Fleet housed about three hundred prisoners and their families. It was a profit-making enterprise: prisoners had to pay for food and lodging, pay the turnkey to let their families in and out, and even pay not to be kept shackled in irons. There were opportunities for work, though some inmates were reduced to begging from passers-by – a grille was built into the prison wall along Farringdon Street for this purpose.
It was not a requirement, but was nevertheless common, for wives to accompany their husbands to debtors’ prisons such as the Fleet, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench. Mary did so – as her fellow novelist and poet Charlotte Smith would when her husband was confined a few years later. Often wives would come and go, bringing in for their confined husband. Young children were, however, usually left with relatives. It is a mark of Mary’s deep devotion to her baby that she took the 6-month-old Maria Elizabeth to prison with her rather than leaving her in the care of Hester. For that matter, she could presumably have stayed with Hester herself. Her loyalty to Tom Robinson is striking, especially in the light of his infidelities.
They were given quarters on the third floor of the towering prison block, overlooking the racquet ground, which the inmates were at leisure to use for exercise. Robinson – an ‘expert in all exercises of strength’ – played racquets daily while Mary tried her best to make a home in the squalid surroundings, and took care of her baby. She barely ventured outdoors during daylight hours for a period of nine months, though she did at least have a nurse to help her with the baby. The cells were small, dark, and sparsely furnished, but at least they were given a pair of rooms and not just one. This meant, however, that they paid extra for lodging, which meant that it would take longer to put aside the money to pay off the debt.
According to the memoirs of Laetitia Hawkins, a neighbour of Mary’s during her years of fame, Robinson was sent a guinea a week subsistence money by his father. He was also offered some employment ‘in writing’ – probably the copying of legal documents, an activity for which he was well trained – but he refused to do anything. Mary, by contrast, not only attended to her child but also ‘did all the work of their apartments, she even scoured the stairs, and accepted the writing and the pay which he had refused’.9
Less welcome offers of assistance came from the rakish lords, Northington, Lyttelton, and Fitzgerald. She knew, though, from the ‘language of gallantry’ and ‘profusions of love’ in their letters what the offers really meant. It was above all her maternal devotion that kept her from exchanging a life of poverty for the temporary comforts afforded to a courtesan.
At night, she would walk on the racquet court. One beautiful moonlit evening, she went out with her baby and the nursemaid. Mary would later remember it as the night when her daughter ‘first blessed my ears with the articulation of words’. They danced the child up and down, her eyes fixed on the moon, ‘to which she pointed with her small fore-finger’, whereupon a cloud suddenly passed over it and it disappeared. Little Maria Elizabeth dropped her hand slowly and, with what her mother perceived as a sigh, cried out ‘all gone’. These were her first words – a repetition of the phrase used by her nurse when she wanted to withhold something from the baby. In retrospect, it seemed like the one joyful moment in the long months of captivity. They walked until midnight, watching the moon play hide and seek with the clouds as the ‘little prattler repeated her observation’.10
Twenty years later, Mary’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge would make one of his loveliest poems out of a similar experience. Coleridge writes of how his infant son Hartley could recognize the song of the nightingale before he could talk:
My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp,
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen!
He then tells of how one night when baby Hartley awoke ‘in most distressful mood’, he scooped him up and hurried out into the orchard
And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam.11
Coleridge’s poem was written in April 1798, two years before Mary drafted this section of her Memoirs. It was published in Lyrical Ballads, a book she knew well (it would inspire the title of her final volume of poetry, Lyrical Tales). What is more, Coleridge visited her on several occasions in the early months of 1800, when she was writing the Memoirs. They subsequently wrote poems inspired by each other’s work. There can, then, be little doubt that the phrasing of her memory of Maria Elizabeth by moonlight – the idea of ‘articulation’, the baby’s raised forefinger, the dancing yellow light – was shaped by a memory of Coleridge’s poem for Hartley. Later in 1800, she paid a further compliment in the form of a lovely poem for Coleridge’s third son, Derwent.
It was only as a result of the literary revolution of the 1790s, in which Coleridge and Robinson each played an important part, that intimate memories of this kind became the stuff of poetry and autobiography. Mary’s early verse, published while she was in the Fleet, was stilted and artificial in comparison. Poems by Mrs Robinson, an octavo volume of 134 pages, was published in the summer of 1775, with a frontispiece engraved by Angelo Albanesi, a fellow prisoner who had been befriended by Tom. The volume garnered a mediocre notice in the Monthly Review: ‘Though Mrs Robinson is by no means an Aiken or a More, she sometimes expresses herself decently enough on her subject’ (Anna Aikin and Hannah More were the most admired ‘bluestocking’ poets of the age).12
The volume includes thirty-two ballads, odes, elegies, and epistles. For the most part, they consist of pastorals (‘Ye Shepherds who sport on the plain, / Drop a tear at my sorrowful tale’) and moral effusions (pious outbursts addressed to Wisdom, Charity, Virtue, and so forth) that are typical of later eighteenth-century poetry at its most routine. But a handful of the poems show signs of future promise: there are, for instance, some brief character sketches in which one may see the seeds of the future novelist’s voice.
Several of the poems were modelled on the work of Anna Aikin (later Barbauld): ‘The Linnet’s Petition’, for example, was an imitation of her ‘The Mouse’s Petition’. Women’s poetry of the period was often written in the form of verse letters. Mary’s ‘Epistle to a Friend’ is written with a lightness of touch and warmth of feeling:
Permit me dearest girl to send
The warmest wishes of a friend
Who scorns deceit, or art,
Who dedicates her verse to you,
And every praise so much your due,
Flows genuine from her heart.13
One is left wondering about the identity of the friend, especially as the following poem is an elegy ‘On the Death of a Friend’, which ends ‘May you be number’d with the pure and blest, / And Emma’s spirit be Maria’s guard.’ We know hardly anything about Mary’s female companionship of these early years, beyond a passing reference in
