Laetitia Pilkington (1712–1750)

Catharine Lee, Independent scholar, Pasco, Florida
July 2023

Laetitia Van Lewen was born in County Cork, probably in 1708 or 1709, and around the age of two moved with her family to Dublin. This was the city where she spent most of her life, and where she died as Laetitia Pilkington on 29 July 1750. Her father was the son of a Dutch émigré and her maternal ancestry was Irish, originally with Catholic and Jacobite roots. Her husband Matthew was educated at Trinity College, as was her brother Meade, and her earliest literary contacts, including Jonathan Swift and some well known women writers, belonged to the circle of Dublin writers. Yet this leaves out of account an important phase of her life, when on her second visit she journeyed alone to London in late 1738 with hardly any money, recently divorced, and separated from her children. This would be her home for more than eight years before she returned to Ireland in May 1747 to pass her last days in the land of her birth. While in England, she established contacts with Samuel Richardson, Sir Hans Sloane, Stephen Hales, and Lord Middlesex, among many notabilities, subsequently described in her autobiography. The first two volumes of her Memoirs were first published in Dublin (1748), immediately followed by London editions. After her death, Pilkington’s son put together a third volume in 1753, with the order of publication in the two cities reversed.

By this time Laetitia had become a celebrity on both sides of the Irish channel. This had something to do with her colorful private life, even though she naturally left some of the juicier details from the Memoirs. Nevertheless, she attracted attention from the English literary establishment, partly based on the patronage Swift had bestowed on her former husband, but more importantly on her energy and skills in the profession of writing. Few documents bring the milieu in which she worked so vividly to life. She packed an amazing amount of living into little more than forty years: her account could have become just an early example of the misery memoir, but it is irradiated by humour, gusto and an ability to enter into the fortunes and misfortunes of others. Unafraid of depicting the follies of the great, the good, or the merely notorious, she leaves incisive cameos of individuals such as Colley Cibber, Edmund Curll, Richard Mead, and Thoms Sheridan the younger.

She was the daughter of John Van Luwen (1684–1736), a leading obstetrician, and Elizabeth Corry, who had married in 1705. Her father was born in or around Mallow, County Cork, as the son of a Dutch surgeon, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as Leiden (possibly under the great Herman Boerhaave) and Utrecht, while her mother, Elizabeth Corry (d. 1742), was the niece of Sir John Meade (d.1707), a former Attorney General of Ireland. After their marriage and the birth of Laetitia, the family moved to Dublin, settling first in William Street, near to the widowed Lady Meade. John built up a successful practice in midwifery, and prospered so well that he would later become President of the College of Physicians, an unusual honor for one in his branch of the profession. It is reported that he was the only medically recognized accoucheur in Dublin at this date, since the occupation was mainly reserved either for female midwives or for the lowly ranked surgeons. He was awarded the degree of MD at Trinity in 1729. At the height of his success, John Van Luwen suffered an unfortunate domestic accident with a knife which caused him to inflict a severe cut on his side. He died of the effects a few weeks later, on 1 January 1737.

By that date, Laetitia had been married for several years—indeed, she was almost on the point of undergoing divorce. She had also given birth to three children, of whom two died in infancy.

During 1734 she had paid her first visit to London and made contacts with figures in the English establishment. Prior events in her life are hard to confirm, since her Memoirs are distinctly economical in the period from her birth (which she postdates 1712) to her teenage years. Most of her childhood is passed over, although we are given a brief indication of tensions with her severe mother and of the characteristic schoolgirl preoccupation with reading that is a common feature of budding writers. At around thirteen, she reports, she began to attract many suitors, despite the fact that she claims never to have been good looking, other than being very fair. It was her behavior which filled the pace of beauty, as she was “well drest, sprightly, and remarkably well tempered.” These qualities were to remain with her for most of her life, notwithstanding the many reverses she chronicles in her book.

As with many women in the past, she tells the story of her life as though it became a distinct narrative only when she married. This occurred in May 1725, when she was about seventeen and the recently ordained clergyman Matthew Pilkington was about twenty-four. The only lasting relationship Laetitia is known to have developed before she met her future husband is one with Constantia Grierson, née Crawley (c.1705–32), remembered today as a precocious poet and scholar cut off in her youth. The pair of literary young ladies exchanged verses about their experiences and feelings. Constantia, who was about eighteen when Laetitia got to know her, made an immediate impression. The Memoirs describe how Constantia was brought to John Van Lewen by a “stationer”—actually George Grierson (d. 1753), a printer who married Constantia in 1726—to receive instruction in midwifery. The passage continues, “She was Mistress of Hebrew¸ Greek, Latin and French; understood the Mathematicks, as well as most Men: And what made these extraordinary Talents yet more surprizing, was, that her Parents were poor illiterate Country People.” An exceptionally clever woman herself, Laetitia had no jealousy toward her new acquaintance. In due course another woman joined the group to form what Swift called the “triumfeminate” of poets in Dublin. (Another member who came to replace Grierson after the death and partially supplanted Laetitia after her marital troubles was Elizabeth Sican.) The new recruit was Mary Barber (c.1685–1755), the wife of a woollen draper, whose literary career was encouraged by Swift’s friend Dr. Patrick Delany, and whose poems are now the best known of those produced by the group.

