. As a result, the poem rapidly spirals out of control.

Such loss of control marks much of the work in the volume, as Carstairs seems incapable of settling on any single style or approach. She attempts most types of popular eighteenth-century poetry, and in almost all cases, work that might initially seem familiar soon wanders off in strange directions. Original Poems includes a more-or-less blank verse drama about Mary Queen of Scots, light-hearted ballads, simple Scots songs, and occasional verses on domestic subjects. Yet all of these poems evince the indifference to conventional poetic development or control evident in the verses to Boswell. The Song written for the tune "Here awa, there awa" (56), for example, gives an almost palimpsestic sense of containing elements of numerous familiar Scots songs even while not quite making full sense of any of them. There is a hint of misunderstood love, a hint of regret at parting from familiar places and friends, and a hint of melancholic wandering -- yet none of these elements cohere. The occasional poems are written on occasions of almost Lewis Carrollian oddity. One calls for a painter to portray a scene in which Maria, Lady H[alke]tt embraces a daughter as a maid almost lets her drop; another, simply called "Kinross, 1767," turns out to be about how the speaker's reflections on Mary, Queen of Scots, were interrupted one day when "a boar put us all in a fright" (43). Most odd, perhaps, is an "Impromptu" with a title almost as long as the eight-line poem, which is supposed to be "spoken by a Gentleman, occasioned by a Miniature Picture of a Lady being put up as a But to shoot at in Germany at the time of the last war." The poem itself, one of Carstairs' most polished efforts, is overwhelmed by the accumulation of bizarrely specific detail in the title. While the volume is ostensibly in the style of "ladies'" poetry of the era, Carstairs' free departure from the conventional patterns that she initially seems to be imitating and her evident ability to find the bizarre in the quotitidian matters of an eighteenth-century woman's life make the poems entirely unlike those on which they are apparently modelled.

The gap between the conventionality of Carstairs' framework and the actual content of the poems is perhaps best illustrated by her "On the Death of André." John André, a British soldier, was executed as a spy during the Revolutionary War despite what many of his countrymen felt to be extenuating circumstances that ought to have saved his life. News of the execution sparked both grief and outrage, and the death inspired several writers among Carstairs' contemporaries to attempt elegies, with Anna Seward's "Monody on the Death of Major André" being perhaps the best known of such works. Carstairs expresses the standard regret for what was perceived as unnecessary death and uncharacteristic cruelty on Washington's part in carrying out the sentence, but she does so in a startlingly hyperbolic manner. The poem consists of a series of staccato exclamations of misery, the short, irregular lines perhaps chosen to mimic the incoherence of grief -- or the oracular style of prophecy. This prophetic tone is appropriate, as André's death, in Carstairs' version of it, is not merely a tragedy of war but a martyrdom that might save both countries:

Proud nations. Love of liberty carried too far.
One of your noblest -- bravest -- dearest sons
Dies!
To reunite you.
Relent. (69)

On one level, this wish that the warring nations might be reconciled through André's death demonstrates nothing more than a naive belief that political and military history are shaped by the logic of a a sentimental novel. Yet the poem's assumption that its overwrought expressions of private, feminine grief echo the wider sociopolitical response to André's death invites a more nuanced reading. Such a mixture of fashionable sentiment and oracular declamations about the fate of nations is more reminiscent of James Macpherson's Ossian poems than it is Seward's more conventional elegy for André. Perhaps the most famous and influential Scottish work of that era, Macpherson's controversial translations of ancient Gaelic poetry similarly link the fate of individuals and the fate of nations; in them, private grief for an individual frequently echoes and intensifies grief for a vanishing society. Macpherson also "translates" these epics into a form of prose poetry, rejecting formal metre and rhyme and employing heightened, formal diction and syntax in order to convey the solemnity of the subject matter. What Carstairs seems to be doing in her version of the death of André is attempting to invest contemporary politics with the solemn, tragic grandeur that so many of her contemporaries found in Macpherson's version of the Ossian poems.

