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Darby had sailed from England to Chateau Bay with 150 men. He was then given headquarters on Cape Charles, where he constructed lodgings, a workshop, and a landing stage. Fishing began well, but then the local Inuit burned his boats and destroyed his crucial supply of salt. His men fought with each other and refused to winter on the coast. He made a second attempt a year later, in partnership with a fellow merchant, returning with new men and more sophisticated equipment. But more fighting ensued and in the summer of 1767 ten men were arrested on murder charges. Then in November, around the time of Mary’s tenth birthday, the Labrador project came to a violent end: another band of Inuit attacked a crew preparing for winter sealing, killed three men, burned Darby’s settlement, and set his boats adrift. Thousands of pounds’ worth of ships and equipment were destroyed. ‘The island of promise’ had turned into a ‘scene of barbarous desolation’ – though Mary’s account characteristically exaggerates the slaughter, turning the three casualties into the murder of ‘many of his people’.¹⁹ Darby’s patrons refused to honour their promise of financial protection and, with more losses incurred, he dissolved his partnership and set in train the sale of the family home.

Back in Bristol, Hester Darby faced a series of calamities: the shame that came with the news that her husband was residing in America with his mistress, the financial losses that would cost her everything, and the death – from smallpox or possibly measles – of Mary’s 6-year-old brother William. On his return to London, Nicholas lived with his mistress Elenor, but the manuscript of Mary’s Memoirs has an intriguing memorandum, excluded from the published text: ‘Esquemaux Indians brought over by my father, a woman and a boy.’²⁰ Could this have been another mistress? And could it then be that Mary had an illegitimate half-Inuit half-brother?

Mary always felt torn between pride in her father’s achievements and resentment at his abandonment of the family. Her ambivalence can be seen in the way that she emphasizes his dual nationality. When she speaks of his bold and restless spirit, and his love of sea life, she ascribes this to his status as an American seafarer, yet at other times he is that stalwart of the community, a ‘British merchant’. Mary blamed her father’s mistress for bewitching his senses at a time when he was isolated in America, away from his wife and family. She herself learnt a valuable lesson at a particularly vulnerable age: loss of fortune and position swiftly loses friends. Dropped by the people who had been happy to take advantage of their former prosperity, the family were left bereft.

A year later, Hester, Mary, and the surviving younger son, George, were summoned to London to their father’s lodgings in fashionable Spring Gardens, near the famous Vauxhall pleasure gardens. Hester was unsure as to whether to expect ‘the freezing scorn, or the contrite glances, of either an estranged or repentant husband’.²¹ His ‘coldly civil’ letter had ‘requested particularly’ that she should bring the children with her: this ought to have been enough to make her realize that the meeting would be a farewell, not a reunion.

When they met, her father was in tears and could barely speak. The embrace he gave his wife was ‘cold’ – and it was the last she was to receive from him. Once the initial recriminations had blown over, Nicholas set out his plans. The children were to be placed at schools in London, while his wife was to board with a respectable clergyman’s family. He would be returning across the Atlantic. And, indeed, the following year he launched a new and much more successful venture in Labrador, this time employing experienced Canadian fishermen.

The next stage of Mary’s education was to be crucial to her vocation as a writer. She was sent to a school in Chelsea and came under the tuition of a brilliant and accomplished woman, Meribah Lorrington. Lorrington was highly unconventional in that she had been given a masculine education by her schoolteacher father, and was as well versed in the classics as she was in the modern languages, arithmetic, and astronomy. She was the living embodiment of a character type that Mary would fictionalize in several of her novels, the female who benefits from the education usually reserved for boys.

Mary worshipped her teacher, elevating her influence far above that of the More sisters: ‘All that I ever learned I acquired from this extraordinary woman.’²² The classical education she was given in Chelsea meant that in the long term her writings would demand a respect that was not often granted to female authors. There is an especially striking breadth of classical allusion in her feminist treatise A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination.

