The Posthumous Public and Private Printing of Mary Tighe’s Poetry

<1>Shortly after Mary Tighe’s death in March 1810 her survivors produced three distinct collections of her poetry, each one using a different print mode to present their competing visions of her identity, her poetics, and her significance to disparate readerships. The first was Psyche, with Other Poems, published by the Longman group in conventional print for the general public in May 1811. No editor’s name appears in the edition, which led to its false attribution to Tighe’s brother-in-law and fellow poet William Tighe for nearly 200 years, but in 2011 Averill Buchanan definitively identified Tighe’s husband Henry Tighe as the editor, and posited that he received some assistance from Tighe’s brother John Blachford.(1) The second collection, Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years, also lacks a named editor, but internal evidence indicates that Tighe’s mother Theodosia Blachford prepared this limited edition for a carefully chosen group of friends in the autumn of 1811, using a local press to print the volume in a hybrid mode that interspersed poems in manuscript with poems in print. The third, Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe, contains handwritten transcriptions of 20 Tighe lyrics in an undated bound manuscript signed by E. I. Fox.(2) Ironically, though Fox is the only one of the three editors who self-identifies, Fox’s identity and connection to Tighe is not yet known, but the selections suggest Fox participated in Tighe’s coterie, sharing verse and friendship with other members of Tighe’s social circle. Husband, mother, friend: each editor stands in a particular relationship with Tighe, and, as this essay will argue, each editor embodies and recreates that relationship in the print mode they employ, the arrangements they devise, and the poems they select to pay tribute to Tighe, to memorialize her, and, ultimately, to monumentalize her as a projection of themselves. Akin to the familial editors Margaret Ezell describes in a formative essay on the posthumous publication of women’s manuscripts, whose paratexts often “stress the fidelity of the printed text to the departed author’s living voice,” Henry Tighe, Theodosia Blachford, and E. I. Fox stake contrasting claims to what Ezell sees as “an attempt to continue the ‘living’ voice of the author’s manuscripts writings” (“Posthumous Publication” 128). Perhaps inevitably, they establish one-sided conversations that reify themselves in their representation and valuation of Tighe: while her Latinist husband lauds her knowledge of classical literature, her Methodist mother focuses on her spirituality, and her coterie companion emphasizes her sociality.

<2>These three posthumous collections not only cast aside the fiction of editorial neutrality in constructing alternative and sometimes oppositional versions of Tighe’s literary legacy, but they also instantiate materially diverse responses to Tighe’s antipathy to publication. If most Romantic-era writers actively participated in literary manuscript culture as well as print culture, as Donald Reiman, Michelle Levy, Betty Schellenberg, Tim Fulford, and others demonstrate, some, such as Tighe, or Dorothy Wordsworth, or Catherine Maria Fanshawe, shied away from presenting their work to the public and engaged in what Ezell terms social authorship by exchanging the writings Reiman designates as confidential manuscripts.(3) Although Tighe began sharing manuscripts of her lyric verse with her coterie in the early 1790s, after she completed her epic romance “Psyche; or, the Legend of Love” in 1803, her readers urged her to make that work available to a larger audience.(4) She contemplated Henry Tighe’s suggestion that she publish a volume featuring “Psyche” and a collection of her lyric poems, but decided against it, citing her fears of the reviewers and her concern that the lyric poems would appear as an afterthought of sorts. In an 1804 Christmas Eve letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, she writes:

I have myself been on the very verge of a most frightful precipice & had almost been persuaded to expose to the mercy of the reviewers, Edinburg butchers & all, my poor little Psyche & a volume of smaller poems which I was advis’d to add, as I thought, to serve like the straw appendages of a kite, that she might not fall to the ground by her own weight -- however after a few nights agitation I found that I have not nerves for it, let my stock of self conceit be as great as it may, so I am very obstinate to the partial solicitations of those who I am sure are chiefly anxious to provide me with what they think would prove amusement -- but it is too serious a business for that. (Letters 286)

Instead she commissioned James Carpenter to print 50 copies of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, which she edited during the spring of 1805, and began distributing to friends and family that July, inscribing individualized dedications which made each copy unique.(5) At the same time she prepared a beautiful, illustrated two-volume manuscript edition of 121 of her lyric poems for Henry Tighe, Verses Transcribed for H.T., which she continued working on till 1808. Despite Tighe’s efforts to control the circulation of her writings, the privately printed edition of Psyche became something of a sensation as readers shared their copies, produced their own manuscript transcriptions of borrowed copies, and published poems, reviews, and memoirs celebrating her work and calling for its commercial publication.(6) Fourteen months after her death Henry Tighe answered those calls by publishing the Longman edition of Psyche, with Other Poems, which codified her literary reputation till the end of the twentieth century.

<3>Though Tighe expressly rejected printing such a volume in her lifetime, and repeatedly declared her aversion to commercial publication and her commitment to manuscript culture in her letters to Walker and others, Henry Tighe overrode what some construed as her exceptional modesty.(7) His preface to the volume asserted that it was the duty of survivors to share her work with the public because she so eloquently exhibited classical taste, linguistic excellence, and a moral sensibility: “when a writer intimately acquainted with classical literature, and guided by a taste for real excellence, has delivered in polished language such sentiments as can tend only to encourage and improve the best sensations of the human heart, then it becomes a sort of duty in surviving friends no longer to withhold from the public such precious relics” (iv). He noted that, unlike the privately printed edition of Psyche, she neither selected nor corrected the smaller poems for publication; however, in some ways she did, given the highly finished presentation of her work in Verses, which she transcribed in response to his suggestion that she publish an edition of Psyche with other poems. No reference to Verses appears in Henry Tighe’s words:

