Samuel Rogers: A Passion for Little Girls

Abstract

Samuel (1763-1855) was known for writing chaste and decorous verse, yet he had a proclivity for girls was considered unusual even in an age when sexual use and abuse of very young was not uncommon. The author of The Pleasures of Memory (1792), The Voyage of Columbus (1810), Jacqueline (1814), Human Id] (1819), and Italy (1822), was prominent. enough to be offered Poet Laureateship upon Wordsworth's death in 1850 (he declined it, in favor of Tennyson). He was famous for his art collection his home 22 St.. James's Place, and for his breakfasts, which he entertained many personalities, politicians, and writers over several decades. A wealthy banker, writer, connoisseur, and patron of arts, was acquainted with a long list of famous literary names. He was also notoriously acerbic and liked to mock, criticize, and spread malicious gossip about his friends, which sometimes led to estrangements, especially in case of Byron, who began his career praising but eventually satirized hint. When he died age ninety-two, was unmarried, though he did make least one offer of marriage when he was young (Clayden 1:6) In Byron Journal (1989), William St. Clair published a new version of a letter of July 10, 1817 from Byron to Thomas Moore, copied from a Regency-era scrapbook. This text differs from only previously available version, Moore's transcription, published in his 1830-31 biography of Byron. Discussing some magazine extracts from Moore's new poem Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817), according to Moore's text, Byron wrote: There is a simile of an orange-tree's 'flowers and fruits,' which I should have liked better, if I did not believe to be a reflection on * (Byron Letters 5:230). St. Clair's uncensored version reveals joke behind asterisks: There is a simile of an orange tree's flowers and fruits which I should like more if I did not believe to be a reflection on of with children 'Age play with infancy.' St. Clair assumes is an in-joke but, he writes, it is difficult now to be sure of what. Byron intended, but Rogers, who was an old bachelor, illustrated his books of poems with podgy little boys reminiscent of Italian putti, and there may be some reference to that. (53-54). In fact Byron's joke was intended to cut more deeply than The reference to Lalla Rookh is clear enough; relevant lines are: Just then beneath some orange trees,/ Whose fruit and blossoms in breeze/ Were wantoning together, free,/ Like age play with infancy (212-15). Byron's syntax is confusing because of lack of punctuation (which might be fault of he scrapbook transcriber): does Byron mean that companions of Rogers are playing with children, or that of arc children with whom he plays? The apparent logic of joke would suggest latter, especially because of reference to age--Rogers was fifty-four in 1817, but by all accounts looked many years older (Byron thought was fifteen years older than he actually was [Byron Letters 8:100]). Many of Rogers's acquaintances made jokes, preserved in diaries, letters and anecdotes, about his pale skin, quiet voice, and wrinkled, cadaverous appearance, and over time came to be known by cruel nicknames like the Dug-up Dandy. Age, then, but why at play with infancy? A startling passage in unexpurgated edition of diaries of Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville (1794-1865) provides a clue. On December 16, 1835, Greville, dining with Whig luminaries Lord and Lady Holland, Lord Melbourne, Dr. John Allen, and others, reported: Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers--the poetry of former so licentious, that of latter so pure; much of its popularity owing to its being so carefully weeded of everything approaching to indelicacy; and contrast between lives and works of two men--the former a pattern of conjugal and domestic regularity, latter of all men He had ever known greatest sensualist. …