Pupil and teacher became close companions, even sharing the same bedroom. Mary dates her love for books from this relationship: ‘I applied rigidly to study, and acquired a taste for books, which has never, from that time, deserted me.’²³ The women read to one another and Mary began composing verses, some of which were included in her first collection of poems, which she was to publish from debtors’ prison. In Mary’s narrative of her own life, her intellect first blossoms in an all-female community, with Meribah and half a dozen fellow pupils (among whom Mary is clearly singled out as the favourite). Far from aligning herself with the highly respectable Hannah More, she chooses to identify Lorrington as her mentor – and then goes on to reveal that she was an incorrigible drunkard.

Mary often complained of the contemptuous treatment that she received from her own sex, but she paid the utmost respect to the women who inspired and supported her, especially in her writing career. As Meribah Lorrington was credited for encouraging her juvenile writing, so Mary’s first literary patron was another woman of dubious reputation, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Mary adored both women, though Meribah was a hopeless alcoholic and Georgiana an equally addicted gambler.

Mary accepted the explanation that Meribah gave for her addiction to drink: she was grief-stricken by the death of her husband and was the victim of a bullying, disciplinarian father, a stern-speaking silver-bearded Anabaptist who wandered round the girls’ schoolroom wearing nothing but a loose flowing robe which made him look like a necromancer. Mary noticed that the presence of the father always made the daughter reach for the bottle.

Meribah Lorrington’s ‘state of confirmed intoxication’ even during teaching hours led to the demise of the Chelsea school. Some time later, Mary discovered a drunken beggar woman at dusk in the street. She gave her money, then, to her surprise, the woman said, ‘Sweet girl, you are still the angel I ever knew you.’ Their eyes met and Mary was horrified to discover that it was her old teacher. She took her home, gave her fresh clothes, and asked her where she lived. Meribah refused to say, but promised she would call again in a few days. She never did. Years later, Mary learned that her brilliant but flawed mentor had died a drunk in the Chelsea workhouse.

Mary describes herself in her Memoirs as well developed for her age, tall and slender. At the age of 10, she says, she looked 13. During her fourteen-month period boarding at the Lorrington Academy, she visited her mother every Sunday. One afternoon over tea she had a marriage proposal from a friend of her father’s. Hester was a little surprised; she asked her visitor how old he thought her daughter was. ‘About sixteen,’ he replied. Hester informed him that Mary was still only 12. He found this hard to believe, given that she was such a well-developed girl both physically and intellectually, but he was prepared to wait – he was a captain in the Navy, just off on a two-year voyage. He had great prospects for the future and hoped that Mary might still be unattached on his return. Just a few months later he perished at sea.

In this version of Mary’s first encounter with male desire, she is the innocent: a child, albeit with the body of a woman. The first ‘biography’ of her, published at the height of her public fame in 1784, tells a very different story. The Memoirs of Perdita is a source that must be treated with great caution, since – as will be seen – it was written with both a political and a pornographic agenda. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the book’s anonymous author had a very well-informed source. The ‘editor’ claimed in his introduction that ‘the circumstances of her life were communicated by one who has for several years been her confidant, and to whose pen she has been indebted for much news paper panegyric’ – a description that very much suggests Henry Bate of the Morning Herald, a key figure in Mary’s story. According to the ‘editor’ of The Memoirs of Perdita, ‘the following history may with propriety be said to be dictated by herself: many of the mere private transactions were indisputably furnished by her; nor could they possibly originate from any other source’.²⁴ In some instances this is true: The Memoirs of Perdita published personal information about Mary’s life that was not previously in the public domain. In other instances, however, these supposed memoirs can safely be assumed to offer nothing more than malicious fantasy.

According to The Memoirs of Perdita, Mary’s first love affair occurred soon after the Darbys moved to London. Her father supposedly brought home a handsome young midshipman called Henry, who was allowed ‘private interviews’ and ‘little rambles’ with Mary. They went boating together on the Thames. On one occasion, they stopped for refreshments at Richmond. The only room the landlord had available in which to serve them with a glass of wine and a biscuit happened to be a bedchamber – which had crimson curtains that matched the ‘natural blush’ to which Mary was excited by the sight of the bed. The young midshipman duly took her hand and sat her with him on the white counterpane. ‘Perdita’s blushes returned – and Henry kissed them away – She fell into his arms – then sunk down together on the bed. – The irresistible impulse of nature, in a moment carried them into those regions of ecstatic bliss, where sense and thought lie dissolved in the rapture of mutual enjoyment.’²⁵

The affair supposedly lasted for some time, until the ‘jovial tar’ was summoned back to his ship, never to be seen again. In all probability, ‘Henry’ is pure invention, perhaps spun at second hand from some passing remark about the sailor’s proposal. After all, given that Nicholas Darby was estranged from his family, he was not there to introduce a midshipman into the household. But it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the young Mary – steeped as she was in poetry and romance – might have had some kind of sexual awakening in her early teens.