The smaller poems which complete this volume may perhaps stand in need of that indulgence which a posthumous work always demands when it did not receive the correction of the author. They have been selected from a larger number of poems, which were the occasional effusion of her thoughts, or productions of her leisure, but not originally intended or pointed out by herself for publication. (v)

Unfortunately, some contemporary reviewers of the 1811 edition pointed to Henry Tighe’s delicate disclaimer to account for their paying scant attention to the 39 smaller poems even as they proffered high praise for Psyche, thereby enacting a version of the very scenario Tighe envisioned in her 1804 letter to Walker. As the Eclectic Review put it, “The smaller pieces, at the end of the volume, form a wreath, lovely indeed, but scarcely worth the brow of Psyche; consisting of flowers that would have attracted very transient attention, had they been less happily placed. The feebleness of many, and the unequal merit of the best, of these occasional effusions, indirectly prove the extraordinary pains that were taken to compose and polish the leading poem” (228).(8) Whether or not the smaller poems formed a wreath or served like the appendages of a kite, the posthumous edition proved so successful that the first printing of 500 copies in May 1811 sold out in two months, prompting Longman to purchase the copyright from Henry Tighe in July 1811 for an impressive £300 for future editions. According to the Longman archives at Reading University the firm went on to produce 2,000 copies of the octavo or third edition in August 1811, 2,000 copies of the fourth edition in June 1812, and 1,000 copies of the fifth edition in May 1816.

<4>The sale of the copyright for Psyche, with Other Poems in July 1811 created a serious dilemma for Theodosia Blachford that autumn, who also sought to fulfill the duty of a survivor by publishing a collection of 30 of her daughter’s poems to offer a chronological overview of her spiritual and mental states between 1789 and 1809. Blachford planned to include 13 of the poems Henry Tighe sold to Longman in Mary, but felt she could not reprint them, given copyright issues. Thus she improvised a radical solution. Rather than omit the poems, she privately printed a hybrid edition that utilized two print technologies: print for the 13 unpublished poems and manuscript for the 17 published poems. In a handwritten comment, inscribed on the front free endpaper of the Harvard copy of Mary, Blachford notes that the “M.S. lines I wish’d to have printed with those which are printed here, and some others (omitting the dream) as a kind of mental history of the author, to give away to her friends and mine, but as that design was prevented, I have only had a very few copies of this selection printed privately by a friend to be given only to her most partial & serious friends.”(9) She makes the rationale for her unusual design more explicit in a print comment just before the first manuscript insertions: “Her reflections in the next eight years may be found in several of the Poems annexed to her Psyche, and printed the year after her death: they would have been inserted here, but that it was supposed improper to reprint them, the copyright having been purchased” (13). Blachford’s use of the passive voice in these remarks hint at the degree of frustration she must have experienced in needing to modify her original design for the volume, which “was prevented” because “it was supposed improper to reprint them.” Those who received copies of Mary would have known exactly who prevented Blachford from pursuing her initial plan, creating a problem Blachford circumvented by seizing agency via her innovative printing mode, which not only enabled her to draw a portrait of her daughter that competed with Henry Tighe’s version, but also engineered a mode of publication that resembled the mediated form Tighe adopted in her 1805 Psyche to avoid what Tighe called “the repugnance I now feel to stand before the public & say Hear me” (Letters 268). Some book historians speculate that the private press Blachford employed for her edition was located at the Tighe home in Wicklow, which Henry Tighe’s mother and sisters used to print family productions.(10)

<5>While Blachford’s Mary deployed a hybrid, print–manuscript design to renegotiate the image of Tighe that her son-in-law presented to the public in Psyche, with Other Poems, Fox’s posthumous collection of Tighe’s poetry exclusively employed manuscript transcription to focus on Tighe as a poet who valued friendship, retirement, and coterie culture. Unhampered by copyright considerations, Fox’s bound volume of 20 Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe calls attention to its effort to supplement and even supplant Henry Tighe’s edition with a descriptor that precedes the title page, which declares “In this Manuscript are Twelve Poems not published with Psyche.” All 12 of the poems not published in Psyche, with Other Poems appear in Verses, the probable source of Fox’s transcriptions, though the title and word variants that differentiate Fox’s manuscript from Tighe’s Verses (as well as Henry Tighe’s Psyche, with Other Poems) allow for the possibility that Fox reproduced Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe from alternate copies circulated within Tighe’s coterie. While the nature of Fox’s relationship with Tighe remains unknown, the collection as a whole speaks to Fox’s intimacy with Tighe, especially via a footnote to “Verses Written at Hotwells Bristol July 1804,” which provides biographical information on their mutual friend Nannette Beresford Uniacke Doyne: “The loved vision then was Mrs. Uniacke – Miss Nannette Beresford that had been – and Mrs. Doyne that now is” (page 51 of unpaginated book). Surprisingly, however, a 21st poem by Fox concludes the collection and incorrectly dates Tighe’s death to January 1810—“To the Memory of Mrs. Henry Tighe Who Died January 1810. Etat 37”—unlike the precise listing Henry Tighe provides at the end of Psyche, with Other Poems: “The concluding poem of this collection was the last ever composed by the author, who expired at the place where it was written, after six years of protracted malady, on the 24th of March, 1810, in the thirty-seventh year of her age” (311). That Fox made so significant an error in a poem whose title emulates the title of Tighe’s memorial for her grandmother (“To the Memory of Margaret Tighe. Take from us June 7th, 1804—Aetat 85”) raises questions about the reliability of Fox’s knowledge of Tighe. Nevertheless, Fox, like Theodosia Blachford, and unlike Henry Tighe, adopted a print mode that respects the form of social authorship Tighe valued.

