Louisa Comes Home

I've been totally spoilt this Valentine's with a remarkable gift - what's thought to be a first edition of Anna Seward's sentimental verse novel, Louisa, published in Lichfield in 1784.

Before I tell you the story of the book, allow me to do a quick recap. You'll remember that I wrote about Seward (above), who was a poet of some renown by the 1780s (dubbed The Swan of Lichfield, and credited by Erasmus Darwin as the inventor of a poetic form, the epic elegy). She lived almost her entire life in the cathedral city and knew many of the major artistic and scientific figures of her day, including Samuel Johnson (whom she thought 'an overrated ranter') and James Boswell ('nought but a Scottish coxcomb'). In fact, Boswell rather fancied her; she rebuffed his attentions twice but did give him a lock of hair tied with pink ribbon, which was found in his papers after his death.

We still have Seward to thank for preserving aspects of Lichfield which survive to this day: in 1773, she approached the town clerk with an idea to stop Minster Pool from silting up (she proposed it should be 'serpentined' by digging out certain areas), and she decried attempts by the church authorities to remove every other lime tree from The Dean's Walk, comparing it to 'removing every other tooth from a mouth'. The monument to her in Lichfield Cathedral (below) carries an epitaph by Walter Scott.


Anyway, my partner, knowing my interest in Seward, tracked down Louisa from a bookseller in Delanson, New York, who then shipped it back home to the place it was published over 200 years ago. When it arrived in Lichfield, he was surprised to find just a bundle of pages, so he contacted a bookbinder called Henry Mills, a family business since 1855, based in Aston, near Birmingham, and got it bound, complete with the beautiful marbled end papers (below). You can see that the pages are brown with age; I can't begin to describe the excitement of handling them.

But the biggest thrill was on the back page (see bottom picture), which Seward appears to have signed. Could this have been one of her own copies, kept in her house, The Bishop's Palace, just a stone's throw from where we live? I'd like to think so!





Photographs © Memoirs of the Celebrated Mrs Woffington.

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Swan of Lichfield

A little while ago I wrote a short story on bonkers Lunar Man Thomas Day, who took up two foundling children with the intention of making one of them into the perfect wife. That's a whole post in itself, but anyway, one of Day's friends during his days living at Stowe (on the outskirts of Lichfield) was the poet Anna Seward, otherwise known as the Swan of Lichfield.

I won't go into her biog here, but her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is online if you're interested. She admired Darwin (and wrote his Memoirs), treated Johnson with a dim regard, and wrote some seriously witty and rather waspish letters (she once said that an unanswered letter was an 'expatiated sin'). Some regard her verse as doggerel, which is rather unfair. After all, Darwin saw fit to steal some of it for his long poem Botanic Garden, without either permission or acknowledgment. But I love her rather sarcastic defence of Darwin's descriptions of the sexual reproduction of plants in the above book: 'do not suppose that a virtuous girl, or young married woman, could be induced, by reading the Botanic Garden, to imitate the involuntary libertinism of a fungus or flower'.

Here's one of her poems:

"SONNET IV"

And now the youthful, gay, capricious Spring,
Piercing her showery clouds with crystal light,
And with their hues reflected streaking bright
Her radiant bow, bids all her warblers sing;
The lark, shrill carolling on soaring wing;
The lonely thrush, in brake, with blossoms white,
That tunes his pipe so loud; while, from the sight
Coy bending their dropt heads, young cowslips fling
Rich perfume o'er the fields.--It is the prime
Of hours that beauty robes:--yet all they gild,
Cheer and delight in this their fragrant time,
For thy dear sake, to me less pleasure yield
Than, veil'd in sleet, and rain, and hoary rime,
Dim Winter's naked hedge and plashy field.

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