Mary was moved to a more orthodox boarding school in Battersea, run by a less colourful but nevertheless ‘lively, sensible and accomplished woman’ named Mrs Leigh.²⁶ Nicholas Darby then stopped sending money for his children’s education. The resolute Hester took matters into her own hands and set up her own dame school in Little Chelsea. The teenage Mary became a teacher of English language, responsible for prose and verse compositions during the week and the reading of ‘sacred and moral lessons, on saints’-days and Sunday evenings’.²⁷ Readers of her Memoirs would have been at best amused at the idea of one of the most notorious women of the age presenting herself as a teacher of morals and religion. Mary also had responsibility for supervising the pupils’ wardrobes, and making sure that they were properly dressed and undressed by the servants.

In 1770, Nicholas Darby ran into more problems. Just as he had a thousand pounds’ worth of seal skins ready for market, a British military officer arrived at his Labrador fishery and confiscated all his produce and tackle on the grounds that he was illegally employing Frenchmen and using French rather than British equipment. He was left marooned. He eventually made it back to London and asked the Board of Trade for compensation, claiming that he did not know that his Canadian crew were actually French subjects. The Board of Trade passed the buck, saying it had no jurisdiction in the case. Nicholas had a moral victory when the Court of King’s Bench awarded him £650 damages against the Lieutenant who had seized the goods, but the money was uncollectible. In the circumstances, one might have expected him to be grateful for his estranged wife’s initiative in establishing a school. But he was a proud man: ‘he considered his name as disgraced, his conjugal reputation tarnished, by the public mode which his wife had adopted for revealing to the world her unprotected situation’.²⁸ He lived openly with his mistress, but could not abide seeing his wife publicly revealed as someone akin to an impoverished widow or spinster. He demanded that the school be closed immediately. It had lasted for less than a year.

Hester and her children moved to Marylebone. Like Chelsea, this was an expanding village on the edge of London, but it had a less rural feel and was fast being recognized as an integral part of the metropolis. Mary reverted from teacher to pupil, finishing her education at Oxford House, situated near the top of Marylebone High Street, bordering on Marylebone Gardens. Nicholas Darby and his mistress Elenor settled in the more fashionable and gentrified Green Street, off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, a district that was becoming increasingly popular with merchants and rich shopkeepers as well as the gentry.

Mary must have been acutely conscious of the differences in lifestyle between her mother and her father. She sometimes accompanied her father on walks in the fields nearby, where he confessed that he rather regretted his ‘fatal attachment’ to his mistress – they had now been together so long and been through so much that it was impossible to dissolve the relationship. On one of their walks, they called on the Earl of Northington, a handsome young rake and politician, whose father had been one of the sponsors of Darby’s Labrador schemes. They were very well received, with Mary being presented as the goddaughter of the older Northington (now deceased). In later years, she did not deny rumours that she might have been the old Lord’s illegitimate daughter. The young Lord, meanwhile, treated her with ‘the most flattering and gratifying civility’.²⁹

When Nicholas returned to America, Hester moved her children to Southampton Buildings in Chancery Lane. This was lawyers’ territory, backing onto Lincoln’s Inn. She had placed herself under the protection of Samuel Cox, a lawyer. Perhaps she had applied to him for legal help after the separation from Nicholas became final. Being ‘under the protection’ of a man was usually code for sexual involvement, so it may have been more than a professional relationship.

