The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

36 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

the World also would have been Robinson’s preferred source for the

latest news—political, fashionable, and literary—upon her return to

England. There she would have read numerous reports on the King’s

health, the Prince’s cavorting, and the political maneuvering of Fox

and Sheridan, who were opponents but who nonetheless shared a

common foe, Prime Minister William Pitt (about which more follows

in the next chapter). In July of 1788 all of this would have galvanized

Robinson, who had deployed her celebrity to canvass for Fox in April

of 1784. So, for those possessing a longer memory than gossip usually

affords, what drama there may have been in Robinson’s return was

set against a backdrop of royal lunacy and the impending aggrandize-

ment of her former lovers.

Publishing with Bell certainly was an appealing prospect.

Exploiting changes in the copyright laws, Bell began his career as

a highly successful maverick publisher with his multi- volume collec-

tions of Shakespeare (1774), British Theatre (1774–6), and, most

significant, his 109 volumes of Poets of Great Britain from Chaucer

to Churchill (1777–82), which prompted the rival series the Works

of the English Poets featuring Samuel Johnson’s famous prefaces and

that established, in Michael Gamer’s words, the “ ‘Bell’ brand name”

(46–7). By publishing, as Bell himself put it, “the most beautiful,

the correctest, the cheapest, and the only complete uniform edition

of the British Poets,” Bell played no small part in establishing the

literary canon as we have it today, with these volumes reaching and

inf luencing an inestimable number of readers and writers.^11 Bell’s sig-

nificant printing innovations set new standards for readability and

general elegance; this, coupled with his attention to the pulse of pub-

lic, popular taste, made the World a significant venue for poets in the

marketplace. On top of this, from 1780 he was proprietor of the sub-

scription library called “the British Library”; in 1788, he purchased

the right to brand himself “Bookseller to the Prince of Wales” on the

title pages of his publications (Morison, John Bell 6–7, 9).^ As Morison

elsewhere points out, Bell found himself at the center of a fashionable

network: his library became “the resort of men of fashion” and “was

elegantly furnished within”; Bell made it a site of hypermasculinity

with “a nude Apollo mounted over the facia [that] advertised the

British as no ordinary Library” (Morison, “Captain Epilogue” 4–5).

Bell, who despite his success remains a rather shadowy figure, estab-

lished an atmosphere of ludic eroticism in which poetry and sexuality

were linked. Bell’s naked Apollo was at worst incongruously bawdy

and pretentious, but it was an easy target for his competitors and

became an emblem signifying bad taste and a lack of decorum both

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