'The Entire Works of Clarinda': Unpublished Juvenile Verse by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Abstract

The common reader feels a strong interest in the earliest literary attempts of future writers, leading to varying degrees of regret for Pope's Alcander, Fanny Burney's 'Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems' burned on her fifteenth birthday, and those love-letters composed for ladies by the thirteen-year-old Samuel Richardson.1 Where very early efforts survive, they may throw light not so much on the budding of literary identity, for the earlier and later style may differ widely, but on early influences, the grown writer's point of departure. Pope's Horatian 'Ode on Solitude', written at the age of twelve though revised later, is more like Cowley's translations than like his own later imitations of Horace.2 Lady Mary Pierrepont, born the year after Pope, lived to make her slighter mark beside his in the world of Augustan letters as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. To the end of her life she kept two albums of her work composed between the ages of twelve and sixteen, during the period I7oI-5.3 They tell a remarkable story about the far from Augustan patterns of poetry available at this time to an ambitious girl. This period, infertile in poetry, has been called 'the desert of early eighteenthcentury verse'.4 Dryden had died in I 700; the Miscellany connected with his name continued sporadically until its introduction of Pope to the public in 1709. Lady Mary might be regarded as lucky in that the list of poets publishing during this decade (Halifax, Garth, Prior, Granville, Congreve, Addison) coincided closely with that of the circle of friends of her father, the Earl of Kingston, as well as that of the first readers of Pope's pastorals in manuscript.5 The child Lady Mary must have admired these men. She appealed to Congreve for help with her scholarly studies, later recalling that 'the smallest error could not 'scape his sight'.6 She composed verse compliments to Halifax and Garth on poems of theirs. Her father, a younger brother of Oldham's patron and himself an early reader of Pope, had introduced his daughter at the age of eight as a toast of the Kit-Cat Club.7