It was during her time at Oxford House that Mary was drawn towards the stage. The governess, Mrs Hervey, spotted her talent for ‘dramatic exhibitions’, and persuaded Hester to let her daughter try for the stage, despite the fact that it was not considered to be a respectable career. Hester was persuaded that there were actresses who ‘preserved an unspotted fame’. Nicholas obviously had his doubts. Upon setting off on his new overseas adventure, he left his wife with a chilling injunction to ‘Take care that no dishonour falls upon my daughter. If she is not safe at my return I will annihilate you.’³⁰

The school’s dancing master was also ballet master at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. Through him, Mary was introduced to an actor called Thomas Hull, who was impressed by her recitation of lines from Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore of 1714. But nothing came of the audition. Mary did not despair and she was rewarded with a much greater opportunity. Her mother’s protector Samuel Cox knew Dr Samuel Johnson and that was enough to open the door of Johnson’s old pupil and friend, David Garrick.

What was Mary Darby like at the time that she met Garrick? Though she may have been a plain child with dark swarthy looks, she had become a very beautiful teenager. She had curly, dark auburn hair and soft blue eyes that were to enchant men from the Prince of Wales to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She had dimples in her cheeks. But there was always an elusive quality to her beauty. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pupil, James Northcote, remarked that even his master’s portraits of her were failures because ‘the extreme beauty’ of her was ‘quite beyond his power’.³¹

^*See Appendix for the uncertainty over the year of Mary’s birth.

CHAPTER 2 A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

As London is the great emporium of commerce, it is also the centre of attraction for the full exercise of talents, and the liberal display of all that can embellish the arts and sciences.

Mary Robinson, ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc.

etc. of the Metropolis of England’

London was like nowhere else in the world. Bigger than any other city in Europe, with a population more than ten times that of Bristol, it was a place of extremes. Riches and squalor, grandeur and wretchedness, appeared cheek-by-jowl. This was an era of unprecedented consumerism: for companionship and entertainment there were coffee houses, taverns, brothels, parks, pleasure gardens, and theatres. Above all there were shops. Napoleon had good reason to dismiss the English as a nation of shopkeepers. By the time of Mary’s arrival in the metropolis, London had one for every thirty residents. Oxford Street alone boasted over a hundred and fifty. Everything was on display, from plate laden in silversmiths’ shops to fruits and spices piled high on street-barrows. Tea, coffee, sugar, pepper, tobacco, chocolate, and textiles – the ‘fruits of empire’ – were sold in vast quantities.¹ There were print shops, book shops, milliners, linen drapers, silk mercers, jewellery shops, shoe shops, toy shops, confectioners. London was the epicentre of fashion, a place to gaze and be gazed at. It was an urban stage, and few understood this as well as Mary.

For the young poet William Wordsworth, London’s inherent theatricality was disturbing. His section on ‘Residence in London’ in his autobiographical poem The Prelude describes with unease ‘the moving pageant’, the ‘shifting pantomimic scenes’, the ‘great stage’, and the ‘public shows’. For Wordsworth, the gaudy display and excessive showiness of the city signalled a lack of inner authenticity; ‘the quick dance of colours, lights and forms’ was an alarming ‘Babel din’.² Mary Robinson also captured the cacophony of urban life in her poem ‘London’s Summer Morning’, but she relished what Wordsworth abhorred:

Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds

Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke

Of noisy London? On the pavement hot

The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face

And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade,

Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door

The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell

Proclaims the dustman’s office, while the street

Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins

The din of hackney-coaches, wagons, carts;

While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers,

Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,

Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries

Of vegetable vendors, fill the air.

Now ev’ry shop displays its varied trade,

And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet

Of early walkers.³

She finds poetry in everything from the dustman to the ‘neat girl, / Tripping with bandbox lightly’ to the street vendor of second-hand clothes.

Mary was to experience London in its entirety, from debtors’ prison to parties given in her honour as the Prince’s consort at St James’s Palace. She became notorious for her self-promotion and her skill in anticipating the next new thing, be that in fashion or poetry. But she also grasped the very essence of urban culture in the late eighteenth century in a way that eluded Wordsworth. She knew that in order to survive and thrive in the new consumer society, she had to work to sell her wares. The literary marketplace was as crowded as the London streets and it took guts, brashness, and ostentation to make your voice heard – especially if you were a woman.

She must have felt some trepidation at meeting Garrick: ‘King’ David, the man who had single-handedly transformed the theatre world, acting on stage with unprecedented naturalism, producing behind the scenes with prodigious energy, and above all conferring on his profession a respectability it had never had before.

