Social Authorship and the Mediation of Memory in Anne Grant’s Poetry

ABSTRACT

In the early 1820s, Anne MacVicar Grant (1755–1838) compiled a manuscript miscellany that exemplifies Grant’s poetic activities throughout her writing life and encapsulates the conditions under which she composed and circulated verse. I identify those conditions as a form of social authorship, and the miscellany as a media object that records activities of reading, writing, and manuscript circulation closely resembling those of literary coteries. Moreover, the miscellany functioned as a memorial to the social networks that the circulation of poetry had helped to create. Each poem formed a node not only in Grant’s social circles but in her memories of those circles so that the compilation and annotation of poems mediated Grant’s memories of her social circles to those with access to the volume. Grant’s iterative inscription and reading of the miscellany thus turned commemorative poetry into a technology for the medialization and memorialization of social networks.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to acknowledge that archival research for this article was made possible by a Gwin J. and Ruth Kolb Research Travel Award from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a D. W. Smith Fellowship from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Notes

1. In addition to Ezell, see especially Justice and Tinker; Karian; Levy; Prescott; and Schellenberg. In her study of the Memoirs of Grant’s second cousin, Elizabeth Grant (1797–1885), Rachael Scarborough King identifies traces of the “fluidity in genres, in concepts of authorship, and in modes of writing” characteristic of social authorship as late as the mid-Victorian period (299).

2. One example, ripe for further study, is the social circle centered on the Glasgow home of George and Mary Macintosh mentioned later in this article.

3. In designating Grant’s miscellany a “memorial,” I adopt Melissa Sodeman’s approach to Romantic writers’ memory work in which memorialization “stands for a mode of commemoration that admits the inevitability of forgetting and that seeks to preserve not what has been lost, but rather its remembered image” (14). In fact, a certain duality attaches to Grant’s miscellany and its relation to memory. As a physical object, the miscellany is designed as a monument to Grant’s friendships and social networks by embodying and thereby preserving a textualized version of them (see Sodeman 13–14). When put into practice, however, it functions more like a memorial, encouraging a performance of the losses and slippages visited on Grant’s memory of friends and social connections by the passage of time as much as it enables a retracing of the social, affective bonds that cemented those friendships. This tension between recovery and loss is both the precondition and the effect of poetic memorialization, in which the subject comes to be recreated but also to be replaced by the poet and her poetic construct; Jacqueline Labbe characterizes this process of displacement as the “arrival of the self in poems ostensibly devoted to another” (135).

4. In the absence of a full-scale biography, important sources of extended biographical information are Gallagher; Perkins “Biography”; and Tod. For biographical information on Grant’s friends and correspondents, I have drawn on their entries in the ODNB where available as well as on the information provided by Grant herself and by her youngest son, John Peter Grant, in the editorial apparatus that accompanies the many editions of her writings (see especially Letters from the Mountains, 6th ed. [hereafter LftM 6], and Memoir and Correspondence, 2nd ed.). Additional sources are cited in notes in the appropriate places.

5. James Grant’s gravestone in the graveyard of Laggan’s parish church reads in part, “rev James Grant min[ister of] Laggan [died] 2.12.1801 [at] 60 [years of age], mo[ther] Mary 80y, w[ife] Anne Grant [died] 7.11.1838 [at] 83 [years of age] b[urie]d St Cuthbert's Edinburgh.” For information on his career in the Church of Scotland, see Macpherson 238; and Anderson.

6. All punctuation except the comma before “&” is mine to clarify the sense; Grant tended towards minimal punctuation in her correspondence.

7. On the complicated relationship between Grant’s claims to the privacy of her writings and her publication ventures, however, see Perkins, “Professionalization”; and Women Writers 111–77.

8. This narrative has its origins in Grant’s preface to the Poems and in her posthumously published Memoir, and some modern criticism as well as most biographical sources on Grant have adopted it to a greater or lesser extent, for example, Gallagher; Hallock; McNeil; Perkins “Biography.” Perkins is the only scholar, to my knowledge, who has taken explicit steps to question this account (especially in Women Writers 148, 160–61), though her recent reference to the Poems as Grant’s “literary debut” comes closer again to confirming it (“Grant” 220) and represents exactly the conflation of print with publication and a literary career that I intend to challenge in this study.

