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The working-class poet Ann Yearsley, known as "Lactilla," or the "milkwoman of Bristol," provides an especially interesting test-case for rethinking Romanticism on a number of levels. Yearsley's poetry was brought to the attention of Hannah More and Lady Wortley Montagu by More's cook in 1784. More admired Yearsley's poetry, and assembled a list of subscribers for her work. Yearsley's work was well-received, but shortly after the publication of her first volume of poems, she and More quarreled publicly and eventually parted company over More's unwillingness to let Yearsley control even the interest on the revenue generated by the poetry. Yearsley continued to write, taking up such subjects as reason, sensibility, apathy, virtue, and friendship in her works, but also publishing increasingly political pieces, such as "Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade" (1788), and pieces on the deaths of Louis XVI (1793) and Marie Antoinette (1795).
If "to publish, in the 1790s, was inevitably to enter a public debate," then the fact that Yearsley entered this debate as an uneducated laboring-class woman, and wrote about classed and gendered categories marks her relationship with her middle-class readers as both privileged and tenuous. Yearsley's writing illustrates time and again that she was acutely aware of the fact that her longevity in the poetic arena depended on wealthy and middle-class readers. Although Yearsley remained true to the conventions, content, and terms through which she initially gained access to this sphere, her poetry nonetheless increasingly criticized the rigid and hollow forms of middle-class behavior that rendered her position with regard to these categories necessarily static. Her critique of society attains its clearest articulation in "Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade," which appeared in her final volume of poems, The Rural Lyre, in 1796. Yet this poem also manifests Yearsley's most obscure syntax and imagery. On a "cold" first reading of this poem -- that is, knowing nothing about Yearsley's life or her other poetry -- "Remonstrance" is turbid almost to the point of opacity. But a survey of her dealings with Hannah More, in conjunction with Yearsley's other verses, illuminates many of the poem's obfuscating moments: abrupt tense shifts, sudden changes in location, and syntactical gaps. In fact, "Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade" finally constitutes Yearsley's experientially-grounded critique of her middle-class readers.
In his introduction to Eighteenth Century Women Poets, Roger Lonsdale has highlighted the difficult position in which female poets often found themselves at this time. From almost the moment that she met Hannah More, Ann Yearsley's life has been written about in various ways, but almost always in terms of her economic and artistic struggles. As legend has it, in the winter of 1783-84, Yearsley and her family were destitute and on the brink of starvation, huddled together in a barn for the winter. They expected to die there, but were rescued by a country gentleman. In her account of Yearsley's pre-Hannah More existence, Mary Waldron remarks the curiosity of this situation, in that by this time, Bristol's parish relief system was surely in operation, yet Yearsley's family had not applied for aid. Waldron suggests that the reason for this was pride, and that just prior finding themselves situated in the barn, Yearsley's family had probably donated to the parish relief fund, and were too proud to acknowledge their fall from the (barely distinguishable) upper tier of the rural pecking order.
In the summer of 1784, Hannah More, who lived among the wealthy merchants in the town of Bristol, learned of the Yearsley family plight when More's cook showed her some of Ann's verses. More speedily undertook to compile a list of subscribers, and published Yearsley's first volume of verse, Poems, On Several Occasions. On the basis of Yearsley's previous occupation as a milkwoman, More christened Yearsley with the poetical name of "Lactilla," and assured co-patroness Lady Elizabeth Wortley Montagu that "I am utterly against taking her out of her situation" (quoted in Mahl, 279). Toward this end, More established an investment fund for the proceeds, in More's and Lady Wortley Montagu's names. More seems to have had only Yearsley's best interests at heart; with the money in trust, Yearsley would not mishandle the money, and her husband could gain no access to it. Yearsley initially agreed to this arrangement, and both she and her husband signed a deed of trust over to More. It was not until after the volume's publication that Yearsley began to have misgivings about the arrangement. Yearsley's need of some of the money to pay of small debts seems only to have strengthened More's opinion that Yearsley was not fiscally responsible.