The 14-year-old girl was summoned to the actor’s elegant and grand new house in Adelphi Terrace, designed by the fashionable Adam brothers and overlooking the Thames. The Garricks had recently moved there and had furnished it lavishly. Mary would have entered through the large hall, with its imposing pillars, and then been shown into the magnificent first-floor drawing room, with its elaborate plaster ceiling crowned by a central circular panel of Venus surrounded by nine medallion paintings of the Graces. Garrick would have soon put her at ease with his good humour and liveliness. His wife, Eva Maria Veigel, a former dancer, was usually at his side and was especially considerate to young girls, as the future dramatist and novelist Fanny Burney testified when she visited the Garricks at their new house the same year: ‘Mrs Garrick received us with a politeness and sweetness of manners, inseparable from her.’⁴

Garrick, always susceptible to beauty, was captivated by Mary’s loveliness. Her voice reminded him of Susannah Cibber, an actress and singer he had favoured in his youth. An added attraction came in the form of Mary’s long, shapely legs, ideal for the highly popular ‘breeches roles’ that were required of actresses on the Georgian stage. In an age when women wore full-length dresses all the time, the actress who cross-dressed in boys’ clothing – as Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola, and in dozens of similar roles in eighteenth-century comedies – provided a unique spectacle: the public exhibition of the shape of a female leg.

Garrick’s personal interest was in no sense salacious. His faith in this young unknown was typical of his unfailing support for women in the theatre. His patronage of female actresses and female playwrights was highly unusual in a society that discouraged women from the stage and still regarded actresses as little better than prostitutes. Garrick ‘discovered’ many a young actress and gave playwrights such as Hannah More and Hannah Cowley their first break. In return these young women adored him and his wife.

He offered to train Mary for the part of Cordelia to his own King Lear in the version of Shakespeare’s tragedy that he had reworked from Nahum Tate’s Restoration era adaptation, in which Cordelia is happily married off to Edgar instead of being hanged. Garrick was now in his fifties, beginning to suffer from gout and gallstones. He was conserving his energy, limiting the number of his appearances on stage. Lear, which he had been playing since he was 25, was not only one of his most celebrated but also one of his most demanding roles. This late in his career, it was an extraordinary gamble to entrust Cordelia to a complete unknown. He and Mary spent hours preparing for her debut in the role.

But it was not all work: in the Memoirs, she draws a charming picture of them dancing minuets (Garrick was an excellent dancer) and singing the favourite ballads of the day. Her memory remained vivid: ‘Never shall I forget the enchanting hours which I passed in Mr Garrick’s society: he appeared to me as one who possessed more power, both to awe and to attract, than any man I ever met with.’⁵ She also noticed his dark side: ‘His smile was fascinating; but he had at times a restless peevishness of tone which excessively affected his hearer; at least it affected me so that I never shall forget it.’ His temper was renowned. Fanny Burney reported in her diary that Dr Johnson attributed Garrick’s faults to ‘the fire and hastiness of his temper’. Burney loved Garrick and was mesmerized by the lustre of his ‘brilliant, piercing eyes’, but she also noted that ‘he is almost perpetually giving offence to some of his friends’.⁶ Others could feel irritated by his attention-seeking behaviour. As his friend Oliver Goldsmith put it, he was always natural, simple and unaffected on stage – ‘’Twas only when he was off, he was acting.’⁷

Garrick had a genius for self-publicity and was astonishingly energetic: in the light of Mary’s subsequent career, one might say that he was her perfect role model. Mary adored him and took his advice seriously. He advised her to frequent Drury Lane and familiarize herself with its practices before she made her debut. She quickly became known as Garrick’s new protégée and drew a swarm of admirers. This was Mary’s first taste of celebrity and she loved the ‘buzz’ (her term). While Hester fretted about her daughter’s reputation, Mary was confident that she could tread the thin line between fame and infamy: ‘my ardent fancy was busied in contemplating a thousand triumphs, in which my vanity would be publicly gratified, without the smallest sacrifice of my private character’.⁸