The question of whether or not she succeeds in that attempt is less interesting than the simple possibility that that is what she is doing. One of the debates sparked by Macpherson's work centred on questions of sentiment and, a little more indirectly, gender. Sceptics doubted that any third-century bard would be capable of the refined delicacy of feeling described in Macpherson's poetry; supporters insisted that what gave the work its main charm was precisely that it proved that a British society had been capable of valuing tender, domestic ties at a time when much of the rest of Europe was in a state of barbarism.[6] The mixture of heroic virtue and tender sentiment portrayed in the Ossian poems was valued and admired, even when readers did not quite believe in it. What Carstairs is doing in her poem is taking that combination which, at least in literature, so fascinated her society and writing as if it actually affected the realpolitik of her day. The stark oddity of the result suggests that not only was that combination of warlike masculinity and sentimental femininity out of place in third-century Scotland, as Macpherson's detractors argued, but that it was equally foreign to the society reading about and trying to find a reflection of itself in Ossianic world of noble, sentimental savagery.

Any attempt to build serious cultural analysis on the fragile framework of Carstairs' poem on André cannot be long sustained. The point here is not that the poem itself sets out to raise these issues but rather that Carstairs demonstrates, intentionally or not, the difficulty of finding a "feminine" idiom in which to write about the dominant public concerns of her society. Macpherson's use of "feminine" sentiment to convey stereotypically masculine subject matter might have had wide appeal, and might have been particularly inviting to women writers, but as Carstairs' work makes clear, the combination was not one that offered them an effective means of transcending the limitations of the private world of sentiment in their own writing. This doesn't mean that women could not write about public events from the perspective of private grief. The thematic problem with the poem on André is not that Carstairs expresses womanly sympathy for the sufferings caused by war, but that she assumes (if only in the poem) that there is no discontinuity in the responses of the individual and of the nation.

Carstairs could write more conventional poetry about national affairs, as she demonstrates in a sequence of three poems dedicated to her brother, killed in India in 1763. The address to the Indians in "Epitaph," warning them away from the "sacred -- field" (29) in which her brother lies anticipates later, explicitly imperial poetry that equates death abroad with English conquest, poetry ranging in era and tone from Felicia Hemans' "Graves of a Household" to Rupert Brooke's "Soldier," with its vision of a grave in some foreign field "that is for ever England." Carstairs' laments for her brother are less ambitious than the elegy on Major André, but they do suggest that Carstairs was preoccupied by questions of the costs of military glory (a theme that also appears in the poem addressed to Boswell) and its impact on the lives of women. Yet in these elegies, Carstairs is pessimistic about the ability of individual mourning to achieve anything, even on the most private level. While in the poem on André, she hopes that grief will transform the political order, in "Epitaph" (29), she expresses fears that it will require "much sweeter lays" than her own laments even to do simple, private justice to her dead brother's memory.

**** **** ****

This mournful proclamation of the poem's inefficacy might be merely a nod to conventional feminine modesty, but however we choose to read the line, it does lead into a larger question about Carstairs' work: if her poems are so ineffectual why did she choose to publish them in the first place? The simple answer, that she did so to earn money, is probably accurate but it is also inadequate. The pencilled annotations in the National Library of Scotland's copy of the volume, which was, according to a note on the title page, "presented to the antiquarian society by the Author," suggest that Carstairs was sufficiently interested in the quality of her poems to go through the printed volume and make revisions. Moreover, her presentation of the book to a gentleman's society implies that she wanted to reach readers beyond her small group of subscribers. The British Library copy was also a gift from the author to a potential reader, in this case a Mr. Allan.[7] There is less evidence about either her attitude towards or the readership of her other publication, the fragmentary farce The Hubble-Shue, in part simply because there is no subscription list. Yet the very fact that Carstairs chose to publish it without any of the aristocratic support that she was able to garner for the volume of poetry, might hint that, like any author confident of the value of her own work, she simply wanted to see it in print.

