Laetitia Pilkington and the Mnemonic Self

Abstract

The role memory plays in Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs has been oddly underexplored. Although Pilkington draws heavily upon biographical details of her life as Swift acolyte, scandalous divorcee and Grub Street demimondaine, she supplements personal memory with her ‘astonishing’ memory for literary texts. The Memoirs’ ‘rich embroidery’ of over 250 lengthy quotations from other authors, especially Shakespeare and Milton, as well as many of the poems written by Pilkington herself, were taken from memory. Pilkington, often homeless and on the move, had little access to physical books or manuscripts while writing the Memoirs. This article sets Pilkington’s own prodigious textual memory, of which she often boasted, within the context of the long-standing educational practice of memorizing and reciting poetry, still widespread during the eighteenth century and valued as a social accomplishment of educated girls. Pilkington’s frequent discussions of memory in the Memoirs reveal her keen interest in memory as a mental faculty and cognitive function. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, read in the Dublin intellectual circles in which she grew up, shapes her own poem ‘Memory’. Memory for Pilkington is more than the marketable resource of the ‘kiss-and-tell’ scandal memoirist but a foundational part of her identity as author and wit.