<6>In the discussion that follows I provide a closer look at each collection to examine how the editors create portraits of Tighe that operate as reflections of themselves, particularly through the poems unique to each collection, and via the biographical information available on each editor, which suggests something about the choices they make and the narratives they shape through the sequences they assemble. While I can only speculate about Fox’s identity, it seems fair to assume that Fox was a member of the landed gentry of England or Ireland, and, as I posit later on, potentially connected to the Foxes of Holland House in London, the Foxes of Fox Hall in Longford, or the Foxes of Kilcoursey. Much more is known about Theodosia Blachford, the wealthy widow of Rev. William Blachford, and granddaughter of the first Earl of Darnley, who achieved renown in her own right as an early follower of Wesleyan Methodism: she not only published religious tracts, a translation of The Life of the Baroness de Chantal, and an edition of Fenelon’s works, but she also founded the Dublin House of Refuge and taught at the Female Orphan House in Dublin. While she commended Henry Tighe’s generosity and good nature in a commentary on Mary Tighe’s journals, she always regretted her daughter’s marriage to him, because she felt he drew her away from her spiritual side: “he was not religious . . . . [his] want of principle, & knowledge of the world encouraged her in every vanity & folly, into which the love of admiration draws our weak sex” (Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe 230–33). Henry Tighe’s worldliness also disappointed his own mother, who hoped he would pursue a life in the church; instead, he studied law, briefly practiced, and held a seat in the Irish Parliament as MP for Inistioge, but wanted to pursue a literary life, according to his sister, and composed verse in Latin and English.(11) This essay goes on to argue that Henry Tighe sought to realize his own literary ambitions by publishing a volume of poetry that includes his full name in the title, Psyche, with Other Poems. By the Late Mrs. Henry Tighe; that Theodosia Blachford printed a collection that emphasizes the existence and restoration of her more religious Mary; and that E. I. Fox’s transcriptions provide a mirroring image of the H. Tighe who delighted in sharing her confidential manuscripts with her friends. The next section provides a brief overview of Tighe’s Verses to consider how she structured the presentation of her lyric poems in a self-conscious artifact before turning to the posthumous collections that reconstruct her voice.

Mary Tighe as Petrarchan Poet in Verses

<7>As I argue in the introduction to the electronic edition of Verses and elsewhere, Tighe arranged the 121 lyric poems she transcribed for Henry Tighe (see Figure 1) in a series of sequences that map her emergence, development, and journey as a Petrarchan poet who insistently interrogates the capacity of memory to compensate loss and the potential for verse to control or contain desire.(12)

In the opening lyric, “The Vartree,” Tighe depicts herself rejecting the fashionable world and dedicating herself to retirement and the pursuit of the Muse on the banks of the Vartry river in Wicklow, tellingly referring to herself via her coterie name “Linda”: “Here Linda rest! The dangerous path forsake / . . . . / Here woo the Muses in the scenes they love” (lines 25, 45).(13) Though she explicitly affiliates herself with the Italian lyric tradition by using an epigraph from Molza’s “La Ninfa Tiberina,” in which Molza tries to woo his muse on the banks of the Tiber,(14) she implicitly likens herself to Petrarch, as Anthony Harding suggests, who sees her claiming the “Vale of Vartree . . . as Petrarch claimed La Fontaine de Vaucluse (Vallis Clausa): as a place where she can cultivate the Muses; where she can pursue her calling as poet” (64). The second volume closes with a Petrarchan “Sonnet in reply to Mrs. Wilmot” (see Figure 2), which epitomizes a typical coterie exchange as Tighe, casting herself as a sister poet, belatedly thanks Barbarina Wilmot (later Lady Dacre) for her complimentary sonnet “To Psyche, on Reading Her Poem” and thereby ends Verses by distinguishing herself as the author of Psyche: ‘let my Psyche in thy partial ear, / Whisper the sad excuse, & smiling see / In hers the lovely sister form most fair, most dear” (lines 12–14).(15) Lady Dacre was still very much a coterie poet in Tighe’s lifetime and known for her work in the Italian lyric tradition, notably her manuscript translations of Petrarch, which she shared with Tighe. Thus the poems that initiate and conclude Verses frame Tighe’s representation of herself as a poet working in the Italian tradition who begins her lyric journey with an act of dedication to the muses and ends with an affirmation of her journey’s success.

