“They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday”

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official, granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor.

Riggs’s mother was, according to the novelist Frances Burney, “a most prodigious fat old lady,…very merry and facetious.” Horace Walpole said she was “an old rough humorist who passed for a wit.”

In 1765 Riggs married John Miller (c. 1744–1798), from a genteel but poor Irish family. He served as a junior officer in a light-horse regiment during the last three years of the Seven Years’ War and then tried studying the law.

Miller was “full of good-natured officiousness,” Walpole said, but that didn’t promise financial success. Fortunately, Anna inherited a fortune from her grandfather.

The Riggs-Millers (John took on Anna’s surname in honor of her money) bought an estate in the village of Batheaston, near Bath. They spent a lot of the Riggs family money fixing up the manor and laying out ornamental gardens.

By 1770 this lifestyle had become too expensive or, in Walpole’s words, “the whole caravan were forced to go abroad”—the Riggs-Millers, their infant girl, and Anna’s mother, plus select servants. The family spent a couple of years in France and Italy, expanding with the birth of a boy in Paris. Anna Riggs-Miller bought an antique vase dug up “by a labouring man in 1769 at Frescati, near the spot where is supposed to have stood the Tusculanum of Cicero.”

The couple came back to Batheaston full of continental sophistication. Well, a version of it, per Walpole:

Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle [Madeleine de] Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey. The Captain’s fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù…

Anna published her Letters from Italy in three volumes in 1776.

By 1775 the Riggs-Millers were hosting literary salons at Batheaston. The main ritual of these gatherings was a poetry contest staged around that antique vase. Once again, here’s Walpole, from a 15 Jan 1775 letter in which he also remarked on news from Massachusetts about something “called minute-men”:

They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for the prizes. A Roman vase, dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles, receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fair hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I don't know what.

You may think this is fiction or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published. Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimés on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them, by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others, very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carmarthen; many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; and immortality promised to her without end or measure.

In short since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there never was anything so entertaining or so dull—for you cannot read so long as I have been telling.

Between 1775 and 1781 the Riggs-Millers published four volumes of Poetical Amusements at a Villa Near Bath, along with the smaller collections On Novelty and Hobby Horses, giving the proceeds to charity. The frontispiece of the first volume showed the “Roman vase,” above.

Literary reviewers and poets who weren’t invited to the salons tended to disdain the whole enterprise. Nonetheless, notable writers like William Mason and David Garrick contributed work. The poet Anna Seward credited that biweekly salon for discovering her. In 1778 John Riggs-Miller was made a baronet (on the Irish establishment).

In October 1778, as I described back here, the celebrated historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath after sharing the Rev. Thomas Wilson’s house for years. The next month, in the town of Leicester, she married William Graham, a doctor less than half her age. By the end of the year, the posh people of Bath were gossiping about the newlyweds. And in that same period Sir John and Lady Miller hosted one of their regular salons.

TOMORROW: “Winter’s Amusement.”

The Tragedy of André

Speaking of William Dunlap’s tragedy André, my friend John W. Kennedy has created an online text of that play by transcribing the 1798 edition and annotating it. You can find it all here.

Kennedy writes:

William Dunlap (1766–1839) dominated American theatre in his day as no one else ever did but David Belasco. He was born in Perth Amboy, and the family later moved to New York City. There is a pretty, but questionable, legend to the effect that he may have seen some of the theatrical productions in occupied New York in which John André had a hand.

He traveled to England in 1784 to study with Benjamin West, as was practically de rigueur for aspiring young American painters, but seems to have chiefly fallen in love with the theatre there. Upon his return to America in 1787, his first thought was to write an imitation of Royall Tyler’s hit, The Contrast, and Dunlap’s The Modest Soldier or Love in New York was accepted, though never produced.

But he continued to write, and was soon successful enough to be asked in 1796 to become managing partner in the Old American Company, so called because it was the return of the American Company, founded in 1752, which had retreated to the West Indies in 1778 after Congress had outlawed theatrical performances as incompatible with the war effort. André is one of the plays of this portion of his career.

The result was a tragedy with a “curiously Greek construction—it is written in scenes for two or three, places all the physical activity offstage, takes place in only a few hours’ time, and really wants only a chorus to be perfectly Athenian.”

Dunlap’s blank-verse text is accompanied by several supplemental texts:

• three letters André wrote to Anna Seward in 1769, when he was eighteen.
• André’s satirical poem “The Cow Chace.”
• documents about André’s trial and execution.
• Seward’s “Monody on Major André,” published in 1781.

Here’s a sample from the play, as the character identified only as “the General” laments in Act 5 that he must let Maj. André’s execution proceed:

O what keen struggles must I undergo!
Unbless’d estate! to have the power to pardon;
The court’s stern sentence to remit;—give life;—
Feel the strong wish to use such blessed power;
Yet know that circumstances strong as fate
Forbid to obey the impulse. O, I feel
That man should never shed the blood of man.

And here’s a discussion by Elfin Vogel and Michael Bettencourt of the challenges of staging André.