2 - Sketches of Rural Scenery: Mitford’s Country Rambles

Summary

When Mary Russell Mitford began publishing her sketches of provincial life in the Lady's Magazine beginning in September 1822, she did so anonymously. Mitford appended a single initial at the end, ‘M’, or, inexplicably and misleadingly, ‘K’. Others included no attribution at all. As I noted in Chapter One, anonymity facilitated Mitford's ability to write for multiple periodicals without accruing a reputation for being a hack. While she aspired to be a historical dramatist, staging her plays was fraught with difficulties. By contrast, the Lady's Magazine and, to a lesser extent, other periodicals and annuals, offered her comparatively steady remuneration. ‘Many writers began their careers in this way’, Adrian Room has argued of anonymity, ‘believing that if what they wrote was worth reading, the public would buy it for its own sake, irrespective of whoever the author might be’. ‘But there is a snag’, Room continues. ‘If your work has no name to it, how can the public obtain more if they want it?’ (Room 1988: 26). In Mitford's case, she developed an easily recognisable narrative voice: acerbic, ironic, ambivalent.

She also developed a signature topos. Almost all her topographical sketches, distinguished from the studies of character examined in the preceding chapter, include some version of a country walk. In the early years, Mitford's narrator was often accompanied on these local expeditions by a young neighbour who is frequently at her side, as well as her dog, Mayflower (Figure 2.1). While wandering through the village with her companions, the narrator encounters neighbours, registers architectural differences among houses, remembers anecdotes, and delights in fall foliage or gets caught in spring showers. The very features of Mitford's sketches that have struck literary critics as ‘slightly simpering’ or ‘anodyne’ (Aslet 2010: 200; Gifford 2020: 134) registered very differently for her contemporaries. For, as Harriet Martineau insisted at mid-century, while looking back on her own childhood in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Mitford had invented – as I have noted earlier – ‘a new style of “graphic description” to which literature owes a great deal’. Before Mitford took up her pen, Martineau avers, ‘there was no such thing known … as “graphic description”’.