<8>The 119 verses these two poems bookend fall into six broad groups that showcase Tighe’s ability to create different lyric voices as she engages her Petrarchan theme. Volume one begins with a series of largely autobiographical poems that invoke the pleasures of friendship and retirement as well as the pains of loss, transitions to poems written in the personas of characters from Tighe’s manuscript novel Selena, and concludes with a firmly designated cycle of 30 numbered sonnets, introduced with a single page demarcating them as “Sonnets.” The second volume turns from the elegiac voice of the sonnets to a set of lyrics focused on history, politics, and the world, shifts to the performative subjectivity of an extensive section devoted to liberal translations of Latin, French, Italian, and German texts, and then returns, for the most part, to more personal lyrics interspersed with a few translations and political poems. Neither volume adheres rigidly to a particular scheme: Tighe does not position all the sonnets in the sonnet section, all the friendship poems in a friendship section, all the Selena poems in a Selena section, or all the translations in the translation section. In several places Tighe juxtaposes forms and themes to produce intriguing contrasts. Thus an imitation of Horace’s Epistle 1.4 that expresses gratitude for her emotionally and artistically fulfilling friendship with her cousin and sister-in-law Caroline (“To Caroline”) is followed by a Selena poem that voices the agitation the character Emily experiences as she fails to resist the seductions of her faithless cousin Henry (“Written for Emily”). Elsewhere she scripts a trio of poems on tyranny, servitude, and freedom: the sonnet “Written On the acquittal of Hardy &c,” followed by translations of Anacreon’s “The Dove” and Parny’s “Madagascar eclogue.” These juxtapositions, groupings, and sequences evince deliberate design. As Buchanan asserts, “these texts represent authorial intention at its highest level” (10), a point echoed by Paula Feldman and Brian Cooney in their edition of Tighe’s collected poetry, which reprints Verses in its entirety (preceded by Psyche, and followed by “Late Poems and Fugitive Verse”): “we consider the texts contained in ‘Verses Transcribed for H.T.’ the most authoritative and use them as our copy texts. Tighe carefully chose the arrangement of her works; for example, she grouped together and numbered her sonnets, and she did not use strict chronology” (xvii). Much more than a simple collection of transcriptions for Henry Tighe, the two volumes of Tighe’s Verses constitute a curated edition of her lyric poems.

Transforming Mary Tighe’s Verses into Henry Tighe’s Psyche, with Other Poems

<9>When Henry Tighe turned to Verses to select poems for his edition of Psyche, with Other Poems, he not only located fair copies of 29 of the 39 smaller lyrics he planned to include (each one of which he edited), he also found an organizational framework he adapted to emphasize Tighe’s skill with poetic form. But where Tighe focused on voice, he calls attention to genre (see Table 1). His edition opens with a lightly edited version of Psyche; or The Legend of Love, and then turns from Tighe’s epic romance to her lyric poetry, partially imitating the layout of Verses by introducing them with a single page demarcating them as “Sonnets.” Unlike Verses he does not include Tighe’s sonnet cycle in its entirety, but begins the “Sonnets” section with a set of 19 sonnets that reorder and reduce Tighe’s deliberate sequence. After the 19 sonnets he prints another 10 poems from Verses (not following Tighe’s order), interspersed with ten late poems that Tighe wrote between 1804 and 1809 but did not include in Verses. Many of those poems focus on Tighe’s declining health or her feelings about friends and relatives.

Table 1 Genre in Psyche versus voice in Verses.

<10>Curiously, despite his praise for Tighe’s knowledge of classical literature, his selections downplay her immersion in multiple literary traditions, which she displays in dozens of lyrics in Verses. Of course Psyche by itself evidences her impressive literary background via her revisionary verse translation of Apuleius, her references to Ovid, Livy, Sulpicia, Plutarch, and more, her epigraph from Ariosto, her scholarly footnotes, and her preface’s invocations of Martial, La Rochefoucauld, Jonson, Spenser, Moliere, La Fontaine, Demoustier, Marino, and Terentius. But Henry Tighe omits nearly all of Tighe’s lyric translations, deletes her references to Petrarch and Lucretius, and excludes all the poems that allude to her contemporaries, such as Thomas Moore, Thomas Gray, Frances Greville, James Beattie, Charles Pierre Colardeau, Vincenzo Monti, Anna Seward, William Bowles, the Ladies of Llangollen, William Cowper, William Hayley, James Macpherson, Salomon Gessner, and others.(16) He also omits all but one of the poems written for the characters of Selena, which so elegantly demonstrate Tighe’s ability to work within an assumed persona. Thus despite Henry Tighe’s efforts to highlight Tighe’s virtuoso use of form by turning from her epic romance to a marked section of sonnets and lyric poems, his omissions strip Tighe of her participation in larger literary traditions and counter her self-presentation in Verses as a Petrarchan poet dedicating herself to her muse.

<11>Whereas Tighe opens Verses with “The Vartree,” Henry Tighe opens the sonnets section of Psyche, with Other Poems with an untitled and undated sonnet Tighe wrote for her friend William Parnell and did not include in Verses, “Dear consecrated page! methinks in thee,” which Henry Tighe titled and dated “Written in a Copy of Psyche which had been in the Library of C. J. Fox. April, 1809” (219). Tighe tipped her version of the sonnet into a copy of the 1805 Psyche she dedicated to Parnell, who presented his copy to Charles James Fox. In April 1809, three years after Fox’s death, his family returned that copy of Psyche to Tighe at her request, and she sent them another copy of Psyche with the sonnet for Parnell rededicated to Fox. While the sonnet provides a natural transition from “Psyche” to the sonnets section, its position as the first lyric transforms Tighe’s emphasis in Verses on her active agency as a Petrarchan poet to the value her work seemingly acquired in being read—and exchanged—by powerful men:

Dear consecrated page! methinks in thee
  The patriot's eye hath left eternal light,
  Beaming o'er every line with influence bright
A grace unknown before, nor due to me:
And still delighted fancy loves to see
  The flattering smile which prompt indulgence might
  (Even while he read what lowliest Muse could write)
Have hung upon that lip, whose melody
  Truth, sense, and liberty had called their own.
For strength of mind and energy of thought,
With all the loveliest weakness of the heart,
  An union beautiful in him had shewn;
And yet where'er the eye of taste found aught
  To praise, he loved the critic's gentlest part.(17)

As Buchanan observes, Henry Tighe’s inclusion of this sonnet reflects one of his objectives: to “signal the Tighes’ political allegiances and underscore Mary’s genteel breeding. . . . [via] her tribute to the Whig parliamentarian Charles James Fox, and poems addressed to Lady Asgill and Lady Charlemont” (124). But it also speaks to his role as an enterprising editor, whose “eye of taste” selects what readers of the collection will praise as he performs “the critic’s gentlest part” (lines 13–14), and accrues significance by presenting Psyche, with Other Poems to the public just as Parnell gifted his copy of Psyche to Fox.