9. I have added all punctuation except for the period after “publication” to clarify the sense. The aunt and uncle whom Grant mentions were George Macintosh (1739–1807) and his wife, Mary Macintosh, née Moore (d. 1808) who, by the 1790s, had become good friends with Grant and featured prominently as recipients and subjects of Grant’s poetry. Mary Macintosh’s brother, Dr. John Moore (1729–1802), was the author of the novel, Zeluco (1789). On George and Mary Macintosh, see Stewart 65–76, 79–92; and MacLehose xviii, 220, 301.

10. I have added or altered some of the punctuation to clarify the sense.

11. On Grant’s contributions to the remediation of Highland culture and nostalgia, see Daly and Shields. Scholars like McNeil and Gottlieb have also highlighted the nation-building tendencies and interests in much of Grant’s writing about Scotland and the Highlands.

12. Perkins has noted that Grant later turned the apparent dichotomy of domestic and print public spheres into a productive professional stance (“Professionalization”; Women Writers), a dichotomy that Sarah Prescott finds evoked as early as the period 1690–1740, but which does not receive full reification into calcified social structures until after the mid-nineteenth century (King). Grant had established this stance in the subscription proposal for Poems (a copy survives at the National Library of Scotland, Aps. 4.81.8), authorized it in her “Introductory Verses” (Poems 17–18), and was given critical approval in the reviews of the printed volume (particularly in The Annual Review 2 [1803] 559–61; The Anti-Jacobin Review 16.2 [1803] 113–29, and 16.3 [1803] 236–44; The British Critic 22.3 [1803] 291–97; and The Monthly Review 44.3 [1804] 272–80).

13. References to line numbers will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

14. Grant’s parents had moved back to Glasgow in 1793 after her father’s retirement from army service. Whereas the “Journal” divides Grant’s travels into five days, according to the two letters that mention the journey in Letters from the Mountains, her return only took three days, from 16 to 18 January (LftM 1 2:33–38).

15. Anne Ourry, whom Grant often also refers to as “Nancy,” was the daughter (not, as Donald Cornu states, the sister) of Louis Simon Ourry (1717–1779), Captain from 1772–75 in the 15th Regiment of Foot stationed at Fort Augustus, and married James Furzer, Captain of the Royal Marines, in May 1794; see the Ourry family tree (“Huguenot Refugee Family of Ourry” 12–13); and Cornu 33, 48.

16. This is signaled within the poem not least by the surprisingly low frequency of terms of friendship in the passage that narrates Grant’s return to her home in Laggan (two occurrences in 72 lines), though the unusually high frequency of proper names (14 names of family members in 72 lines) may make up for and explain this phenomenon.

17. Isabella and Jane Ewing were the daughters of William Ewing, Deacon-Convener in Glasgow in 1773, and Isobel Reid; Isabella married the Glasgow merchant Archibald Smith (1749–1821) in 1781, while Jane married James Brown (1749–1808) in 1788 (MacLehose 43–4, 285; Smith and Mitchell). The British Library owns a copy (BL Cup.408.l.6) of an Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of Portraits on Loan in the New Galleries of Art, Corporation Buildings, Sauchiehall Street (Glasgow: Thomas Annan, 1868) that includes photographs by Thomas Annan (1829-87) of portraits of Isabella Smith (by John Graham Gilbert, plate 98) and her eldest son, James (by Sir John Watson Gordon, plate 91).

18. The poem’s “Louisa” is another of Furzer’s long-time friends, Louisa Malliet (1759–1819), daughter of John Malliet, FRS (d. 1786); Furzer stayed with Louisa for a time while residing in Westminster. Louisa Malliet later became Grant’s close friend and helped to find buyers for Grant’s Letters from the Mountains amongst her acquaintance (LftM 1 2: 285; Letter to Malliet and Furzer 63r).

19. The importance of poetry to Grant and her friends is also indicated by the strong interest that members of these circles took in supporting young, poor, or otherwise emergent poets and poetry: Louisa Malliet and her parents, John and Mary, subscribed to Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), while Mary and George Macintosh appear as subscribers to Joanna Baillie’s edition of A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (1823); not surprisingly, all of these friends as well as Furzer, Smith, Brown, their spouses and children, were amongst the enormous list of subscribers to Grant’s Poems.

20. I base my categorization of Grant’s volume on Ezell’s differentiation between various forms of manuscript text as well as on some of the sources she uses (25, 148n6). Grant’s contemporaries—and she herself among them—often also referred to such manuscript volumes as “albums,” but that term runs the danger of being confused with later forms such as the scrapbook or the friendship album, which often mixed script, print, and other media. Grant’s volume is more closely related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practices of manuscript compilation than to the personalization of book objects made possible by the broad deployment of new paper-making and printing technologies. On the difficulties for historians and archivists to categorize personalized book objects, see Zboray and Zboray; for a fascinating exploration of the uses to which some of these later media forms were put, see Hess.

