Life
1712-1750 [prob. 1708 or 1709; var. Letitia]; b. Dublin; ‘adventuress’
(DNB); dg. John Van Lewen, MD, an obstetrician (‘midwife’);
descended on maternal side from Sasrsfield of Kilmallock, m. Rev. Matthew
Pilkington, 1729; estranged from Swift, 1732; discovered in bed with another
man by her husband, pleading that they were ‘keeping warm’ while
reading a book; divorced and retired to England [q.d.]; employed by Bemjamin
Victor to write ghost birthday ode for Princess of Wales on his behalf;
offered him An Excursory View, satire; spent some time in Marshalsea;
joined by unmarried dg. with child, and her son Jack; returned to Ireland
in 1747 and 1748; her reminiscences (Memoirs, 3 vols., 1748-54)
made her ‘something of a splash’ and served as one of the chief
authorities for Swift’s last years and otherwise contains material
devised by her, and posthumously by her son, to extract money from the
parties named; set up bookshop in St. James St.; imprisoned for debt and
rescued by Colley Cibber; wrote The Turkish Court; or, the London Prentice,
a burlesque acted in Capel Court, Dublin (1748) but never printed; The
Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests (1751), amused Swift highly
[the jests, perhaps, but not the book; JS obit. 1748]; died in lodgings
at Pharper Lane, Dublin after much travelling back and forth; her son
Jack issued the third vol. of her memoirs, and himself was much in debt,
dying in 1763; a plaque erected in St. Anne’s, Dawson St., 1997 DNB
DIW DIB FDA OCIL
[ top ]
Works
Plays, The Turkish Court, or London
Apprentice (1748). Poetry, ‘Poems’ included in Poems by Eminent Ladies, 2
vols. (London 1755); Bernard Tucker, ed., The Poetry of Laetitia Pilkington
and Constantia Grierson (Edwin Mellen Press 1996).
Prose, The Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington wife to the Rev. Mr. Matth. Pilkington Written by Herself, Wherein are Occasionally interspersed, All her POEM with Anecdotes of several eminent Persons, Living and Dead [ol. 1 title], 2 vols. (Dublin 1748), with additional 3rd vol. (London 1754); Do., (Dublin 1776)]; rep. as Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, 1712-1750, written by herself, intro. by I. Barry (London: Routledge 1928); The Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests (1751) [FDA var. 1764].
Reprints, A. C. Elias, ed., Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, 2 vols. (Athens: Georgia UP 1997), 845pp. [called ‘magisterial edition in review of Glendinning’s Jonathan Swift, TLS, 25 Sept. 1998].
[ top ]
Criticism
B. G. MacCarthy, The Female Pen, Women Writers and Novelists 1621-1818
(CUP 1994) [with others in Chap. IX, ‘The Oriental Novel’].
Bernard Tucker, ‘"Swift’s Female Senate", Three Forgotten Poets", in Irish Studies Review, No. 7 (Summer 1994), pp.7-10 [incl. port. of Mrs Letitia Pilkington by Nathaniel Hone, Nat. Portrait Gall. (London)].
[ top ]
Notes
Peter Kavanagh, Irish Theatre (1946), Laetitia Pilkington, 1712-59;
The Turkish Court or the London Prentice (Capel St., 1748), sat.
burl.; The Roman Father, trag., printed in Memoirs. See
Virginia Woolf entered a plea in defence of L. Pilkington in The Common
Reader, 1st ser., (1929), pp.160-67.
Esther K. Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock Alley (NJ: Princeton 1967): gives account of how Letitia [sic] writes gages for her son John, who acts the part of the second Atall to bate Woodward; and that John was arrested by Sheridan for forging tickets, inspiring Letitia to write a vicious satirical poem about him (Memoirs, p.438f.) in which his family are obscenely denigrated. (Sheldon, p.126, ftn.)
