The Countess of Blessington: Reading as Intimacy, Reading as Sociability

Abstract

When the American journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis visited London in 1834, one of his aims was to acquaint himself with the social and intellectual elite. Since the Countess of Blessington was one of the foremost salonnieres, Willis visited her soon after his arrival. Blessington, recently famous Conversations of Lord Byron (1832/33) and a prolific author of novels, stories, and occasional poems, had just started to edit annuals. She was certainly no bluestocking in the style of the Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, or the Berry sisters. And she never wrote any tracts about female learning, either in the conservative style of Hannah More, or in the revolutionary manner of Mary Wollstonecraft, but she could not escape being associated with these circles. So she allowed herself to be staged as a woman reader, or, to be precise: as a transgressive woman reader, thus toying with 19th century cultural anxieties about the female perusal of books. The following description of the first encounter between Willis and Blessington appeared in the New York Mirror in March, 1835, shortly after Willis's visit, later reprinted in his travelogue Pencillings by the Way. It served to stage his supposed intimacy with British patrician mores for a wider American readership. Willis was fascinated by what he took to be an aristocratic style of sociability: In a long library lined alternately with splendidly bound books and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture to my eye as the door opened was a very lovely one. A woman of remarkarkable [sic!] beauty half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent lamp, suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling; sofas, couches, ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded sumptuousness through the room; enamel tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in every corner, and a delicate white hand relieved on the back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the of its diamond rings. As the servant mentioned my name, she rose and gave me her hand very cordially, and a gentleman entering immediately after, she presented me to her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay, the well-known Pelham of London, and certainly the most splendid specimen of a man and a well-dressed one that I had ever seen. Tea was brought in immediately, and conversation went swimmingly on. (Willis 1852, 469) Willis, raised in evangelical New England circles, was disciplined by the church elders for writing religious verse in Byronic style, and eventually converted to dandyism while embarking on a successful career in publishing, especially in marketing celebrity (Baker, 13-85). In 1834, this apostle of aestheticism came to London, when Blessington still resided at Seamore Place, where a library dominated the ground floor and served as a reception room, which visitors remarked upon. In Blessington's library and in her drawing room, many writers met, among them Edward Bulwer Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, L.E.L., Walter Savage Landor, William Makepeace Thackeray. Willis captures the atmosphere combining an oriental sumptuousness with Blessington as a woman of letters. This image of Blessington as a reader seems to have been among her favourite self-stylizations, which Alfred D'Orsay, her son-in-law and reputed lover, used to market her successfully as London's foremost salonniere and grande dame of letters. The quotation from the New York Mirror combines her reading, her intellectual activities, with erotic overtones. Words like splendid, lovely, magnificent, expensive, elegant, delicate, blaze create a luxurious aura. Anything may develop between the solitary hostess with the hand on her book and her visitor. Female reading, much debated in the 19thcentury, was both educating and morally dangerous, especially the reading of fiction, of which Blessington herself produced a great deal. The hand on the book, the slight physical contact, denotes a readiness to engage with the imaginary erotic encounters offered by novels but also a possible willingness to leave the book behind in order to act out this very encounter with her visitor, before the backdrop of connoting oriental splendour, erotic transgression, and lascivious opportunities. …