A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Kathryn R King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138663558
• eBook ISBN: 9781317314790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she 'never wrote any thing in a political way'. This study of the life and works, the first full-length biography of Haywood in nearly a century, takes the measure of her duplicity.

1 ‘Her Approach to Fame’: 1714–29

Most accounts of Haywood in the 1720s stress her sexual alliances or the cultural scandal of her earliest fiction, but the more compelling story is of a young woman’s journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement. Haywood began her public life ambitious for fame — as an actress first, and then perhaps as a coterie poet — but she found popular acclaim, almost by surprise it would seem, as a ‘best-selling’ novelist. Very soon she was writing as an ‘author by profession’ and by the end of the decade had developed the shrewd marketing practices that would serve her throughout her career. Her politics in the 1720s are not easily pegged, however. Her novels were not exactly written ‘outside the context of party politics and patronage’, as some have thought, but neither did she write as a Tory partisan.¹ Dedications, panegyrical passages and records of friendships point instead toward a quest for protection and support from sometimes unexpected quarters. This chapter (and the next) will consider evidence for her partisan alignments and will conclude, with some reservations, that Haywood is probably best described as an opportunist by necessity in this phase of her career. But this is not to say that she lacked political principles or convictions. Even in the 1720s she was drawn to political themes to which she would return for the rest of her career, many of them concerned with social justice and truth-telling.

For this period there exists a relative wealth of information regarding her personal experiences and even, if some speculation is granted, her inner life. This is the time of her infamous squabbles with Martha Sansom (née Fowke) and the toxic falling-out with former intimate and soon-to-be enemy, Richard Savage. Haywood did something she would seldom if ever do again, she took her wounded feelings into print, retelling the story of her disdain for Sansom and Savage and her victimization by them (as she saw it) in prefaces, dedications, self-inscriptions and allegorized fictions. She even invented for her purposes a retaliatory ‘revenge’ subgenre of the amatory novella that enabled her to continue punishing the pair in one encrypted roman-à-clef story after another. By the end of the decade she seems to have cured herself of this proclivity for airing her grievances in public and would thereafter maintain the practised reticence so often remarked nowadays, but during this emotionally tempestuous period she would many times vent her wounded feelings in self-inscribed writings. As a result, there is much in print bearing upon her feelings about Savage, Sansom and Aaron Hill, the other figure in the psychosexual Hillarian tangle. The self-reflexive writings she composed are ripe for further biographical investigation, and they may be just the materials needed to dispel the earlier fear that biographers may never find a route to ‘her “sensibility”, her responses to experiences and to life’.²

This chapter and the next, which focuses on Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724–5), trace her journey in the 1720s toward a multifaceted role as an ‘author by profession’. The popular success of Love in Excess seemed to point towards a career supplying the racy but ‘polite’ fictions that would attract buyers in the fashionable novels-and-translations segment of the market. But there were signs early on that she was restive with such a limited role and wanted to expand her scope, purpose, and authorial identity beyond the ‘Novel kind of Writing’ that came so easily to her, even if that meant embracing less respectable dimensions of authorship.³ She wanted to occupy new generic territories and expand her range as a chronicler of contemporary life. With the publication of Memoirs of a Certain Island in September of 1724 she basically reinvented herself. Memoirs is often represented as a dive to the bottom — ‘It is hard to imagine any depths to which Haywood will not sink in her prose scandal chronicles’, writes one especially hostile modern critic — and there is no denying the sheer nastiness of the attacks Haywood contrives for her scandal chronicles.⁴ But scandal writing, I will argue in the chapter that follows, also represents an advance in her satiric methods and a considerable widening of her sense of social purpose. The present chapter attends to the beginnings of her career when she sought recognition on stage and as a poet of the sublime and then found fame as the author of that surprise ‘hit’ of 1719, Love in Excess. By the end of the 1720s she had consolidated her identity as a thoroughgoing businesswoman coolly overseeing a number of well-established literary product lines, some published under her name and others anonymously, some with winking hints for the cognoscenti.

