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Abstract
This article uses eighteenth-century correspondence and daily writing to unpack the complex networks of emotional, artistic, and poetic exchange that surrounded Plas Newydd, the home of the so-called ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. It focuses on the gifting of a printed copy of George Romney’s painting Serena Reading (1782) to the women by the poet Anna Seward, viewed by the trio as a portrait. Using an interdisciplinary and microhistorical approach, the article places the image within two contexts: first, within an intricate display of gifted portraits at Plas Newydd; and second, in relation to Seward’s poetry. In so doing, it argues for the centrality of the cultural, emotional, and intellectual process of exchange as a way for understanding the emotional life of the period. By focusing on the literary lives of this portrait-object, the article also demonstrates the necessity of an intermedial approach to eighteenth-century visual and material culture, highlighting the productive possibilities of using textual sources to consider long-lost artworks.
Notes
1 For a full biography, see Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (London: Penguin, 2001).
2 For context, see Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt, eds, Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).
3 Elizabeth Mavor, ed., A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 86.
4 Ibid., 179.
5 Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2.
6 Jocelyn Anderson, Touring and Publicizing England’s Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 93–94.
7 J. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 2010).
8 Viccy Coltman, ‘Im-material Culture and History of Art(efacts)’, in Writing Material Culture History, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 17–31, at 19; Michael Yonan, ‘Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 232–248, at 243; Sam Rose, ‘Close Looking and Conviction’, Art History 40 (2017): 156–77.
9 Wall, Prose of Things, 153; Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
10 Wall, Prose of Things, 150.
11 Ibid., 200.
12 For example, the Glamorgan Pottery, based in Swansea, released a pattern depicting the women between 1813 and 1839. An example survives in the collections of the National Library of Wales, NMW A 34515.
13 Plas Newydd sale catalogue, 1832; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, NLW MS 9132D.
14 For more on Seward’s relationship with the women, see Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 198–200.
15 Claudia Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 202.
16 Alex Kidson, George Romney, 1734–1802 (London: Princeton University Press, 2002), 165–66. Versions of the painting survive in the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Harris Museum and Art Gallery (Preston), and the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
17 William Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper: A Poem (London, 1803).
18 On Romney’s relationship with his engravers, including Smith, see David Alexander, ‘A Reluctant Communicator: George Romney at the Print Market’, in Those Delightful Regions of Imagination: Essays on George Romney, ed. Alex Kidson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 251–88; and Susan Matthews, Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011), 60.
19 Alison Margaret Conway, Private Interests Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 44.
20 For intersections between portraiture and printed images during this period, see Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 196–202.
21 Anna Seward, Letters of Anna Seward: Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, ed. A. Constable, 6 vols (Edinburgh: J. Seagrave, 1811), 5: 109.
22 Ibid., 4: 98.
23 Orest Ranum, ‘Intimacy in French Eighteenth-Century Portraits’, Word & Image 6, no. 4 (1990): 351–67; Kate Retford, ‘A Death in the Family: Posthumous Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art History 33, no. 1 (2010): 74–97, at 75.
24 Seward, Letters, 5: 258.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 5: 15–17.
27 Ibid., 5: 106–12.
28 Ibid., 5: 110.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 4: 120.
31 For example, J. H. Michell, The Tour of the Duke of Somerset, and the Rev. J. H. Michell, through parts of England, Wales, and Scotland, in the year 1795 (London: printed privately, 1845), 20–21.
32 Mavor, Ladies of Llangollen, xvii; Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 93.
33 Fiona Brideoake, ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community’, in ‘Queer Romanticism’, special issue, Romanticism on the Net 36–37 (2004–5), https://doi.org/10.7202/011141ar. For a discussion of the idea of ‘romantic friendship’, see Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (Virginia: Morrow, 1981).
34 Seward, Letters, 4: 120.
35 Mavor, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 48, 179, 183; G. H. Bell, ed., The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton (London: Macmillan & Co., 1930), 32, 60; Denbighshire Record Office, Ruthin, DD/LL 7, 1809–16; Seward, Letters, 4: 107; Mavor, Ladies of Llangollen, 129.
36 Nicole Reynolds, Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 94–96. Castle likewise highlights Butler and Ponsonby’s management of their image, referring to it as their ‘public relations campaign’; Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 93. Brideoake’s recently published book on Butler and Ponsonby mentions their gifting only briefly; Brideoake, Ladies of Llangollen, 103–04.
37 Marcel Mauss emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in gift-giving, defining the gift as something given with the obligation that the favour be returned; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 50.
38 Sarah Haggarty, Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.
39 Ibid., 190.
40 Cliff of Worcester, The Cambrian directory, or, cursory sketches of the Welsh territories (J. Easton: Salisbury, 1800), 150.
41 Seward, Letters, 4: 98.
42 Journal of Katherine Plymley, Shropshire Records and Archive Centre, Shrewsbury, 567/5/5/1/1, 6–9.
43 The advertisement for the auction that dispersed Butler and Ponsonby’s belongings following the latter’s death in 1831 described their ‘Pictures, Valuable Drawings, and Prints’ as follows: ‘in frames and in portfolios, comprising a collection the most choice and valuable, many by the first Artists of the day, Portraits of Kings, exalted and renowned Characters, and Views of the most celebrated Scenery of Various Countries’; cited in John Hicklin, The ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, as Sketched by many Hands (Chester: Thomas Catherall, 1847), 18.
