Mrs. Richmond Inglis
By Stephen C. Behrendt
Critical Essay
It is difficult to say anything very conclusive about the work of a poet from whose hand we have only one substantial production. In 1781 Mrs. Richmond Inglis published Anna and Edgar: or, Love and Ambition. A Tale, which was printed for her in Edinburgh. About Inglis herself there is little information. Her title page tells us that she was the daughter of Colonel James Gardiner (1688-1745), "who fell at the Battle of Preston, 1745". A career military man, Gardiner was at the time of his death a colonel of the regiment of light dragoons known as the 13th Hussars. When in 1745 the Pretender's forces approached Edinburgh these dragoons fled until Gardiner rallied them for a stand at Prestonpans. Gardiner's unwilling and overmatched dragoons were routed in the ensuing battle on 21 September. Unwilling to leave his infantry after the flight of the dragoons, Gardiner fought on with them, sustaining at least five wounds, the last of which, a blow from behind with a Lochaber axe, killed him. Of his thirteen children, only five survived him, his daughter Richmond among them (DNB 7:854-56). She was subsequently represented in the form of a young woman called "Fanny Fair" in a song called "Twas at the Hour of Dark Midnight," which was set to music (to the tune of "Sawnie's Pipe") from verses composed by the poet and statesman Sir Gilbert Elliot, third baronet of Minto (1722-1777) in honor of Gardiner (DNB 6:672).
Anna and Edgar is formally dedicated to
the Queen, Charlotte, and the brief dedication invokes the queen's attention and
sympathy not so much for the poem, which she calls merely a "little
performance" ([ii]), as for herself in what appear to be straitened
circumstances. Inglis calls upon the queen, "knowing that in your Majesty's
breast the unfortunate ever have a powerful
Anna and Edgar is a fairly conventional sentimental tale of disappointed love. The plot is relatively straightforward. The lovely young Anna is the only child of the elderly Alcander, whose wife who is now deceased. Alcander has raised not only Anna but also Edgar, the son of a friend, Ardolph, who, on his death bed, had "bequeathed" him to Alcander to raise. As the children grew, Anna's loveliness increased in proportion to Edgar's remarkable grace and virtue. Edgar, we are told, possessed both physical attractiveness and a "soul superior" in which "sweet affections reign'd; / And ev'ry virtue native seem'd / By sacred truth maintained" (3). Familiarity grows to love, and when Anna finally declares her love, Edgar reciprocates with his own declaration. Now the "days of transport, love, and truth" (5) pass happily until Alcander decides it is time to present the rapidly maturing Edgar with the sword Ardolph had left him. Binding the sword to him and informing him that Ardolph has left him also a small bequest, Alcander tells Edgar that he is to go to serve his king "in a righteous cause" (6) in which Alcander fully expects him to display his uncommon merits. Edgar hurries to tell Anna of this development and they decide that Anna will at some future point ask Alcander's blessing on their eventual marriage. Part I ends with Edgar departing and Anna retiring "to the woodlands," where she pours out her sadness and prays for Edgar's welfare, but not without the narrator's warning that Anna will prove unequal to the faith Edgar has placed in her.
In Part II Inglis introduces a complication in the form of Almeira, the not particularly grief-stricken widow of a prosperous but unloving duke ("for he was cold, untoward, rude, / To one of gentlest kind" [14]) who resides at their estate, Grampus Hall. Almeira's mother, we learn, was the sister of Anna's maternal grandmother, which makes her essentially Anna's great-aunt. Having always cherished Anna, Almeira now proposes that Alcander "to my care / Forever her resign," for "No tender mother has the fair! / No daughter now is mine!" (15). To facilitate this informal adoption, she offers to take in Alcander as well, and the pair move to Grampus Hall. Anna continues her trips to the woods to lament her absent Edgar, but these trips gradually grow less frequent, and her remaining feelings for Edgar reflect more a habit of mind than any passion of heart. Moreover, he is now eclipsed by Almeira's son, Orcar, who now appears like "a meteor," "All blazing in a car, / His varlets trim'd [sic] with silver sheen, / He with a diamond star" (18). Smitten immediately by the brilliant young duke and his courtly flattery, the impressionable Anna now abandons any thought of Edgar in a rush of impetuous infatuation, so that ". . . few days were spent, / Few tears had Anna shed, / When she was brought to give consent / To share the ducal bed." (20). Part II closes with Alcander blissfully happy at his daughter's glittering match while the more insightful Almeira mistrusts her fashionable, irresponsible son's sincerity.
Part III details the inevitable glorious return
of Edgar, who has won fame and a knighthood for his heroism. Hurrying to the
Anna he still adores he imagines the joyful reunion, only to be perplexed to
find Alcander's old residence abandoned. He goes to the nearby village where a
festive crowd has assembled. There he discovers that the festival is a marriage,
and that
Part IV details Anna's guilty recriminations as she bitterly regrets the blind infidelity that she believes has led to Edgar's death. Her faithful nurse offers to take Anna to a remote woodland refuge "where safe and calm you'd be" (40). Anna quickly accepts the offer and they escape the same night, while Orcar is absent in London. Physically secure, Anna nevertheless cannot escape the psychological burden. Inglis's narrator steps in to observe that
An early tomb shall Anna find,
No remedy remains;
Death's keenest dart is in her mind,
His poison in her veins. (43)
Her nurse declines first, however, taking to a bed from which she never again rises, even though she in fact survives Anna. This section of the poem closes with Anna's lament to the sea that crashes wildly on the shore near her refuge.
Part V closes the tragedy quickly. Anna lies on
her death bed, still convinced she has been responsible for Edgar's death.
Meanwhile, a terrible storm has resulted in a shipwreck nearby, to
"Yet may the moral of her woes
"Ne'er from our minds depart;
"No real bliss that bosom knows
"Which holds a faithless heart." (53)
Despite its twists and turns, the plot of Anna
and Edgar is neither unique nor exceptional. It is, rather, the manner in
which Inglis handles her narrative that lends interest to the poem. Her
omniscient and rhetorically "involved" narrator intervenes often in
the tale to indicate or underscore the nature of the moral lesson that drives
the tale. At the end of Part I, for instance, the narrator addresses the reader
before the removal to Grampus Hall but after Anna has confided in her
nurse that she aspires to a husband of greater stature than her still untested,
pastoral lover, Edgar (something that is not explicitly recorded in the
dialogue). The narrator laments in advance what she has yet to reveal, that Anna
will prove faithless to the "all-lovely youth" (11). She likewise
reveals both the histories of the central characters and the virtuous, vicious,
or simply ill-conceived
Works Cited
Dictionary of National Biography. Ed.
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. 22 vols. London: Oxford UP, 1917.
Inglis, Richmond. Anna and Edgar: or, Love and Ambition. A Tale.
Edinburgh: A Murray and J. Cochran for the Author, 1781.