Bell’s Laureates II 107As a professional writer and, in some ways, an entertainer,
Robinson may have been responding to what she believed her audi-
ence wanted to read. Modern Manners, however, was not successful.
The magazine reviews were lukewarm, although the papers predict-
ably puffed its brilliance. In August the Oracle and the Morning Post,
proudly revealed that Robinson was the poet behind the mask of
Horace Juvenal (Werkmeister, Newspaper 311). She did not disavow
her authorship, but she never reprinted it. Her next significant claim
to the poetic laurel again addresses the fate of Marie Antoinette and
speaks to the outrage many Britons, particularly those in Robinson’s
circles, felt over her execution. Almost two months after the execution
of the French Queen, Robinson published, under her own name, her
long poem in heroic couplets Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen
of France, the title of which evokes her poem on another illustrious
death from the previous year—her Monody to the Memory of Sir Joshua
Reynolds—making a weird cultural pairing of the great English por-
traitist and the infamously wicked Queen, both of whom Robinson
had known personally. This poem is ably discussed in depth by Craciun
and Garnai, so I need not provide a reading of it here.^20 But I con-
tend that the poem fits in with the discernable pattern of Robinson’s
publications in 1792–3, ref lecting again ambivalence toward the
Revolution; it is also a poem that corresponds with Robinson’s project
of asserting poetic fame for herself through form. Robinson hails the
Queen as an “ILLUSTRIOUS SOUL” whose fame “shall ne’er decay” and
as “the BEAUTEOUS MARTYR! Austria’s pride!” (1: 240; 10, 139). And
she represents the Revolution as a Hobbesian nightmare conjured
by misguided democratic principles: “While ALL are RULER S—ALL,
alas! are SLAVES! / EACH dreads his fellow, EACH his fellow braves!”
(101–2). Robinson’s Monody represents this revolution as a far greater
crime than any perpetrated by the deceased royal couple, who again
appear as cogs in a system of oppression— “crimes LONG PAST”—that
they only passively inherited but for which they nonetheless suffered
(247). Some recent readings of this poem, such as those by Craciun
and Garnai, avoid Robinson’s acknowledged sympathy for the French
nobility, whom she pities as “the MANY suff’ring for the GUILTY FEW!”
(441–2). But she also condemns any corrupt aristocrat “Who shields
his recreant bosom with a NAME” (449), while also denouncing the
revolutionaries’ capricious, even terrifyingly arbitrary, persecution of
all those born with a title. The poem asserts a principle of equality
that extends to even the titled and proud. “TRUTH,” Robinson con-
tends, “can derive no eminence from birth” and its “blest dominion”
is “vast and unconfin’d” (455–6). But the poem is not radical because9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 1079780230100251_04_ch02.indd 107 12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM
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