|
Description
The poet, biographer, and portraitist Matilda Betham is best known for her friendships with S.T. Coleridge, Robert Southey, and the Lambs, although her own poetry and painting has recently attracted scholarly interest: Morton Paley's "Coleridge's 'To Matilda Betham, from a Stranger'," Jonathan Wordsworth's Woodstock facsimile of The Lay of Marie and Donald H. Reiman's Introduction to the Garland Reprint Series of Betham's Poems and Elegies. She published four books of poetry--Elegies and Other Small Poems (1797), Poems (1808), The Lay of Marie (1816), and Vignettes: In Verse (1818)--and A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804), drawing on an 18th century tradition of historical biography. However, since many of her letters and unpublished diaries have been destroyed or lost, little is known about Betham herself.
In the Introduction to the Woodstock facsimile of The Lay of Marie, Jonathan Wordsworth explains that Betham recorded Coleridge's poetic tribute "To Matilda Betham, from a Stranger" in her Autobiographical Sketch, of which there are fragmentary cuttings, four at Dove Cottage and four pages at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which currently catalogues the work as an unidentified publication. Jame Dykes Campbell found the fragment of the autobiography among Southey's papers and first published the verses in The Athenaeum in 1890. Betham's niece and goddaughter Matilda Betham-Edwards published biographies of her aunt in Six Life Studies of Famous Women and Friendly Faces of Three Nationalities, but even she could not trace the origins of these fragments..
Unique papers at the Ipswich Record Office reveal that Betham's Autobiographical Sketch with its transcription of Coleridge's poem is in fact part of a nineteen-page Preface to a previously unknown work, Crow-quill Flights (n. d.), which had been printed by private subscription in the early 1840s and distributed to select acquaintances, including Robert Southey. From a letter Betham sent to Lord Brougham in 1841 (which helps to date the Preface), she explains that the printing process had been temporarily interrupted, that it was written "for such as have felt interested in my fate, during a life of some vicissitudes" (Crow-quill Flights 1). This autobiography describes her early success when her famous literary friendships were formed.
Like so many women writers of her generation, as illustrated in the majority of entries in J.R. de J. Jackson's Romantic Poetry by Women, even her name and date of birth are in dispute. An incomplete entry in the International Genealogical Index indicates that a Mary Matilda Betham was born at Stradbrook, but there is no baptismal record from there or the parish of Stonham Aspal, where she was raised (according to Mrs. Alison West who researched the parish registers). According to a letter she sent to the Revd. Mitford, editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, she was born on November 16, 1776, the first of Mary Betham (formerly Damant) and the Revd. William Betham's fifteen children, one of whom died in infancy (Betham, Notes). Although the Bethams christened their first child Mary Matilda, she was known by family and friends as Matilda, which may account for their naming a later daughter Mary also. Betham's... |
More articles from Wordsworth Circle
Borrowing from Robert Merry in Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793..., June 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
%20%20&position=1)