The quarrel between More and Yearsley was long and drawn out, resulting finally in a conclusive break between the two women, at which time More's publisher also vowed to have nothing to do with Yearsley. Yearsley published a "Narrative" of the dispute in the fourth edition of Poems on Various Occasions, as well as in her subsequent volume of verse, Poems on Various Subjects (1786) . Under the dedication "To the Noble and generous Subscribers Who So Liberally Patronized a Book of Poems Published under the Auspices of Miss H. More, of Park-Street, Bristol," Yearsley endeavored to exculpate herself from More's charge of ingratitude. According to this account, after she realized that of the money generated by her verses, she was to receive only an allowance of More's determining, Yearsley worried that her children might never receive any of the money. Therefore, the "Narrative" claimed that she merely requested "a declaration of the deed for the security of my children ... and a copy of the deed itself" (reprinted in Wordsworth, xvii). More resisted, and the affair remained unresolved until, according to Yearsley, some friends interceded on her behalf. The "Narrative" recounts the final meeting between More and Yearsley, at which time More gave Yearsley a copy of the deed, and finally relinquished control over the trust. Yearsley closed the "Narrative" with an apology to her readers, stating that she never would have published it, "but, as character is more precious than life itself, the protection of that alone compelled me to the task" (xxiv). To "further vindicate her character," at the end of the "Narrative" Yearsley attached a copy of the deed, as well as a copy of her rejected "Mrs. Yearsley's Proposals, in Behalf of her Children, presented to Miss Hannah More, and rejected" (xxx).
Whether as a result of or despite the publication of the "Narrative," Yearsley's reputation as a poet emerged from the quarrel unscathed; her second volume of poetry was as warmly received as her first. Indeed, Yearsley maintained enough readers' support to publish many more works. After Subjects (1786), which proved to her audience that she was worthy of their attention regardless of her relationship to More, Yearsley published occasional pieces "On the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade" (1788), on the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, (1793 and 1795), as well as a small collection called Stanzas of Woe (1790). She also tried her hand at other genres, including a play, Earl Goodwin, which was produced in 1789 and published in 1791, and a novel, The Royal Captives (1796). Yearsley returned to verse for what might be considered her swan song; on the whole The Rural Lyre (1796) is more calm and more mature than Yearsley's earlier verse. Yet with this tempered restraint she finally articulates her dissatisfaction with her relationship to the self-absorbed readers on whom she had to depend for her livelihood.
By the time that Yearsley wrote "Remonstrance," she was caught up in a complex chain of social and intellectual identifications and dis-identifications, which are illuminated by her poetry. She was initially presented to the public by More as an untutored genius, and as such a curiosity for the middle-class readership. Yet from the very first she sought to distance herself from the laboring class, and vehemently reproached More with the charge that "it was the height of insult and barbarity to tell that she was poor and a Milkwoman" (quoted in Mahl, 284). Accounts of Yearsley as a solitary figure, known to her neighbors only by virtue her solitary walks, corroborate Mary Waldron's suggestion that "Ann Yearsley did not identify herself with the feckless laboring masses, addicted to the instant gratification of unsuitable tastes" (310), a sense which Yearsley's public success only could have augmented. Still, Yearsley's judgment of the hypocrisy of middle-class behavior also prohibited her from identifying herself as a member of that class. In effect, Yearsley sustained an opportunistic, albeit superficial and tenuous, alliance with each class as it suited her poetry's needs. The position of marginality, then, seems to have suited Yearsley's sense of her poetic self. She alternately presented herself as the hapless victim of the middle class, the serious critic of that same group, the position of international political critic, sententiously "recommending order, virtue, and commerce to the Britons" in a subtitle to "The Genius of England" in The Rural Lyre. Whichever way we read her, it cannot be simply in the picturesque terms of rural milkwoman; the relationship between Yearsley's personal and professional life is inextricable. Pieces such as the "Narrative," "To Those Who Accuse the Author of Ingratitude," and "To ... Milo," indicate that Yearsley was well acquainted with the potential use of her verse publications to air her personal grievances.
Regardless of these widely variant positions, once she acquired an intellectual relationship to the middle class reading audience at the site of poetic publication, Yearsley fought vigorously to maintain that relationship. Without this access, of course, she could entertain no hope of a career in poetry. She perceived as early as the "Narrative" that character was dearer than life itself, and by extension that form was equally valued by her middle class readers. As a result, she deftly couched "Remonstrance," her most stringent social critique, in dense terms and elevated imagery, while situating the action of the poem spatially and temporally outside of any recognizable society. While "Remonstrance" re-affirmed what Jerome McGann has termed Yearsley's "commitment to Ideal forms" (63), this piece nonetheless enacts a criticism of the hollow manifestation of these categories in polite eighteenth-century society. To say that "Remonstrance" is autobiographical in content, then, in no way precludes it from being critical in spirit.
