The Delights and Degrees of Passionate Sensibility: ‘Mental Fight’ in Ann Batten Cristall's Poetical Sketches

Abstract

I: Introduction Ann Batten Cristall (c. 1769–1848) was born in Penzance, Cornwall, to a well-educated merchant’s daughter and a Scottish sea captain. At nineteen she became a schoolteacher in Lewisham and met Mary Wollstonecraft, who seems to have lent emotional and financial support to Ann and her brother Joshua (the famous British watercolorist). In all likelihood through the guidance of Wollstonecraft and the radical writer George Dyer, Cristall’s only known work, Poetical Sketches, was published by Joseph Johnson in 1795. Subscribers came from radical and dissenting circles and included John Aikin, Anna Barbauld, George Dyer, William Frend, Mary Hays and Mary and Everina Wollstonecraft. Contemporary reviews of the volume deplored its irregular versification while praising its imagination and originality. In 1796, Dyer recommended to the feminist Mary Hays that she and Cristall collaborate on a novel, in which Cristall would intersperse her poems. In 1797, Robert Southey told his publisher Joseph Cottle that he admired Cristall’s ‘genius’. In spite of her brief success, however, Ann drifted into obscurity after Poetical Sketches. Having probably never married, she died in Lewisham at the age of seventy-eight. Some few but excellent studies of Poetical Sketches have appeared since the recovery of Romantic-era women poets began in earnest in the 1990s. Critics usually discuss Cristall in one of three discursive contexts: as a poet of sensibility, as a destabilizer of gender norms and as a like-minded contemporary of William Blake. Jerome McGann argues that, as a poet of sensibility, Cristall emphasizes ‘the intellectual authority of feeling’, and for Christopher Nagle her poems blur any fixed distinctions between sensibility and Romanticism. According to Richard Sha, ‘Cristall calls into question the culture’s prevailing assumption that women were more prone than men to lose self-control’, while Jacqueline Labbe claims that Poetical Sketches represents a ‘self-conscious rejection of the path marked out for [female poets] by a patriarchal culture reliant on ordered and regular behavior’. A handful of other critics compare Cristall to Blake in terms of poetic style and content, while asserting her originality as an artist. Although calling Cristall a poet of sensibility, scholars generally have not examined to what extent and for what purpose the rhetorical climate of Poetical Sketches