It was during her time at Oxford House that Mary was drawn towards the stage. The governess, Mrs Hervey, spotted her talent for ‘dramatic exhibitions’, and persuaded Hester to let her daughter try for the stage, despite the fact that it was not considered to be a respectable career. Hester was persuaded that there were actresses who ‘preserved an unspotted fame’. Nicholas obviously had his doubts. Upon setting off on his new overseas adventure, he left his wife with a chilling injunction to ‘Take care that no dishonour falls upon my daughter. If she is not safe at my return I will annihilate you.’30
The school’s dancing master was also ballet master at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. Through him, Mary was introduced to an actor called Thomas Hull, who was impressed by her recitation of lines from Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore of 1714. But nothing came of the audition. Mary did not despair and she was rewarded with a much greater opportunity. Her mother’s protector Samuel Cox knew Dr Samuel Johnson and that was enough to open the door of Johnson’s old pupil and friend, David Garrick.
What was Mary Darby like at the time that she met Garrick? Though she may have been a plain child with dark swarthy looks, she had become a very beautiful teenager. She had curly, dark auburn hair and soft blue eyes that were to enchant men from the Prince of Wales to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She had dimples in her cheeks. But there was always an elusive quality to her beauty. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pupil, James Northcote, remarked that even his master’s portraits of her were failures because ‘the extreme beauty’ of her was ‘quite beyond his power’.31
*See Appendix for the uncertainty over the year of Mary’s birth.
CHAPTER 2 A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World
As London is the great emporium of commerce, it is also the centre of attraction for the full exercise of talents, and the liberal display of all that can embellish the arts and sciences.
Mary Robinson, ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc.
etc. of the Metropolis of England’
London was like nowhere else in the world. Bigger than any other city in Europe, with a population more than ten times that of Bristol, it was a place of extremes. Riches and squalor, grandeur and wretchedness, appeared cheek-by-jowl. This was an era of unprecedented consumerism: for companionship and entertainment there were coffee houses, taverns, brothels, parks, pleasure gardens, and theatres. Above all there were shops. Napoleon had good reason to dismiss the English as a nation of shopkeepers. By the time of Mary’s arrival in the metropolis, London had one for every thirty residents. Oxford Street alone boasted over a hundred and fifty. Everything was on display, from plate laden in silversmiths’ shops to fruits and spices piled high on street-barrows. Tea, coffee, sugar, pepper, tobacco, chocolate, and textiles – the ‘fruits of empire’ – were sold in vast quantities.1 There were print shops, book shops, milliners, linen drapers, silk mercers, jewellery shops, shoe shops, toy shops, confectioners. London was the epicentre of fashion, a place to gaze and be gazed at. It was an urban stage, and few understood this as well as Mary.
For the young poet William Wordsworth, London’s inherent theatricality was disturbing. His section on ‘Residence in London’ in his autobiographical poem The Prelude describes with unease ‘the moving pageant’, the ‘shifting pantomimic scenes’, the ‘great stage’, and the ‘public shows’. For Wordsworth, the gaudy display and excessive showiness of the city signalled a lack of inner authenticity; ‘the quick dance of colours, lights and forms’ was an alarming ‘Babel din’.2 Mary Robinson also captured the cacophony of urban life in her poem ‘London’s Summer Morning’, but she relished what Wordsworth abhorred:
Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds
Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke
Of noisy London? On the pavement hot
The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face
And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade,
Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door
The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell
Proclaims the dustman’s office, while the street
Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins
The din of hackney-coaches, wagons, carts;
While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers,
Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,
Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries
Of vegetable vendors, fill the air.
Now ev’ry shop displays its varied trade,
And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet
Of early walkers.3
She finds poetry in everything from the dustman to the ‘neat girl, / Tripping with bandbox lightly’ to the street vendor of second-hand clothes.
Mary was to experience London in its entirety, from debtors’ prison to parties given in her honour as the Prince’s consort at St James’s Palace. She became notorious for her self-promotion and her skill in anticipating the next new thing, be that in fashion or poetry. But she also grasped the very essence of urban culture in the late eighteenth century in a way that eluded Wordsworth. She knew that in order to survive and thrive in the new consumer society, she had to work to sell her wares. The literary marketplace was as crowded as the London streets and it took guts, brashness, and ostentation to make your voice heard – especially if you were a woman.
She must have felt some trepidation at meeting Garrick: ‘King’ David, the man who had single-handedly transformed the theatre world, acting on stage with unprecedented naturalism, producing behind the scenes with prodigious energy, and above all conferring on his profession a respectability it had never had before.
The 14-year-old girl was summoned to the actor’s elegant and grand new house in Adelphi Terrace, designed by the fashionable Adam brothers and overlooking the Thames. The Garricks had recently moved there and had furnished it lavishly. Mary would have entered through the large hall, with its imposing pillars, and then been shown into the magnificent first-floor drawing room, with its elaborate plaster ceiling crowned by a central circular panel of Venus surrounded by nine medallion paintings of the Graces. Garrick would have soon put her at ease with his good humour and liveliness. His wife, Eva Maria Veigel, a former dancer, was usually at his side and was especially considerate to young girls, as the future dramatist and novelist Fanny Burney testified when she visited the Garricks at their new house the same year: ‘Mrs Garrick received us with a politeness and sweetness of manners, inseparable from her.’4
Garrick, always susceptible to beauty, was captivated by Mary’s loveliness. Her voice reminded him of Susannah Cibber, an actress and singer he had favoured in his youth. An added attraction came in the form of Mary’s long, shapely legs, ideal for the highly popular ‘breeches roles’ that were required of actresses on the Georgian stage. In an age when women wore full-length dresses all the time, the actress who cross-dressed in boys’ clothing – as Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola, and in dozens of similar roles in eighteenth-century comedies – provided a unique spectacle: the public exhibition of the shape of a female leg.
Garrick’s personal interest was in no sense salacious. His faith in this young