Nonetheless, if Yearsley's biographical trials and tribulations initially attracted (and still attracts) readers to her poetry, the poetry itself is not vitiated by such circumstantial knowledge. Indeed, an understanding of Yearsley's economic and professional hardship discloses a new layer of complexity in some of her poems. Even Hannah More realized this as she described for Montagu Yearsley's desperate situation, without a knowledge of which "some of her most affecting verses would be unintelligible" (reprinted in Subjects, viii). Yet although in the light of this detail "Remonstrance" emerges as an autobiographically retrospective piece, this characterization affords no enlightenment of the elevated metaphors, highly wrought imagery or intermittently abstruse wording of the piece. Reading some of Yearsley's other poems, however, resolves at least some of these difficulties, and clarifies the function and significance that certain terms accrue within the broader context of her complete body of work. For instance, long before she characterized the distinction between "true" and "apparent" feeling on the basis on economic conditions, Yearsley endeavored nonetheless to make this difference apparent. Indeed, she introduced this distinction immediately following her split with More, in Subjects, in a poem addressed "to those who accuse the author of ingratitude,"which posits "the false, tho' public din, / In which the popular, not virtuous live" (34-35).
In a similar manner, pieces such as "Familiar Poem to Milo, An Aged Friend, Who Wished the Author Riches" demonstrate Yearsley's discontent what she perceives as a disparity between things as they are and things as they appear. In "Milo," an "attempt" at the "simplicity of epistolary correspondence," the narrator draws a distinction between those who can "feel" and those who can not, along the lines of economic circumstances, "since gold ne'er purchases a mind" (47). Embracing her own penury as the enabling condition of heightened understanding, Yearsley relates that if she were wealthy, she too might have been concerned with behavior and expression rather than feeling, and goes into detail about the behavior of the economically secure. Instead, the poet figures herself as one who has not been distracted by the bright and shiny objects and sensibilities privileged by wealth. In this poem Yearsley clearly moves toward criticism of the economically secure and idly distracted classes.
The distinction between true and false feeling is analogous to other distinctions in Yearsley's work, as in her treatment of real understanding and duplicitous behavior, also enabled by economic conditions. In fact, this theme of distinguishing between real and apparent gains currency as an organizing principle throughout Yearsley's work, and is firmly in place by the time that The Rural Lyre appears. In this volume, friendship is presented as the category of greatest disappointment. In her "Address to Friendship," Yearsley explains that real friendship should prove the "firm cement of the world" (5), but that it is "so rare / That delving souls ne'er find Thee" (24-25). Rather, it unfortunately is the case that ....Friendship's name oft decks the crafty lip: Her robe is borrow'd to allure: her smile, Whose most remote resemblance charms, put on: Her heav'nly air and mien so falsely worn, That she who scorns her imitates her best, And woos with guilty blandishment the heart For Friendship only form'd (59-65).
This moment of friendlessness is reinforced in "Remonstrance" as the narrator recounts her arduous ascent to the height from which she now speaks, as "so frightful, e'en from comfort so remote." The poet is neither proud nor at ease with her position. While she has attained a ground from which to view "the crowd" as well as history (lines 83ff), she is nevertheless isolated by the endeavor. The "plaudits of the wise," are a small consolation, purchased at the expense of any one true female friendship, since ...the year Ne'er rip'd the corn, or strew'd the yellow leaf, But some too feeble maid, who in the morn Ascended with me, lost her hold and fell (78-81).
This distinction, then, between real and assumed instances of categories of feeling, presented in "Remonstrance" and many of Yearsley's other poems, suggests that even friendship is a category that is hindered directly or indirectly by economic status.
The "action" of "Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade" is difficult to characterize briefly. As the poem opens, the narrator ponders her situation in this shade, and then moves to a more general inquiry of the nature of love, friendship, virtue. Reflecting on the nature and scope of her poetry, the narrator finally relates the subject of her "remonstrance," as the "motley crowd," and finally reaffirms her earlier resolution to stay her difficult course. Speaking of her supposedly privileged position as poet, she nevertheless laments its limitations:
These feeble sounds Give not my soul's rich meaning; or my thought Rises too boldly o'er the human line Of alphabets (misused). (50-53)
Either because she overreaches her intellectual station, which is precisely what attracted readers to "Lactilla's" verse in the first place, or because she is trying to verbalize "a picture for the world / too rare" (54-55), the narrator introduces the inability of language to account for her true feelings. For the reader who knows Yearsley's autobiographical circumstances, this passage reads as a simple re-figuration of More's astonishment at finding Yearsley's poems "to be extraordinary for a milker of Cows, and a feeder of Hogs, who has never even seen a Dictionary" (quoted in Mahl, 280), and Yearsley's subsequent disappointment at the break with More, whom Yearsley had considered a friend.
