The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 37

commercially and poetically. The Times for 1 January 1789 suggested

that Bell’s indecent Apollo might be a marker for his literary tastes

and publishing ventures:

In ancient times when modesty prevailed

The female eye was not by vice assail’d:

A thought improper soon received a check,

Nor did indecent words our phrases deck.

The scene’s now changed – immodesty’s caress’d,

And that which shews least shame, is liked the best.

E’en MUSIC’S GOD stark naked’s made to stand

And brave all modest females in the Strand.

May some kind artist, who no vice bewitches,

Give J. Bell’s Pol a decent pair of breeches.

The poem appears with the opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

as an epigraph: “In nova fert animus, mutatas dicere formas corpora”

(“I am inspired to tell of bodies changed into different forms”);

the transformation Bell’s icon represents, the poem suggests, is the

rise of lascivious commercialism. I would suggest that this early cri-

tique of Bell—two years before William Gifford’s attack on him in

the Baviad—may also serve as a commentary on the poetry he and

Topham published in the World and on why it was popular. Bell

would have known the adage well enough—sex sells. The poetry of

the Della Crusca network thus was playfully erotic.

As he did with his other publications, Bell marketed The Poetry of

the World heavily on the front page of the paper while Topham puffed

it extensively in its columns. In particular, the two partners were keen

to capitalize on the popularity of the erotic poetic exchange between

Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, the pseudonyms, respectively, of

Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley. Their fictional love affair had

begun the previous summer and was serially enacted in the pages

of the daily paper over several months, boosting sales of the f ledg-

ing broadsheet sufficiently to warrant publication in book from. The

operatic vicissitudes of these star- crossed lovers was expressed in an

exaggerated version of the language of Sensibility; it was just indeco-

rous enough to be titillating. In 1788, Bell published not only the two

volumes of The Poetry of the World but also a separate volume of the

Poetry of Anna Matilda, which reprinted yet again the Della Crusca-

Anna Matilda exchange, and Della Crusca’s long poem Diversity. For

Bell, this poetical correspondence became a commercially successful

venture in a new form of popular culture. Dodsley’s New Annual

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 379780230100251_03_ch01.indd 37 12/31/2010 4:20:12 PM12/31/2010 4:20:12 PM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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