As she entered the rotunda the first person she encountered was her old ‘seducer’ George Fitzgerald. He was startled to see her, but lost no time in greeting her, welcoming her re-entry into ‘the world’ and observing that she was without Robinson. He followed her for the remainder of the evening, and as she left she observed his carriage drawing up alongside hers. The next morning he arrived at the house to pay his respects, as she sat correcting proofs of her poetry, with her daughter sleeping in a basket at her feet. She was annoyed at the intrusion and her vanity was piqued by the fact that she was dressed in a matronly morning dress rather than ‘elegant and tasteful dishabille’. Papers were strewn over the table, making the room look like a cross between ‘a study and a nursery’.
She received him frostily. Undeterred, Fitzgerald complimented her on her youth and her child on her beauty. The attention to Maria Elizabeth led to a thaw. Fitzgerald then took a proof sheet from the table and read one of the pastoral lyrics, praising her efforts. ‘I smile while I recollect how far the effrontery of flattery has power to belie the judgment,’ Mary wryly notes in her Memoirs.7 She asked him how he had discovered her place of residence and Fitzgerald confessed that he had followed her carriage from Ranelagh the previous evening.
The next evening he returned and took tea with the Robinsons, inviting them to a dinner party at Richmond. Mary declined, but she and Tom tentatively began to socialize with their old friends. Returning to Ranelagh a few days later they reacquainted themselves with Lord Northington, Captain O’Byrne, Captain Ayscough, and the wicked Lord Lyttelton, who had not changed one bit and was – as only to be expected – ‘particularly importunate’.
For a few weeks it looked as if the Robinsons were embarking on their old life again, but then Tom was arrested on a debt of £1,200, consisting principally of ‘the arrears of annuities, and other demands from Jew creditors’. Mary insisted that the debts were all his own: ‘he did not at that time, or at any period since, owe fifty pounds for me, or to any tradesman on my account whatever’.8 Robinson stayed in custody in the sheriff’s office for three weeks. He felt too depressed even to go through the motions of trying to raise the money from his father or his friends. Prison was inevitable and he was duly committed to the Fleet on 3 May 1775. He would spend the next fifteen months there.
The 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