<17>Although Tighe concludes Verses with a sonnet that similarly indicates the value of being read, her response poem for Lady Dacre asserts her identity as a sister poet engaged in a coterie. Henry Tighe alters Tighe’s emphasis throughout Psyche, with Other Poems, renaming her as “Mary” rather than “Linda” in “The Vartree,” focusing on local names and habitations (Rossana, Woodstock, Avondale, Westaston, Killarney, Glenmalure) as opposed to the global perspective her translations evince, and highlighting familial relationships (brother, father, grandmother, aunt, niece, brother-in-law) versus the broader range of characters, personae, and fellow writers who appear in Verses. In all he does to Tighe in death what he apparently did in life, treating her as an object to display to his friends. According to his sister, his friends “associated with him to discuss literary subjects & admire his pretty wife. . . . HT made no acquaintances in the world, where he let his wife go by herself” (Collected Poems and Journals 254). While he deserves credit for arranging some intriguing sequences, as when he juxtaposes the putrid flowers of “Pleasure” with the innocent bouquet of “Written for Her Niece S. K.,” or clusters four poems about mourning women that build a complex political response to the 1798 Rising (“Written at West-Aston, June, 1808,” “Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure,” “Imitated from Jeremiah,” and “Hagar in the Desert”), he ultimately used Tighe’s lyrics to shape his own narrative of her work and life.

<18>Whether Henry Tighe planned to do more with his own poetry is impossible to gauge. Family papers contain a number of his lyrics, in English and Latin, which he occasionally shared with friends. He did present a Latin version of Felicia Hemans’s “The Graves of a Household” to her during her 1831 visit to Tighe’s tomb, to her dismay: “Mr. Tighe, the widower of the Poetess, was amongst our party; he has just been translating a poem of mine into Latin, which I am told is very elegant. He is very intelligent & gentlemanly, nevertheless, ‘I did not like this Dr. Fell’” (515).(18) When he died in 1836 he was working on a sonnet for Tighe that provides a fitting end: “Lo! where I pass the heavy hour alone / Afraid to call thee, lest thou answer not” (lines 1–2). Henry Tighe had many reasons to fear Tighe might not respond, including his second marriage to a woman who may have borne his illegitimate child during the years he was married to Tighe, but perhaps among them was his selling her confidential manuscripts to create the public persona of “The Late Mrs. Henry Tighe.”(19)

Reconciling the late Mrs Henry Tighe with Blachford’s Methodist Mary

<19>If Henry Tighe’s construction of his dead wife purports to emphasize her classical taste and therein mirror himself, Blachford’s chronological arrangement of Tighe’s poems reflects her own religious fervor in depicting Tighe’s fall from and return to grace. In the narrative Blachford creates through her selections and sequencing, that fall occurs right after her daughter’s October 1793 marriage, a point she makes explicit by carefully dating the lyrics she extracts from Tighe’s corpus. The first seven poems in Mary date from August 1789 to March 1793: none appear in Verses or Psyche, with Other Poems, and all convey or seek to experience the intense spirituality Blachford inculcated in her daughter, and mourned when she seemingly turned away from God and her mother to become Mary Tighe. Mary begins with “August 1789,” a poem that imparts a longing to enter the kingdom of heaven: “Happy he whose thoughtful mind / Seeks contentment not on earth” (lines 1–2). Blachford’s commentary on Tighe’s journals speaks to the date’s significance. In August 1789 she took Tighe to London to break off her Dublin doctor’s attachment to her, which “tended, perhaps, to confirm, in her [Tighe’s] mind, a fatal tendency to the love of admiration” (229). It also enabled Blachford to separate her from Henry Tighe, who began courting her in late December 1788: “I found marks of attachment between him & my poor Mary . . . . her connection with HT filled me with very uneasy apprehensions” (229–30). Similar anxieties manifest in the first six poems Blachford presents in Mary, which address Tighe’s faith, her affection for her mother, and her fears that vanity and worldliness were distracting her from her commitment to God, retirement, and the muse, perhaps most forcefully in the sixth lyric, “Verses Written in Solitude April 1792,” which recognizes how her desire to be admired interferes with her ability to be inspired by the muse: “Lost in a crowd of folly and of noise / With vain delights my bosom learned to beat, / Resigned the pleasures I had made my choice, / Of calm philosophy and wisdom sweet” (lines 9–12).

