Ann Yearsley, or Lactilla as she named herself in a reference to her profession as a milkwoman, was a labouring‐class Bristol poet and author writing at the outset of Romanticism. Kerri Andrews argues: ‘Having been neglected for nearly two centuries, Yearsley’s later poetry ought now to be recognized as a crucial bridge between the work of late eighteenth‐century poets, and the new generation of soon‐to‐be Romantic writers.’1 Yearsley’s earlier work also evinces a proto‐Romantic energy and self‐consciousness that she refines in her later work. Producing three collections of poetry, Poems, on Several Occasions (1785), Poems, on Various Subjects (1787), and The Rural Lyre (1796), she also wrote plays, one of which, Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed 1789 and printed 1791), was staged in her lifetime at Bristol and Bath, and a four‐volume historical novel entitled The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795).
Yearsley’s career reflects her socially, financially, and poetically precarious position in the literary landscape of the period. Her writing came to the attention of Hannah More, a distinguished writer and social commentator in her own right, whose zeal and dedication to finding subscribers to Yearsley’s first volume of poetry launched her protégée’s career. Despite her esteem for Yearsley, More refused to grant her any control over the profits of her poetry, even writing to her co‐patron, Elizabeth Montagu, to justify her decision to refuse Yearsley financial agency, and Yearsley and More never reconciled after Yearsley took possession of her own earnings. Yearsley’s poetic career as a whole tends to be sidelined in favour of discussion of this early event.2 Yet, Yearsley’s poetry is hardly amenable to any simple political labelling. As Dustin Griffin points out, ‘Her politics, while they may disappoint some contemporary critics looking for a working‐class ideology of resistance to authority, reflect the reformist beliefs of the broad political middle ground, neither radical nor high‐flying Tory, in the 1790s’.3 Her poetry spans a range of possible political positions, witnessing Yearsley’s unique place in the literary landscape.
Passionate and energetic, both of the poems discussed here reveal Yearsley’s profound political engagement with the social issues of the period. ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave‐trade’, published in 1788 separately from Yearsley’s volumes of poetry, was, in Moira Ferguson’s arresting phrase, an ‘assault against slavery’.4 The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade had been established in 1787 in London, and Yearsley’s poem followed a year later, coming out only a day after her former mentor Hannah More’s poem on slavery, ‘Slavery, A Poem’.5 The Bristol Gazette’s anonymous poem compared ‘More’s polish’d muse, [with] Yearsley’s muse of fire’,6 linking the two women as Bristol’s poets despite their public enmity. Yearsley’s untaught quality which fuelled her ‘muse of fire’ was self‐proclaimed in the poem. Her readers are challenged to engage with her natural tenderness and elevate her ideas from their wild state into articulate and focused outrage against slavery.
‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave‐trade’ is pitched between anger and pity. As J. R. Oldfield notes, Yearsley draws on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), which relates the cruelty suffered by the eponymous hero at the hands of corrupt slavers,7 but makes Luco, her own hero’s character, less ambiguous than Behn’s protagonist. Opening with an address to the city, Yearsley endeavours to shake her readers out of complacency:
Custom, Law,
Ye blessings, and ye curses of mankind,
What evils do ye cause? We feel enslav’d,
Yet move in your direction. (18–21)
Yearsley’s baffled sadness and anger challenge shibboleths, revealing the paradox of a society’s chosen enslavement. Directly addressing Bristol, Yearsley asks that the denizens of her home city ‘snatch her rustic thought / Her crude ideas, from their panting state, / And let them fly in wide expansion’ (10–12).8 Making reference to her position in the popular imagination as ‘Lactilla’ or ‘the Bristol Milkwoman’, the sentiment of these lines belies Yearsley’s confident wielding of her blank verse and her choice to weigh in on this vexed national issue. Lamenting the fallen state of society and the suffering of the slaves, Yearsley’s empathy where ‘My soul with sorrow bends’ (48) seeks to stir the same virtue in her reader.
