Bell’s Laureates II: … So Goes the World

Abstract

Frederick Reynolds in his 1826 autobiography insists that Merry believed that Anna Matilda would turn out to be the woman of his dreams and that he was dismayed to find Cowley instead. Topham and Este, on Merry’s insistence, arranged a meeting in March of 1789 where Merry, according to W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, “found himself in the presence not of a goddess, but of a stout, plain, respectable matron in her later forties!” The “fantasy was destroyed” (194). Hargreaves-Mawdsley’s account, however, is merely a paraphrase of Reynolds’: “when he stood in the presence of the ideal goddess of his idolatry, and saw a plain respectable matronly lady—simply poetical and platonic, he walked away in sad dudgeon … ” (2: 187–8). James Boaden gives a more favorable account, reporting that “Merry was an enthusiast in beauty as well as verse; and the proportion of the former to the latter in the lady was less than might be desired: with a rhapsodical farewell, the correspondence closed” (217). This story has become part of Della Cruscan lore: it makes Merry foolish and Cowley pathetic, and perpetuates the fiction of the poetic romance as founded on genuine passion that was dismantled by the revelation of Anna Matilda’s attachment to another. Cowley was already the wife of a government functionary who had bolted to India.