<20>Blachford concludes this first set of printed poems with “March 1793,” four slightly misquoted lines from Two Gentlemen of Verona spoken by the soon-to-be unfaithful Proteus after his father tells him to join his friend Valentine in Milan: “Oh how this spring of youn / Resembles the glory of an April day, / Which now shews all the beauty of the sun, / And by and by a cloud takes all away” (lines 1–4).(20) It’s not clear whether Blachford knew that these lines came from Shakespeare, or if she and Tighe meant to invoke the play’s troubling treatment of rape, love, friendship and marriage after Valentine appears to gift his beloved Sylvia to Proteus, potentially valuing friendship over marriage: “All that was mine in Sylvia I give thee” (5.4.89). But the precise placement of this citation in Mary performs significant work in harkening back to the previous poem’s hope for a restoration to peace and solitude in April 1792 that a cloud takes away: Henry Tighe proposed marriage in May 1792, which Tighe tried to reject, agonized over in March 1793, and finally accepted in May 1793. In a devastating indictment of the “cloud” that takes Tighe away from peace, solitude, and her mother, the first poem that Blachford includes in the next set of nine handwritten lyrics from Psyche, with Other Poems is “Sonnet. London June 1794”: “As one who late hath lost a friend, adored, / Clings with sick pleasure to the faintest trace / Resemblance offers in anothers face, / . . . . / So muse I on the good I have enjoyed, / The wretched victim of my hopes destroyed; / . . . . / While cheated memory to the past returns , / And from the present, leads my shivering heart / Back to those scenes from which it wept to part” (lines 1–14). She enhances that indictment through the printed remarks that precede the manuscript selections, which mention the sale of the copyright, list the names and dates of the first eight poems, composed between 1794 and 1801, and quote the June 1811 British Review observation that they express “’a deep and feeling conviction of the senseless and fruitless vanity of what is generally, but falsely, called a life of pleasure’” (Mary 13). Here Blachford lets the reviewer convey the point she makes in her commentary on Tighe’s journals, that these poems show Tighe “standing on the edge of a dreadful precipice, & wasting health, time, & what was still more precious than either, the graces & invitations of God’s holy spirit,” barely escaping “what the world calls guilt” (233). Lest the friends who receive copies of Mary miss the point, Blachford follows “As one who late hath lost a friend adored” with Tighe’s sonnet “To Death.”

<21>The next nine printed poems present lyrics from Verses written between 1802 and 1806, which appear to show Tighe rejecting worldly pleasures and resuming her devotion to God, beginning with her sonnet “Can I look back”: “To thee Oh God! My sinking soul would turn, / To thee devote the remnant of my years” (lines 11–12). While Tighe did not devote the remaining years of her life to God, Blachford’s Mary does. Just as Blachford’s commentary on Tighe’s journals claims that in 1807 Tighe “had now a blessed call to turn to her redeemer” (236), the final four handwritten lyrics she publishes in the collection from 1807 to 1809 witness that call.(21)

Table 2 Tighe lyrics in Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years.

What Blachford omits among Tighe’s final poems is the sonnet Henry Tighe prints as his penultimate lyric, Tighe’s “Sonnet Written at Woodstock, in the County Kilkenny, the Seat of William Tighe, June 30, 1809,” in which Tighe calls out not to God but her muse: “Sweet, pious Muse! Whose chastely graceful form / Delighted oft amid these shades to stray, / . . . . oh! be near to charm / For me the languid hours of pain, and warm / This heart depressed with one inspiring ray” (1–6). In omitting what is not only Henry Tighe’s penultimate lyric but also Tighe’s, Blachford maintains her collection’s insistent narration of Tighe’s fall and redemption, ignoring Tighe’s desire to be inspired not by faith but poetic acts. Although her collection concludes with “The Mezereon,” as does Henry Tighe’s (and E. I. Fox’s), that poem does not quite express the Christian resignation of a true believer: “Look up, my soul, through prospects dark, / And bid thy terrors rest; / Forget, forego thy earthly part, / Thine heavenly being trust:-- / Ah, vain attempt! my coward heart / Still shuddering clings to dust” (lines 27–32). Perhaps to correct any misconstruction, Blachford follows this poem with a very lightly edited print version of the two-sentence obituary Henry Tighe used in Psyche, with Other Poems, repeating his assertion in the second sentence that “Her fears of death were perfectly removed before she quitted this scene of trial and suffering; and her spirit departed to a better state of existence, confiding with heavenly joy in the acceptance and love of her Redeemer” (Mary 29, Psyche, with Other Poems 311). This statement, uncharacteristically pious for Henry Tighe, may have been written by Blachford herself, as Buchanan hints in noting that the first sentence echoes language Blachford used in a June 1810 letter to Henry Moore (125-26).(22) Blachford also includes what she identifies as Tighe’s favorite Christian poem (“The Mystery of Life” by Bishop Gambold), her own analysis of Psyche as a Christian allegory, and her transcription of a “Remarkable Dream” Tighe had when she was seven years old, of Christ’s second coming. Thus Blachford not only outlines the restoration of Tighe’s soul in Mary through the sequence of lyrics she presents, but also through the additional materials she presents after Tighe’s poems, which resurrect the faithful daughter she lost to Henry Tighe.

The Mysterious Friend E. I. Fox

<22>Just as Henry Tighe and Theodosia Blachford reinforce their identities as husband and mother by reconstructing the Tighe they knew and loved in editorial acts of auto-narration, so too the mysterious E. I. Fox in the unpaginated manuscript collection of Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe (see Figure 3). The manuscript suggestively positions Fox as Tighe’s truest friend by opening with a Verses poem that Tighe initially inscribed on the first page of her sister-in-law Camilla Blachford’s “Album Camilla 1800,” “A Faithful Friend is the medicine of Life” (see Figure 4).