Anne K. Mellor links such defiance of the norm in the name of virtue to a female poetic mode: ‘Again and again, the female poet insisted that she spoke on behalf of Virtue, a virtue that she consistently gendered as female, a virtue that in a Christian nation must govern both the private and the public sphere, thus taking precedence over all merely expedient considerations of government policy or commercial advancement.’9 Yet Yearsley’s appeal against the status quo is equally grounded in her economic status and her poetic preference for mingling confrontation with any straightforward panegyric or emotional complaint.10 Protected by powerful patrons yet unable to ascend to the safety of middle‐class affluence,11 Yearsley’s poetry is both radical and conservative as it moves between political positions rather than committing itself to a single ideological formula. The poem’s confrontational style employs both empathy and challenge. In an attempt to shock the reader into empathy with the enslaved, Yearsley demands that the ‘moody’ (81) Christian slaver sell his own family. Her rhetorical question, ‘Is it Nature strains / Thine heart‐strings at the image?’ (89–90), draws attention to the unnatural cruelty of the slave trade. Lingering on a depiction of Luco’s bereft family and his lost love, Incilanda, some of Yearsley’s descriptions err towards creating images of the noble savage. She condemns Christian slavers who are unmoved by the sufferings undergone by their slaves. Her notes to the poem spell out her political and moral affiliations, and reveal her knowledge of the practice of slavery. Closing with lines reminiscent of Thomson, ‘Hail social love! true soul of order, hail’ (389), she moves to heal the turbulence of the poem, replacing rage with promise of ‘future glory’ (402). Powerful in her anger, Yearsley closes the poem with sympathy and hope.
‘Bristol Elegy’ commemorates the 1793 Bristol Bridge Riots, where Bristolians were murdered by soldiers for protesting against the renewal of an act levying tolls on Bristol Bridge, despite the offers by Quakers to liquidate arrears. Pleading with the readers and authorities to notice and finally end the struggle in the city, the poem despairs of finding the empathetic response it craves. Written in cross‐rhymed couplets, Yearsley’s poem uses the form to police content as the demands of the quatrain prevent the content spilling beyond the limits of the stanza form. As Claire Knowles notes of Yearsley’s self‐presentation, ‘The poet is presented to her readers (by herself, by her patrons and by reviewers) explicitly as a figure of feminine distress’.12 ‘Bristol Elegy’ shows Yearsley using this self‐portrait at the opening of her poem as she cries, ‘In vain I plead’ (21). Refraining from self‐representation in the main, Yearsley turns the reader’s attention to the suffering of the murdered people that she traces in the poem. From the father of seven who dies within the second stanza, to the murder of a heavily pregnant woman, Yearsley relentlessly shows the privation and pain suffered. The children of the murdered father are left ‘to a world too rude’ (16), where the death of a young man leaves behind an aged mother to mourn for him. Despite the agonies suffered, Yearsley does not encourage or even countenance revolution:
Then nurse not dark revenge.—The peaceful mind
Can the true value of existence prove;
In contemplation ev’ry blessing find;
Calm in its joy, expanded in its love. (97–100)
Though her poem reveals the horror of the murders, choosing evocative exemplary figures to develop a sense of the cruelty and injustice of these government agents, the close of the poem insists on her readers embracing Christian mildness. The lamenting poem never gives way to wildness thanks to the discipline required by the quatrains; without irony or decorous restraint, Yearsley fashions the poem into a troubling ‘fearful scream’ (65). Refusing the Satanic route of revenge, Yearsley rhymes ‘prove’ and ‘love’ and ‘peaceful mind’ with ‘blessing find’ to emphasize the healing power she hopes to claim in her poetry. Despair must be mitigated by belief, and, turning back to God at the close of the poem, Yearsley mournfully trusts to the mystery of faith. In asking the victims to ‘pardon all who wrong’d you’ (117), the poem’s agonized opening notes give way to sad acceptance.
Though writing with reference to ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave‐trade’, Moira Ferguson’s remark that ‘Yearsley offered insights beyond the reach and desire of her middle‐class peers’ has resonance beyond this single poem.13 However, her insights are more complex than merely a class‐based situational vantage point suggests. Ann Yearsley’s poetry is explicitly aligned by some of her critics with an ‘emergent Romanticism’,14 and this is suggestive of the use of nature, self, and marginalized voices in her work. Certainly Yearsley’s relationship with contemporary culture, poetic mores, and political ideas renders her a complex figure in her own right.