21. In the poem, “To a Friend. With the Author’s Picture” (Miscellany 101–102), Grant ascribes the same role to “my pictur’d shade” (17) when she asks Isabella Smith to view her portrait “in pensive mood” (19): “So shall thy grateful friend her wish obtain / Nor thou behold that shadowy form in vain / That wakes in long review, the former years again” (39–41).

22. For the latter, see “Anonymous Verses. To a Husband” (Miscellany 5) and “Lines written at Parting,” on which Grant commented late in life: “anonymous but exquisite and truly original” (32).

23. In an undated letter to Mrs. Wood, Grant claimed a long-standing acquaintance with Southey: “I who have known that amiable person (Southey) so long that am st[ill?] Suffering from the result of similar privation enter with painful sympathy into his loss in Mrs. Southeys death which happend very lately” (Saturday [1837?]).

24. For Byron’s poem and Grant’s annotation, see Miscellany 41–42; Cowper’s poem appears under the title, “Lines Written on Revisiting a Favourite Spot after Twelve Years Absence” (9–11). For Grant’s long-standing admiration for Cowper, see Grant to Helen Dunbar on her “Cowper-mania” (10 May 1803, LftM 1 3: 255); Grant to Furzer (15 June 1803, LftM 1 2: 270–72); and Grant to Mrs. Wood (Saturday [1837?]), in which Grant sends “an American Review of our admird & belovd Cowpers life & works.”

25. See Miscellany 9–11 (Cowper), 18–20 (Crabbe), 13–17 (Bowles Southey), 12–13 (Mary Grant), and 26–27 (anonymous). The last three poems also form their own cluster in terms of the dates associated with them: Mary Grant’s poem is of course explicitly dated to 20 September 1821, just over a month after the poem’s subject, Emmeline Carnes, née Dobell (1797–1821), had died in Boston on 17 August; while “To a Dying Infant” had first appeared in Blackwood’s in July 1821 (for Carnes, see Whitmore 23–25). Grant also gave significant representation to her Boston connections by including, besides the “Tribute,” two poems by Lydia Huntley Sigourney: “To Alice: An Interesting Girl Deprived of the Powers of Hearing and Speech” and “On the Twelfth Anniversary of a Friend and Benefactress” (61–62, 93–95).

26. Walter Scott’s incredulity at the idea that he might have confessed his authorship of Waverley to Grant—absurd because she was “surrounded by so many fetch-and-carry mistresses and misses, and the maintainer of such an unmerciful correspondence”—nevertheless demonstrates that Grant was known to be at the center of extensive, vibrant, and writerly social networks (Scott to Maria Edgeworth, 3 February 1824, Letters 8: 166). Devoney Looser has further noted that Grant was one of the few “bluestocking” women who were portrayed as active writers until well into old age (105–06).

27. On Lady Campbell and her son, see “Argyll, Duke of (S, 1701).”

28. Next to the poem’s title, Grant noted in her late hand: “Written at the request of Lady John Campbell on the Birth of her eldest Son Heir apparent to the Duke of Argyle Lad[y] John livd under my care from her 14th to her 21st year & was much attachd to my family” (63). Grant’s fair copy of this poem survives in a letter to Lady Campbell; the letter is endorsed, “Gaelic Poem & the Translation by Mrs. Grant, 1822,” though there is no Gaelic version of the poem on the letter’s single sheet (Letter to Lady Campbell).

29. See, for example, Miscellany 23, 51–3, 61–2, 87, and 101 (“Original”); and 32 (“anonymous but exquisite and truly original”).

30. For other late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century case studies that investigate ways in which manuscript collections might be composed, circulated, and used for the memorialization of social networks or personal, affective relationships, see Hess; Levy 45–69; and Schellenberg 205–36.

31. Surviving letters from Grant to Mrs. Wood furnish several examples: November 1835 (sends “an extract from the life of Sir James Macintosh”); 9 June 1836 (Wood “will in a day or two I think receive the other Series of Mrs. [Elizabeth] Carters letters”); Wednesday [n.d.] (sends “the life of Elliot which I think you will care for” as well as “two Volumes of [a life of] Hannah More”); and Saturday [1837?] (sends “an American Review of … Cowpers life & works”).