<23>In “A Faithful Friend,” Tighe calls out for a friend who would serve as an honest and faithful mirror to her faults as well as her graces: “Oh give me the friend whose warm faithful breast / The sigh breathes responsive to mine / . . . . / As the mirror that just to each blemish or grace / To myself will my image reflect / . . . . / To my soul let my friend be a mirror as true / Thus my faults from all others conceal” (lines 25–26, 37–38, 41–42). Fox’s selections attempt to do just that by recalling and mourning Tighe through a series of lyrics that manifest Tighe’s Petrarchan sensibility and thereby enable Fox to echo and re-enact Tighe’s interrogation of the capacity of poetry and memory to compensate loss. That theme emerges with power in the second Verses poem Fox includes, “The Faded Flowers” (not in Psyche, with Other Poems or Mary), in which Tighe once again cites Proteus’s lines in Two Gentlemen of Verona—“Glories of an April day” (line 24)—as she conflates her efforts to sketch a bouquet of flowers before they die with her desire to preserve yet contain the image of a lost love: “Paint the voice the look the smile / All that charm’d my cheated soul / All that sorrow could beguile / Soothing cares with soft control” (lines 33–36). Fox maintains that focus in the third poem, Tighe’s Verses sonnet “Or do I dream or do I view indeed” (not in Psyche, with Other Poems or Mary), where Tighe describes a night-time vision of a lost beloved, which Fox transforms into a vision of Tighe through a deliberate pronoun change in the third line, from “thee” to “her”:

Or do I dream or do I view indeed
  That form long lov’d, deplor’d? Soft soothing night,
  By fancy aided, gave her to my sight,
And thus I gaz’d, thus my fond soul could feed
On the vain image, till with cruel speed
It vanish’d at the morns returning light
How cheerless have I mourn’d the phantom bright
  Which seem’d to pleasures rosy gates to lead
  Ah is it thus? and am I doom’d again
  To see my hopes dissolve like melting snow
To wake and weep, and all the anguish know
Of disappointment, yet delay the pain
  Smile thus again, thus cheating all my woe
  Oh ever friendly vision thus remain. (lines 1–14)(23)

Thus whereas Henry Tighe highlights Tighe’s skill with genre and Theodosia Blachford depicts Tighe’s spiritual struggles, Fox focuses on the theme Tighe herself emphasized in Verses. And where Theodosia Blachford seeks to correct Henry Tighe’s secular and classicist image of Tighe by adding poems that delineate her fall from and return to grace, Fox insistently reasserts Tighe’s identity as a coterie poet. Fox renominates her as “Linda” in “The Vartree,” includes her Verses poem “The Hours of Peace” (not in Psyche, with Other Poems or Mary), where Tighe as “Linda” celebrates the pleasures of “my social hearth” (line 15), and refers to her as “Linda” in the concluding memorial poem, which footnotes the importance of honoring her coterie name by reinvoking “The Vartree”: “Her own poetic appellation see her poem on the Vartree.”

<24>Although I posit above that Fox probably used Verses as a source text, it seems equally likely that Fox had access to manuscript copies beyond the verses Tighe transcribed for Henry Tighe. Ten of the 20 appear to display intimate knowledge of Tighe’s compositions in using alternate titles from those in Verses, such as “Hope,” which Fox titles “Le Retour De mon ami” (the return of my friend), or “Written at Rossana August 1797,” which Fox titles “The Chesnut Bower” (following Tighe’s typical misspelling of “chestnut,” which Henry Tighe corrects in Psyche, with Other Poems). In addition to alternate titles, 19 of the 20 poems contain substantive variants from Verses (and Psyche, with Other Poems), as in “Le Retour De mon ami,” which substitutes “joys not half” for “bliss cannot” (line 11), or “Addressed to Oberon,” which replaces “spontaneous” with “uncultur’d” in the final line (see Table 3).

Table 3 Tighe lyrics in Poems of Mrs. H. Tighe.

<25>That intimacy also surfaces in the collection’s subtle intimation that Fox transformed from lover to friend at some point in Tighe’s life, an inference suggested by Fox’s inclusion of poems such as “Il est tems mon Eleonore,” Tighe’s Verses translation of Évariste de Parny’s “Élégie XIII,” which bids farewell to an unsanctioned love and beloved: “The time is come, beloved friend / The moment of delusion past / Here let our faults, our weakness end / And here our errors cease at last” (lines 1–4). While this and other lyrics express the painful passion of Petrarchan desire, Fox’s revocalization of that frustrated desire through transcription replicates the double loss Petrarch experiences when his Laura—and Fox’s Linda—dies: “Accustom’d to this cruel pain / My heart may absence learn to bear / But still thy image shall retain / Till life shall throb no longer there” (lines 33–36 in Fox, 37–40 in Verses).

<26>Truest friend or former lover, Fox’s manuscript collection sketches a semi-biographical narrative that, similar to Theodosia Blachford’s overview of Tighe’s spiritual life, expands on the trajectory of “The Vartree” to show Tighe turning away from the fashionable world, empty pleasures, and, most significantly, unrequited passion to locate contentment or consolation in retirement, domestic love, and friendship (the latter invoked in 15 of the 20 poems in the volume, including 10 of the 12 not published in Psyche, with Other Poems). Despite the private nature of the feelings the collection allusively conveys, Fox clearly intended to share the volume with others. In addition to using catchwords that would facilitate reading the volume aloud, Fox provides several directive footnotes to elucidate other readers. Most curiously, two of Fox’s footnotes to the concluding memorial poem cite page numbers to an unknown manuscript transcription of Psyche (they do not match any published version): for “’Dreams of delight farewell’” (line 1), Fox notes “See Psyche C.6.pa 139;” and for “her constant Dove,” (line 19) Fox notes “See Psyche Can: 2 p. 48.” These footnotes not only indicate Fox’s access to unpublished copies of Tighe’s work, they also suggest that Fox prepared the collection as another confidential manuscript for a particular community of readers who would know where to find those citations.