It is the location of the Platonic Shade, however, that renders "Remonstrance" a uniquely complicated work. The Platonic presence is neither mentioned in any of Yearsley's other poems, nor common in other late eighteenth-century verse. The idea of "shade" is fairly common in poetry of this period, generally marking what Julie Ellison has termed a site "of invention bound up with the speaker's desire to conceive a world and to move actively within it" (230). For Yearsley, this liminal space is multivalent. She locates herself between social groups; she participates within (on the basis of her poetic association) and yet remains outside (on the basis of her working-class background) polite forms of behavior; and she courts though she disapproves of her reader's sensibilities. In "Remonstrance," the shade is further complicated as a complex internal space for the author, a haven to which she retreats in her mind for the purpose of escaping the fighting monsters of the mind.
At the very least, the Platonic characterization of the shade implies a non-Christian after-world. The mention of Plato himself in this shade is somewhat more troubling, but his proximal position to the discussion of "repose" suggests that Yearsley was at least nominally acquainted with the Platonic concept of the transmigration of souls: because they are eternal, they move from body to body. Between worldly incarnations, the soul resides in a nether-space situated between eternal repose and the living world. A soul is granted permanent repose in this region when it attains the ideal level of godlike virtue, the reward for which is an escape from the cycle of transmigration. The poet immediately acknowledges that she is one who has earned this repose granted to the virtuous, but that "I will be dumb, nor dream of that repose; / Deserv'd but unpossess'd" (48-49). Because she steels her resolution to continue on her worldly course, which implies a poetic career, the "dumbness" reads two ways: either the poet will speak no more, and that this (volume) will be her last -- which it was -- or she will remain silent on certain topics, but continue to speak of things like "universal love," as she has been doing. From her isolated position, the narrator reveals the focus of her "remonstrance":
Here I gaze wond'ring at yon motley crowd, Who eye me through a medium all their own. --- I like them not, their pageantry contemn --- They know not how to communicate delight --- But square my compass with a mimic skill.
Although these lines deliver the most directly critical statement of a group of people in the corpus of Yearsley's work, the fact that the syntax breaks down into a series of statements interrupted by dashes suggests how difficult this move is for the narrator-as-poet. The last line is perhaps the most difficult to decode, but because "they" is the nearest subject, it appears that this complaint over the "squaring of the compass" reiterates the earlier statement that because she has been indelibly cast as "Lactilla" in her readers' eyes, her desire to create a different picture is thwarted because it is "too rare" for one defined in her position. Yearsley blames her frustration, then, not on her own intellectual powers, but on the limitations imposed upon "Lactilla" by the reading audience and literary marketplace.
The poet's remark that the crowd's "medium" is "all their own" cuts two ways. Certainly she is the object of their "eye," but Yearsley drives further wedges between the crowd and herself. First, she sets the scene up in a scenario of 'one-against-many', and subtly loads the power of each party's vision: the poet "gazes," while the crowd only "eyes" her. The relative powerlessness of their action to affect her is heightened two lines later as the poet declares that they "know not to communicate." Although they act, the crowd's actions have no meaning for the poet. Further, in her resistance to the crowd, Yearsley makes it clear that she is more disdainful of this form of behavior, the crowd's pageantry, than she is of the crowd itself. And it is on the basis of rigid social expectations that her compass is squared; the crowd, her audience, only desires form from her, and not what appears to her meaningful content.
Although Yearsley lived ten years past the publication of The Rural Lyre, she never published anything else. While it is not possible to know for sure whether or not she planned this volume to serve as her final poetic statement, the fact that it was just that introduces a possibility that Yearsley sensed she might offend her readers in this volume. On the other hand, it may well have been the case that Yearsley planned this volume as her last, and it was therefore her farewell piece. In any event, reading "Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade" in the context of Yearsley's autobiographical situation and in conjunction with her other works suggests that the poem, obscure though it seems, could not be any clearer. Neither could the initially baffling poem finally read any more clearly as a statement of Yearsley's attitudes toward middle-class sensibilities, nor could Yearsley come right out and say any more plainly what ailed her.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, the only complete version of this poem is available through the Chadwick-Healey Poetry Database, on CD ROM. However, there is an incomplete version in Lonsdale's Eighteenth Century Women Poets which omits roughly the first and last stanzas on the entire work.
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