It was at Delville, the estate leased by Delany and Dr. Richard Helsham outside Dublin, that Laetitia met Swift around 1729, possibly through her husband, who already knew some of the Dean’s intimates as a result of his time at Trinity. This gave rise to one of Swift’s teasing friendships with the opposite sex, where he behaved in his familiar manner, displaying kindness and occasional warmth along with the habitual mixture of bossy, overbearing, and carping comments to the young woman. The Memoirs create an unusually frank portrait of the Dean in his off-duty moments. Her modern editor A.C. Elias Jr. says that “Alone among [his] biographers in the eighteenth century and since, she gives us a Swift…who is first and last unknowable, at some level a mystery even to friends.” It was these private revelations that accounted for much of the popularity of Laetitia’s book when it was published in three installments, two decades later, and that remain the most frequently cited passages even today. A typical excerpt concerns the birth of a son to Laetitia in 1731, who would live only five days. She had asked Swift to be godfather, to which he had replied, “Well, if it be a Boy, I don’t much care if I do; but if it be a little Bitch I’ll never answer for her.” When he learnt of the outcome, he told the grieving mother, “The Lord be praised…Pox take me, but I was in Hopes you were dead yourself; but ’tis pretty well as it is, I have sav’d by it, and I should have got nothing by you.” The Memoirs report this heartless joke without any sign of bitterness.

Laetitia’s eldest child, and the only one Matthew later recognized as his own, named William, was born in 1726, followed by a daughter, Elizabeth (“Betty”), baptized in January 1729. Her first son was christened John Carteret (or “Jack”) in May 1730 (his middle name was an effort to curry favor with an influential peer who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but who had now broken with the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole). The same year saw the publication of Constantia Grierson’s edition of Tacitus, admired by Swift, and a volume of Matthew’s poems, issued by the leading light in the Dublin book trade, George Faulkner. In 1732 he was sent to London to act as chaplain to the incoming Lord Mayor of London, John Barber (1675–1741), the printer and longtime friend of Swift. The post had a tenure of just one year, but it was marked by controversy over the Lord Mayor’s role in the opposition to Walpole’s scheme for a new excise duty, strongly criticized by the City of London with Barber at its helm. After a short visit by Laetitia with Mary Barber at the end of 1733, Matthew was arrested together with Mary Barber in connection with their part in conveying a poem by Swift from Dublin, and after the prosecution fizzled out he returned to Ireland. He attempted to advance his career with various writings, but was seen as increasingly untrustworthy among his former colleagues.

The marriage was now sliding on to the rocks, not helped by the death of two further short-lived children, by Laetitia’s loss of her father, or by Matthew’s prolonged absence. The crisis arrived when she was caught in flagrante with a young surgeon Robert Adair (c.1710–90), later a distinguished medical officer In the British, and immortalized in the popular song “Robin Adair.” Laetitia naturally pleads innocence in her autobiography, blaming the appearance of a posse of servants who broke down the door on the machinations of her husband, and claiming that Adair (whom she does not name, and who promptly vanished from the scene) was in her bedroom for a kind of study session involving anew book. Nobody believed her story: she was expelled from the family home and within four months Matthew had obtained a verdict of adultery in the ecclesiastical court at Dublin, effectually a decree of divorce.

Predictably the erring wife was ostracized in many quarters. Swift dropped both Matthew and Laetitia, and she turned for support to the unreliable artist, actor, and writer James Worsdale (c.1695–1767), a recent arrival in Dublin whom the couple had met in London. Later on, their relations were fraught, and Laetitia described Worsdale as a servant of the Devil, but he gave some encouragement to her efforts to establish herself as a writer, beginning with an afterpiece put on at the Smock Alley theater but never published. Buoyed by these developments, Laetitia took the bold step of emigrating to London, leaving her three surviving children in the custody of her ex-husband. It was a risky venture, but it served three purposes: it removed her from the heat after her divorce, it may have helped to restore her finances, and it gave the chance to make some kind of a mark as an author, an ambition that had previously been frustrated by her situation as a wife and mother.