A. C. Elias, Memoirs, reviewd by J. Ardle MacArdle, Books Ireland (Sept. 1998), cites Swift on the Pilkingtons, an amusing poetical Lilliputan couple ‘of the middle kind both for understanding and fortune, who are perfectlye asy, never impertinent, complying in everything, ready to do a hundred little offices that you and I may often want, who dine and sit with me fice times for once that I go to them, and whom I can tell without offfence, that I am otherwise engaged at present’. (p.218.)
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis
1912), notes that her son was John Carteret Pilkington (?1728-1763), author
of The Poet’s Recantation (London n.d); published memoirs,
first ed. called The Memoirs of Luckless Jack, and the second ed.
printed in Dublin, 1762; treated Goldsmith badly; poems in last volume
of his mother’s memoirs, which he edited [he said she died in 1751
and that she was buried in St Anne’s, Dawson St., beside her father,
Van Lewen; called herself a niece of Patrick Sarsfield, he being ‘the
eldest son of Lord Kilmallock’, and describes Catholicism as a ‘religion
that P. S.’s niece can never hate’.
Brian Cleeve & Ann Brady, A Dictionary of Irish Writers (Dublin: Lilliput 1985) lists Memoirs, 2 vols. (Dublin 1748); The Turkish Court, or London Apprentice (Dublin 1748), play; The Roman Father, trag.; also The Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests (1751). Poetry admired by Pope.
A. N. Jeffares & Anthony Kamm, eds., An Irish Childhood, An Anthology (Collins 1987), extract from ‘A Forward Miss’.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, gives bio-dates c.1707-50; selects ‘The Happy Pair, A Ballad’ [468-69]; ‘Advice to the People of Dublin’ [Is there a Man, whose fix’d and steady Soul/No Flatt’ry can seduce, no Fearl controul;/Constant to Virtue, resolutely just,/True to his Friend his Country, and his Trust ... O Stannard!’ (see under Eaton Stannard Barrett, RX; 483]; and Memoirs [the passage in which she recounts her first meeting with Swift in fulfilment of a strong ambition, achieved by enclosing to Dr Delany lines ‘To the Rev. Dr. Swift, on his Birthday’ (‘Behold in Swift reviv’d appears/The virtues of unnumber’d years’) [993-96, and notes, Swift finally wrote of the Pilkingtons, ‘He proved the falsest rogue and she the most profligate whore in either kingdom’], with notes at 419 [under Constantia Grierson] , 497 [Grierson], 463 [ed. Carpenter and Deane, ‘one of the gossips and scribblers who laid the foundations of the great writer’s mythological reputation in Ireland’]; 492, Bibl.; The Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington (Dublin 1776), in which ‘The Happy Pair’, p.p.174-75, and ‘Advice’, p.93]; BIOG, 1009 [as above], and NOTE, Thackeray drew heavily on her Memoirs for his view of Swift in English Humourists. BIBL, Memoirs &c, (2 vols., Dublin 1748, 3rd vol. London 1754), published subsequently as Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, 1712-1750, written by herself, intro. by I[an]. Barry (London: Routledge 1928); ‘Poems’ included in Poems by Eminent Ladies, 2 vols. (London 1755); The Celebrated Mrs Pilkington’s Jests, or the Cabinet of Wit and Humour (London 1764).
Belfast Central Public Library holds Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington, 3 vols. (1748-54); also Memoirs &c. (1928).
Affectation? The Full DNB article speaks of her freedom from affectation as the secret
of her attraction to Swift. NO citations in CAB or JMC.
Commemoration: The plaque erected in St. Anne’s Church, Dawson St., Dublin, reads: ‘in the crypt of this church, near the body of her honoured father, John Van Lewen, Laetitia Pilkington, whose spirit hopes for that peace thro’ the infinite merit of Christ, which a cruel and merciless World never afforded her.’
Kin & Kin: Henry Lionel Pilkington, author of Land Settlement for Soldiers [...] with introductory notes by the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett [...] and Lt.-Col. the Hon. Sir Newton Moore (London: W. Clowes & Sons 1911), xv, 101pp.; also Mallender's Mistake (London: Chatto & Windus 1903), viii, 386pp., and Purple Depths (London; Westhoughton 1904), vi, 275pp., novels.
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)