‘An Inclination for the Stage’

Haywood began her professional life at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1714. She was perhaps twenty-one.⁵ She would return to various playhouses on and off for more than two decades, and critics are beginning to look at the way even her prose fictions are conceived in theatrical terms.⁶ She would later declare her family ‘averse’ to her theatrical ambitions, which is hardly surprising given the times and the possibility of a mercantile family background, but she managed somehow — and that she did so seems a testimony to the potency of her ambitions — to make her way across the Irish Sea to the capital city to serve an apprenticeship as an actress. Dublin was a lively town of 100,000 and Smock Alley, its only professional playhouse, was the chief ‘feeder’ for the London professional theatres. Actors who had the good fortune to find a berth there would be trained by the septuagenarian but still impressive manager Joseph Ashbury, by all accounts the foremost acting teacher of the day. Haywood’s first role, and unfortunately the only role for which records have survived, was the bit part of Chloe in Shadwell’s adaptation of Timon of Athens. This confirms that she was there as a novice to learn her craft. Chloe mostly stands around on stage, now and then delivering a line of little import such as ‘Madam! Your father is come in’. Twenty-one men and eleven women are known to have been part of the acting company at the start of the 1714–15 season. Haywood was one of three novices. Others arriving at this time included Francis Elrington, the younger brother of the renowned tragedian and Smock Alley manager Thomas Elrington, and, in December, William Wilks, nephew of Robert Wilks, another product of Ashbury’s training.⁷ Ashbury’s assistant that season, interestingly, was the man who would be Haywood’s first publisher, William Rufus Chetwood. Due to the spottiness of the Smock Alley records we know nothing about her remaining years there.

She debuted on the London stage on 23 April 1717 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and her arrival received some splash. One of the papers heralded a new actress on the scene, a ‘Mrs Haywood’ ‘lately arriv’d from Ireland’.⁸ She had come a long way from the Chloe days. Her debut role was the Countess of Nottingham in John Banks’s tragedy The Unhappy Favourite: or, the Earl of Essex opposite an associate from the Dublin days, the actor Thomas Elrington, a Smock Alley manager who between 1715 and 1719 divided his time between Dublin and London.⁹ Nottingham was an ‘actressy’ role that Haywood would surely have relished, a passionate revenge-seeking woman said to possess ‘malicious Beauty’ and ‘wondrous’ wit in the invention of wicked plots. She is on from the start — it seems right she would have the first line, ‘Help me to rail’ — and delivers speeches that might be at home in one of Haywood’s female-revenge tales: give me ‘some new strange Curse that’s far above / Weak Womans Rage to blast the Man I love’.¹⁰ Accounts today sometimes give the impression that she achieved notoriety early on as a stage performer but she seems to have fizzled in her debut, or so we infer from the fact she would not get another part until 1723 when she assumed the leading role in her own A Wife to be Lett, a part she appears to have written for herself.

A Wife to be Lett, Haywood’s only comedy, was the last play to be staged as part of an experimental summer season at Drury Lane managed by the twenty-year-old Theophilus Cibber. Richard Savage had a play staged that summer as well. Despite opening in a stiflingly hot week in August, it was to be her most successful play and she performed the lead role of Mrs Graspall three consecutive afternoons, Monday through Wednesday, 12–14 August.¹¹ The story announced in the press was that Haywood undertook the role at the last minute due to ‘the Indisposition of an Actress’,¹² but I am not the first to suspect that she engineered the fiction of the indisposed actress in order to cast herself as a replacement for a role she had intended for herself from the start, and it is worth noting that the part of Mrs Graspall is huge and it would have required time to learn the lines. The prologue, spoken by young Cibber, plays upon Haywood’s literary reputation as a forceful novelist who writes with ‘manly Vigour, and with Woman’s wit’. She now takes the stage as a ‘dangerous Woman-Poet’ and critics in the audience would do well to tremble:

‘Criticks! be dumb to-night — no Skill display;
A dangerous Woman-Poet wrote the Play:
...
Measure her Force, by her known Novels, writ
With manly Vigour, and with Woman’s wit.
Then tremble, and depend, if ye beset her,
She, who can talk so well, may act yet better.¹³

The epilogue was spoken by Haywood. Two years later when Haywood sought to have the play revived she contrived to have ‘Mrs Graspal’ make an appeal to the manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane from within the pages of Mist’s Weekly Journal: ‘Mrs. Graspal, who has been our Customer 2 years desires us to inform the Manager of Drury-Lane Play-House, that if they pleased to play the Comedy, called, A Wife to be Lett, within ten Days, they will oblige her and a great many of the Quality to whom she communicates her Design’.¹⁴ Despite her efforts the comedy remained unperformed in London until much later, although it was performed in Norwich in the late thirties.¹⁵ It would be another seven years before Haywood would appear on stage again and then it would be in another substantial part that appears to have been written specifically for her, this one by her friend, literary collaborator and possibly lover William Hatchett. Her role as Briseis in Hatchett’s The Rival Father, staged at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1730, is discussed in a later chapter.

