The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 35

movement, as those critics deplored it as being. Even though Topham

glibly dubbed the group “the Della Crusca school” in the World, I

see it more accurately as a ludic network of writers, signatures, texts,

intertexts, and media (21 November 1788). The original coterie of

English expatriates residing in Florence consisted of Robert Merry,

Hester Piozzi, Bertie Greatheed, and William Parsons; they wrote

poems to one another for fun and collected them together as The

Florence Miscellany, published in 1785.^10 However, the specific group

in London who, just a few years later, came to be known as Della

Cruscans were those poets associated with the World and later the

Oracle, those who wrote the poetry later reviled as “Della Cruscan,”

and those such as Bell and Topham who published it. These poets

include Merry, Cowley, Robinson, Miles Peter Andrews, Edward

Jerningham, Thomas Vaughan, his daughter (a “Miss Vaughan”),

George Monck Berkeley, William Kendall, Tom Adney, James Boaden,

as well as countless others who remain unidentified. But Merry as

Della Crusca, Cowley as Anna Matilda, and Robinson as Laura and

as Laura Maria are the most prolific and are the participants the pub-

lic best recognized. They—or rather, their avatars—were the nodes

around which the rest of the network coalesced, the public “faces” of

the sensation.

The Della Crusca network began a few months after the creation

of the World. The first number of the paper, 1 January 1787, sold

3,000 copies with an additional 1,000 printed to meet demand

(Morison, John Bell 8). Within its first few months of publication the

World had become hugely successful, affecting the sales of all of the

other London papers (Werkmeister, London 158). Its political opin-

ions were directed by playwright- cum- MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan,

who wrote some of the political coverage, and possibly by the ambi-

tious yet aimless Prince of Wales, who was at the time f lirting with

Whig politics. Topham conducted the paper with the help of his assis-

tant and mistress Mary Wells, the Reverend Charles Este, and the

playwright (and gunpowder merchant) Miles Peter Andrews, whom

Robinson may also have known from her days in the theatre. Bell’s

involvement was limited to the printing of the paper, and his relation-

ship with Topham appears to have been rocky from the start. Well

aware of Robinson’s well- publicized past, the gossip- loving Topham

printed news of her return the previous summer with the intention

of raising eyebrows among the World’s knowing readership, for she

had been the lover both of the Prince and of Fox. Because of these

personal associations and because the paper was itself a sensation,

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 359780230100251_03_ch01.indd 35 12/31/2010 4:20:12 PM12/31/2010 4:20:12 PM

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