Hester worried that her daughter was making too much of a stir amongst the young rakes who frequented the theatre just to flirt with the latest ingénue. She kept her eye on one man in particular. In her Memoirs Mary described him as a graceful and handsome officer – a Captain – who was very well connected, though she declined to name him. After a brief courtship, and offers of marriage, Hester discovered that he was already married. Mary was informed of the deception, but brushed it off: ‘I felt little regret in the loss of a husband, when I reflected that a matrimonial alliance would have compelled me to relinquish my theatrical profession.’ Another rich suitor came forward at this time, but, to Mary’s horror, he was old enough to be her grandfather. She had set her heart on being an actress: ‘the drama, the delightful drama, seemed the very criterion of all human happiness’.⁹

She was naturally flirtatious and her beauty attracted a stream of admirers. One of her most persistent suitors was a young solicitor’s clerk, who lived across the way from her lodgings. He would sit in the window staring at the fresh-faced Mary. He was languorous and sickly looking, which would have appealed to a girl of strong ‘sensibility’. Mrs Darby’s response to the flirtation was to keep the lower shutters of the windows permanently closed. Fancying ‘every man a seducer, and every hour an hour of accumulating peril’, she sighed for the day when her daughter would be ‘well married’.¹⁰

The articled clerk was named Thomas Robinson. He was training with the firm of Vernon and Elderton in the buildings opposite. He persuaded a friend (a junior colleague of Samuel Cox) to invite Mary and her mother to a dinner party out in Greenwich, without disclosing that Robinson himself would be present. Mother and daughter opened the door of their carriage only to find him ready to hand them down. Hester was duly horrified while Mary professed herself only ‘confused’. Fortunately, though, she had dressed very carefully for dinner, sensing that a conquest was afoot: ‘it was then the fashion to wear silks. I remember that I wore a nightgown of pale blue lustring, with a chip hat, trimmed with ribbands of the same colour.’¹¹ The English nightgown was a simple, flowing shift dress that had been popular for many seasons. It was modest in comparison to the revolutionary ‘Perdita’ chemise that Mary herself would popularize in the 1780s. Lustring was a plain woven silk with a glossy finish that was very popular for summer wear, while the fashionable chip hat, made of finely shaved willow or poplar, was to be worn at a jaunty angle.

Mary’s obsession with her outfits might be considered as shallow and frivolous, but this is to misunderstand the power of fashion: she was very attuned to the ways in which clothing could transform her image. Fashion was central to the consumer society of the late eighteenth century. A plethora of shops offered ready-to-wear collections, while there were second-hand clothes stalls for the less well off. Silks, linens, and cottons were more widely available than ever before. Journalism and fashion went hand in hand: new monthly publications such as the Lady’s Magazine included plates and detailed descriptions of the latest styles. Ladies could even hand-colour the black and white engravings and send them off to a mantua-maker with instructions for making up.

Mary loved to remember the tiniest details of the clothes she was wearing on a particular occasion. On the day that she met her future husband in Greenwich she felt that she had never dressed so perfectly to her own satisfaction. Thomas Robinson spent most of the evening simply staring at her. The party dined early and then returned to London, where Robinson’s friend expatiated upon the many good qualities of Mary’s new suitor, speaking of ‘his future expectations from a rich old uncle; of his probable advancement in his profession; and, more than all, of his enthusiastic admiration of me’.¹² Robinson was apparently the heir of a rich tailor called Thomas Harris, who had a large estate in Wales. Hester Darby sensed that the secure marriage she needed for her daughter was within grasp.

As the date set for Mary’s stage debut approached, Robinson was assiduous in his courtship. He knew that it was crucial to win her mother’s approval and did so by his constant attentions and a flow of presents calculated to impress. Hester was especially fond of ‘graveyard’ literature, and she was delighted when Robinson brought her an elegantly bound copy of James Hervey’s lugubrious Meditations among the Tombs of 1746. She was ‘beguiled’ by these attentions and Robinson accordingly ‘became so great a favourite, that he seemed to her the most perfect of existing beings’. He gained more credit when smallpox again threatened the family. This time it was George, Hester’s favourite son, who was dangerously ill. Mary postponed her stage appearance and Robinson was ‘indefatigable in his attentions’ to the sick boy and his anxious mother. Robinson’s conduct convinced Hester that he was ‘“the kindest, the best of mortals!”, the least addicted to worldly follies – and the man, of all others, who she should adore as a son-in-law’.¹³