<27>Like the footnotes to the memorial poem, which paradoxically occlude and yet reveal the exclusive knowledge of Fox’s readers, or Fox’s quick invocation of Nannette Beresford Uniacke Doyne in the footnote to “Verses Written at the Hotwells Bristol July 1804” (titled “Stanzas Written at the Hotwells of Bristol. July 1804” in Verses), E. I. Fox’s name at the conclusion of the collection underscores the confidentiality of manuscript exchange in Tighe’s coterie. Written in block letters, Fox’s signature must have been legible to Tighe’s contemporaries but is as yet indeterminate to twenty-first century scholars. Elsewhere I speculate the editor’s connection to the Holland House family of C. J. Fox (as does Buchanan, and Feldman and Cooney), in light of Tighe’s correspondence with his niece Caroline Fox, and her rededication of the Parnell sonnet to him.(24) But dissimilar to Henry Tighe, who gives Tighe’s sonnet for C. J. Fox pride of place in his edition, E. I. Fox omits that sonnet, which seems surprising if there was a family connection, and one so emblematic of manuscript exchange. Unfortunately, Tighe’s surviving letters and journals refer to no other Foxes, and far too many Fox families populated the landed gentry of Ireland and England in Tighe’s time. While numerous Fox families named their children Edmund, Edward, Eleanor, Ellen, Eliza, Elizabeth, Emma, or Esther, only tenuous ties link Tighe to the likeliest candidates, such as the Foxes of Foxwod in Longford (connected to Tighe through Lady Anne Fox neé Maxwell), or the Foxes of Foxbrooke in Kilcoursey (who shared Theodosia Blachford’s enthusiasm for Methodism and, like her, hosted John Wesley). Despite extensive research, no definitive E. I. Fox has emerged, leaving the confidentiality of Fox’s coterie and identity intact. All that remains is Fox’s manuscript dedication to Tighe.

Forget Me Not

<28>Tighe composed over 150 lyric poems and probably many more: since the advent of the twenty-first century scholars have located dozens of once unknown verses by Tighe, including her collection of Verses Transcribed for H.T., which the National Library of Ireland acquired in 2004. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers only had access to the poems Henry Tighe published in his edition, and formed their judgment of Tighe’s lyric sensibility and her authorial persona on that limited sampling. Once Henry Tighe sold the copyright of Psyche, with Other Poems to Longman, he locked all future public editions of Tighe’s poetry into the arrangement and sequence he devised. Theodosia Blachford and E. I. Fox circumvented that condition by using alternate print technologies, producing their own posthumous collections of Tighe’s poetry to share with select audiences. While Blachford adopted a hybrid mode, combining print with manuscript, to present 30 Tighe poems that included 15 not published in Psyche, with Other Poems, Fox’s manuscript volume of 20 Tighe poems included another 12 lyrics not published in Psyche, with Other Poems (and 16 not included in Mary). Only four Tighe poems appear in all three collections: “The Vartree,” where Tighe dedicates herself to her muse; “Sonnet Written at Rossana, November 18, 1799,” in which Tighe regrets giving way to an impulse she hopes to overcome through retirement; “Verses Written at the Commencement of Spring. 1802,” a poem that mourns the untimely death of her cousin; and “On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon Which Flowered at Woodstock. December, 1809,” the very last poem she wrote. All three collections slot the first three poems in different sequences (none of which match the order of Tighe’s presentation in Verses), but all three collections conclude their Tighe sequences with “The Mezereon,” in which Tighe asks her family and friends to remember her: “Oh! Do not quite your friend forget, / Forget about her faults; / And speak of her with fond regret / Who asks your lingering thoughts” (lines 45–48). Each editor fulfills that request via differing print modes that “re-member” her as a reflection and reinscription of themselves and their relationship to her: Henry Tighe’s classically-gifted spouse in Psyche, with Other Poems, Theodosia Blachford’s spiritually redeemed daughter in Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years, and E. I. Fox’s beloved coterie companion in Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe.

<29>Beyond the prismatic glimpses and renegotiations these posthumous collections provide of the handwritten manuscripts Tighe presented in Verses and elsewhere, they demonstrate the fluidity of print and manuscript culture during the Romantic era. After Henry Tighe transformed the stunning calligraphy of Tighe’s Verses into the print of Psyche with Other Poems, Blachford and Fox reversed that trajectory by restoring many of those poems to the manuscript form Tighe preferred. Thus, as David McKitterick observes, “It is misleading to speak of any transition from manuscript to print as if it were a finite process, let alone an orderly one, or indeed that the process was all in one direction" (47). While most handpress books necessarily began their existence as handwritten manuscripts in the Romantic era, many handwritten manuscripts provided complete copies of printed books. Deidre Lynch calls attention to an excellent example of that reversal in her discussion of a scribal copy of John Keats’s 1817 Poems (MS Keats 3.12) commissioned by Charles Cowden Clarke in 1828 as a birthday present for his sister, Isabella Jane Towers, which shows Keats as the author and the copyist J. C. Stephens as the writer.(25) Scribal copies of Tighe’s 1805 privately printed Psyche similarly reflect that reversal: some of those handwritten manuscripts even transcribe the name and address of the London printer Carpenter employed, “C. Whittingham, Printer, Union Buildings, Leather Lane” (MS ACC 4854, unpaginated page 215). Handwritten reproductions of the 1805 Psyche or Keats’s Poems not only present what Levy recognizes as an “act of devotion, scholarship, or preservation” (Literary Manuscript Culture 8), but also, in the case of Tighe’s Psyche, access to a carefully limited private edition. The three posthumous collections of Tighe’s lyrics that her survivors prepared do even more in operating as deliberate interventions. While Henry Tighe sought to overturn Mary Tighe’s resistance to commercial publication and thereby enhance his own social and economic capital, manuscript and hybrid private printing gave Theodosia Blachford and E. I. Fox a material means to provide competing narratives that demasculinize print and print culture and show the collision of female public and private performances.