44 Ibid., 29.
45 Viccy Coltman, ‘Classicism in the English Library: Reading Classical Culture in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of the History of Collections 11, no. 1 (1999): 35–50, at 36.
46 Mavor, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 147.
47 Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 48–71; Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
48 Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’, 57.
49 Esther Milnes Day, Poems and Fugitive Pieces, by Eliza (London, 1796), 67–68.
50 Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, JER 1–79, 23.
51 G. L. A. Douglas, ‘Observations made during a tour in Wales and different parts of England’, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, MS 10349, 75–81.
52 For example, see the famous ‘Walpole Cabinet’, a pedimented assemblage of wood and ivory designed to hold Horace Walpole’s collection of miniatures and enamels, Victoria & Albert Museum, W.52:1, 2-1925; Silvia Davoli, Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection (London: Scala Arts and Heritage Publ., 2018), 91.
53 Emily J. Climenson, ed., Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House, Oxon. A.D. 1756 to 1808 (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), 10–11.
54 Seward, Letters, 4: 98.
55 La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, 1 September 1808.
56 Bonnie Arden Robb, Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 76.
57 Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision’, Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (2006): 496–507. Tellingly, the portrait owned by Butler and Ponsonby was eventually given to Pamela’s daughter, Pamela, Lady Campbell (1796–1869); William Hepworth Dixon, ed., Lady Morgan's Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1863), 1: 122.
58 La Belle Assemblée, 1 September 1808.
59 Note from Madam de Genlis accompanying a gift of verses, music, and romance ‘sur un enfant’ (c.1800), Denbighshire Record Office and Archive, DD/LL 6.
60 Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women, 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008), 37.
61 Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’, 63.
62 For example, in an undated letter to their friend Harriette Piggot, Butler boasted of the riches that their estate could provide; Harriette Piggot, Letters, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, MS F. I, 1788.
63 Stéphanie-Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, Memoirs of the Countess de Genlis: illustrative of the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 8 vols (New York: Wilder & Campbell, 1825), 6: 185–86.
64 For example, in the note accompanying a gift of verses, music, and books, de Genlis wrote to Butler and Ponsonby that ‘when I can spend a while I’ll bring you one or two small flowers’, a particularly evocative gift in light of Seward’s description of the preserved nosegay exchanged between the women; Denbighshire Record Office, DD/LL 6 (note from de Genlis).
65 Seward, Letters, 4: 100.
66 Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 22.
67 F. A. Crewe, Welsh travel journal, 1795, British Library, London, Add. MS 37926, 18–19.
68 For a discussion of women’s manuscript exchange throughout the long eighteenth century, see Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catherine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
69 Brideoake, ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”’.
70 St. James’ Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 22–24 March 1796.
71 For a full discussion of the numerous poems, sonnets and elegies Seward dedicated to Sneyd, see Stuart Curran, ‘Anna Seward and the Dynamics of Female Friendship’, in Romantic Women Poets: Gender and Genre, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Peitropoli (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 11–22.
72 Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century, 4.
73 Seward was so famous for elegiac and commemorative poetry that she complained that ‘people teaze me with application to write epitaphs upon their favourite friends. Of frequent compliances, there would be no end, and I would wish never to attempt another’; Seward, Letters, 2: 28–33.
74 Ibid., 4: 143.
75 Ibid., 4: 283.
76 Ibid., 4: 127, 146, 164, 195, 199, 202, 203.
77 Haggarty, Blake’s Gifts, 3.
78 Seward, Letters, 4: 208.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 4: 146–47.
81 Haggarty, Blake’s Gifts, 190.
82 Seward, Letters, 5: 258.
83 Anna Seward, Monody on Major André (London, 1821). For a discussion of how the literary treatments of the historical and cultural legacy of the André affair were ‘shaped primarily through the medium of print’, see Jared S. Richman, ‘Anna Seward and the Many (After) Lives of Major André: Trauma, Mourning and Transatlantic Literary Legacy’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 2 (2015): 201–19.
84 The relationship between Sneyd and André was recorded in William Burlap, André: A Tragedy, (New York: T&J Swords, 1798).
85 Significantly, Seward related this fact to Butler and Ponsonby following their receipt of Romney’s Serena; Seward, Letters, 5: 106–12.
86 Seward, Monody on Major André, 4.
87 Ibid., 6.
88 Ibid.
89 Cited in Joshua Hett Smith, An Authentic Narrative of the Causes which Led to the Death of Major André (London: Mathews and Leigh, 1808), 326.
90 Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’, 67; see also Curran, ‘Anna Seward and the Dynamics of Female Friendship’, 16.
91 Anna Seward, Llangollen Vale, with Other Poems (London, 1796), 4; Brideoake ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”’; Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century, 114. For Seward’s lesbianism, see Susan Lanser, ‘Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 2 (1998–99): 179–98.
92 Jaś Elsner, ‘Art History as Ekphrasis’, Art History 33, no. 1 (2010): 10–27.