If that was the case, one might be tempted to think such confidence unjustified, as The Hubble-Shue is, if anything, even more obscure and incoherent than the poems. The mock introduction written for the private 1833 reprint of the farce strikes much the same tone as that in the anonymous manuscript note in the British Library copy of Original Poems. "If originality be a test of genius," Maidment writes, tongue-in-cheek, "the authoress of the Hubble-Shue bids fair to rank highest among the dramatic writers of the last century" (3). Maidment clearly intends the comments as humour; in the handwritten note in the copy owned by the National Library of Scotland, he reports proudly that "the preface written by me ... was said by her Grace [the Duchess of Sutherland] to be worthy of the Drama" (NLS H.32.b.34). Yet when Thomas Tobin echoes this comment more than one hundred and thirty years later in his Plays by Scots 1660-1800, calling Carstairs "a likely candidate for the most outré dramatist of the [eighteenth] century,"[8] he is being more generous than Maidment. Tobin even goes on to call The Hubble-Shue (which he reprints in its eight-page entirety) "an interesting analogue to William Blake's The Island in the Moon, and adds that "[t]hese satires share more than compulsive Italian song" (70). Following Tobin's lead, one might also compare Carstairs' play to Jane Austen's anarchic juvenile attempt at dramatic farce, which is hardly less incoherent than The Hubble-Shue. The problem with such comparisons is that, unlike Blake and Austen, Carstairs does not rise markedly above the incoherence of farce elsewhere in her writing. On the contrary, while there is no doubt that the brief play is deliberately absurd, the histrionic excess and occasional metrical incoherence of her attempt at serious verse drama in the play on Mary Queen of Scots in Original Poems might well make us wonder about how fully Carstairs is in control of tone and language in The Hubble-Shue. Even so, Tobin's suggestion of affinities between Carstairs' work and Blake's is more satisfying than Maidment's straightforward mockery. Carstairs was certainly no Blake, but by reminding ourselves of the more eccentric strands of late eighteenth-century poetry, we can perhaps see Carstairs as something rather more interesting than a failed writer of lady-like occasional verse.

Like Macpherson, or even like Blake, Carstairs seems to have been trying to create an idiom for expressing a vision that resisted containment within orderly heroic couplets or conventional lyric forms. Carstairs' career, brief and obscure as it was, indicates how fully by the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish women were able to see themselves not just as readers but as writers and participants in a literary world. The variety of the poems shows that Carstairs had absorbed a number of eighteenth-century literary models; her attempts to rise beyond or to transform those models show her ambition, if not her ability, as a poet. It is now impossible to know what sort of encouragement Carstairs received in her attempts to fulfil those ambitions or how fully she believed in her own talents. What we can gather is that she had a clear idea of a feminine poetic tradition, already in existence by the time she was writing, and that, whatever her hopes or fears about her own gifts, she set out to participate in and even to transcend it. The poetry itself might not repay much close analysis, but the simple fact that Carstairs both wrote and published what she did is historically significant and can add to our picture of women and poetry in the later eighteenth century.

Notes

1. Christian Carstairs, Original Poems by a Lady. Edinburgh, 1786, p. 9. The National Library of Scotland copy contains a number of pencilled annotations, all in the same hand. All my subsequent citations from the poems will be from this copy.

2. Christian Carstairs, The Hubble-Shue. Preface by John Maidment [?]. Edinburgh, 1833. Maidment is, according to the British Library catalogue, only the presumed writer of the preface, but as I have seen no other attributions, I have chosen to refer to him hereafter as the author. The manuscript annotations are unsigned, but the writer identifies himself in them as being the author of the preface. This note is on a flyleaf in one of the copies of the book owned by the National Library of Scotland (H.32.b.34).

3. Edinburgh Evening Courant, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1767.

4. The Hubble-Shue, NLS H.32.b.34, flyleaf. The double title is not an error: the duchess held one in her own right and one through marriage.

5. [Christian Carstairs], Poems &c. By a Lady. [Edinburgh? 1790?]. The British Library's volume has a slightly different title than the NLS version, and it is the copy that has been microfilmed by Research Publications (Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1986; Reel 2766, no. 25). The long manuscript note on the flyleaf is included in the microfilm.

6. For a discussion of eighteenth-century attitudes to sentimentalism in the Ossian poems, see Howard Weinbrot's Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).

7. This Mr. Allan was probably not the author of the manuscript note in the volume; the writer of it says only that he was "afterwards" acquainted with the author.

8. Thomas Tobin, Plays by Scots 1660-1800 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974), 70.