Late in 1738, she arrived in England, with just five guineas in her purse, and took lodgings in Bury Street, a former resort of Swift, and close to the cultural action in which she hoped to share. She decided to shelter behind the name “Mrs. Meade,” and set about finding work, contributing pamphlets and poems to the cause of the opposition to Walpole. Somehow she attracted the interest of the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber (1671–1757), and began a sort of discipleship to the elderly man of the theater. She took his side in his ongoing quarrel with Alexander Pope, and modeled some of her writing on the Apology for his life that Cibber produced in 1740. In the Memoirs, she openly acknowledged her obligations to her patron: without his aid, “I must a thousand times have dy’d.” While it is not possible to identify all of her miscellaneous journalism at this date, she was obviously regarded as a dependable hand in the world of controversial literature during the 1740s. This was a period dominated by Henry Fielding and by Cibber’s friend Samuel Richardson, who eventually enrolled her as one of his female fan club and part-time advisors while he was composing Clarissa. She probably carried out work for Curll, then nearing the end of his notorious career in publishing. and may have sold him some materials relating to Barber and Swift.

But hack authorship was a perilous business, and Laetitia resorted to opening a print shop in St. James’s, with little apparent success. On 1 October 1742 a warrant was sworn against her for a debt of just forty shillings, and she as arrested early next morning by two rough looking fellows, who called out, “Get up, you Irish Papist Bitch.” (Her background was of course protestant.) Dragged to the insalubrious Marshalsea jail in Southwark, she requested assistance from Colley’s son, the eccentric Theophilus Cibber, since his father was out of town, but he refused to help—as did a near namesake, the supposedly philanthropic Dr. Richard Mead. Cibber the elder sent her a guinea and encouraged others to contribute money to discharge all her accumulated debts. She was discharged in December with thirteen shillings left to live on.

She continued to attempt to mix business as a shopkeeper with such writing assignments as she could pick up. An appeal to Dr. Delany in Dublin yielded twelve guineas passed on by Richardson with the addition of two more. Still, it was an uphill struggle. When her daughter Betty, now sixteen, suddenly arrived at her lodgings pregnant, the landlady evicted them. Following a period of ill health, Laetitia decided to return home with Betty after her long sojourn in England. They got back to Dublin in May 1747, and she began to advertise for subscribers to her Memoirs—something she had not been able to carry out in London. The first volume would appear in February or March 1748, with a second installment issued in December of the same year, with the London edition swiftly following. The full title reads The Memoirs of Mrs. Letitia Pilkington, Wife to the Rev. Matt. Pilkington. Written by Herself. Wherein are Occasionally Interspersed, All her Poems, with Anecdotes of several Eminent Persons, Living and Dead. There may be some hidden malice in stressing the connection with the former husband, who would marry again within a month of her death. (An ecclesiastical separation from board and bed did not permit remarriage while the other partner was alive.) The book is said to be “printed for the author.” As already stated, Laetitia’s son John Carteret Pilkington compiled a shorter and inevitably less successful third volume in 1754, issued in London and Dublin. It trumpeted “the Conclusive Part of the Life the Inimitable Dean Swift.”

Owing in part to its coverage of Swift’s personal life, not to mention its lively conversational manner, the first volume had immediate success. It thrust Letitia into full-blown celebrity, rather than the demi monde notoriety she had known earlier. As Norma Clarke has written, “She was a figure of note…Churchmen, lawyers. Trinity College fellows and students, peers of the realm and country squires discussed her doings and sayings. Work came in.” Sadly, this recognition came too late. A longstanding friendship with Lord Kingsborough broke down in the summer of 1748, plunging her into depression. Her health, never entirely robust, began to decline with a loss of weight, possibly caused by cancer in her digestive organs. Her son John gives a moving account of her final days at end of the Memoirs. They were living in a two-storey lodging in Phraper Lane (now Beresford Street). The end came on 29 July 1750, after she received the prayers of a local curate in the Church of Ireland. Matthew paid for her burial alongside her father, across the other side of the Liffey at St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street. Jack would lead a similar life of literary vagabondage and financial hardship to his mother, without the consolation of creating a book that would long outlast his mortal span.

Bibliography

Clarke, Norma. Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington (Faber and Faber, 2008).

Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A.C. Elias Jr., 2 vols (University of Georgia Press, 1997).

Catharine Lee is an independent scholar based in Florida. Her interests include Irish literature and women’s writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Currently she is working on the letters of Maria Edgeworth. She has taught classes on romantic comedy and autobiography.