All this is to say that the stage held powerful attractions for Haywood. Savage’s sneer in his satire The Authors of the Town (1725) that Haywood panted ‘for Stage-Renown’ might be discounted as the usual Savage nastiness, but Baker corroborates the underlying idea when he notes in more tempered language that she had ‘an Inclination for the Stage as a Performer’.¹⁶ It is suggestive to say the least that she betook herself to Dublin against the wishes of her family to undertake a course of study at the Smock Alley Theatre that amounted to an apprenticeship as a professional actress. In this light, even her efforts as a playwright can be interpreted as an attempt to get herself in front of an audience. If anything, criticism to date may have underplayed the extent to which she sought to achieve fame as an actress.

Richard Savage

The Savage so contemptuous of Haywood’s ‘panting’ stage ambitions is of course that same poet, aristocrat manqué, and Johnsonian biographical subject who at an earlier stage of Haywood’s career publically declared himself one of her literary admirers, writing verses in praise of two of her early novels. In the latest wave of rehearsals of the Haywood life story he is sometimes said to have lived with her and more often named as the father of at least one of the illegitimate children assigned to her by the Pope tradition.¹⁷ It is not necessary to subscribe to the ‘Savage love’ hypothesis, which I have challenged elsewhere, to recognize that the disintegration of their intimacy, whatever its nature, was a crucial event in Haywood’s personal and professional life that ended up playing a huge role in shaping her modern reputation for scandalous maternity and sexual licentiousness.¹⁸ Scholars agree that it was almost certainly Savage who supplied Pope with the gossipy Grub Street particulars that made their way into The Dunciad, among them one presumes the innuendo about the ‘babes of love’ that has given rise to much ill-founded speculation. This is not the place to attempt a full accounting of the Haywood-Savage relation, but the story as presently told stands in need of correction so it is worth pausing to try to put their relation in a truer light.

The beginning of their friendship is usually dated to sometime in 1719, after she published Part 1 of Love in Excess in January, but before June when Part 2 appeared graced with a puff from Savage. The reasoning is that if he had known her earlier he would have written commendatory lines for Part 1, but the fact that he did not do so proves nothing. Savage by all accounts was an insistently self-regarding writer always inclined to use others to serve his own ends. When Part 1 was published Haywood was a first-time author without a name — indeed, Part 1 was issued anonymously — and Savage had little to gain by attaching himself to Love in Excess. He waited, characteristically, until she already achieved éclat. (Verses written for her novel The Rash Resolve in 1724 suggest he was less than thrilled by her subsequent success: the commendation begins with this sulky couplet: ‘Doom’d to a Fate, which damps the Poet’s Flame, / A Muse, unfriended, greets thy rising Name!’).¹⁹ They may have met as early as spring 1717 when she arrived from Dublin for her London stage debut, for they had theatre friends in common, many of them Smock Alley actors now associated with John Rich’s newly constituted company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Rich had drawn away so many from the Dublin company that by spring 1715 Smock Alley ‘had been thoroughly decimated’.²⁰ One of those friends was William Chetwood, the author, publisher and general man-about-theatre who had assisted Ashbury at Smock Alley during the 1714–15 season when Haywood first arrived. He and Haywood were certainly known to each other from the Dublin days. Chetwood, who generally features in theatre histories as prompter at the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, may have been associated during the 1718–19 season with the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.²¹ It was Chetwood of course who published her first novel (as well as several others in the early 1720s) and it was he who provided Love in Excess with its dedicatee (the celebrated actress Anne Oldfield) and wrote for Part 1 a dedication remarkable for its astonishing picture of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Biographical Prolegomenon
• Introduction
• 1 'Her Approach to Fame': 1714–29
• 2 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia
• 3 Theatrical Thirties: 1729–37
• 4 Adventures of Eovaai
• 5 At the Sign of Fame: 1741–4
• 6 The Female Spectator
• 7 The Parrot
• 8 Epistles for the Ladies
• 9 Was Haywood a Jacobite?
• Epilogue: The Invisible Spy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index