Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, Wife to the Reverend Mr Matthew Pilkington, Written by Herself

Abstract

As the daughter of an eminent obstetrician of Dutch descent and his well-connected Anglo-Irish wife, Laetitia van Lewen (c. 1709–1750) had a privileged upbringing in early eighteenth-century Dublin. Indeed, when in May 1725 she married the ambitious but poor young clergyman and poet, Matthew Pilkington, some thought the match to be beneath her. By 1730 the couple were part of the literary circle of Jonathan Swift, whose patronage helped Matthew to become chaplain to the lord mayor of London. When his wife visited him there in 1733 she discovered his philandering, and so began the marital difficulties that culminated in the couple’s acrimonious and very public divorce in 1738. Disgraced by allegations of adultery and denounced by Swift as ‘the most profligate whore in either kingdom’,¹ Pilkington fled Dublin in late 1739 for London, where she remained for the next eight years, eking out a precarious living as a hack writer, while seeking, through her own writings, to capitalise upon the sexual notoriety that attached to her. In London she attracted the patronage of the novelist Samuel Richardson and the playwright Colley Cibber, whom she entertained with her witty repartee and revealing sidelights on Swift’s character and manners. It was Cibber who encouraged her to write her memoirs, which were published in three volumes between 1748 and 1754, and comprise a rich mixture of reportage, gossip, satire, invective, verse, self-interrogation and self-vindication, all bound together by an engaging conversational style. As A. C. Elias notes, ‘Writing her Memoirs when she did, Mrs. Pilkington was largely free to suit herself. Even the word memoirs was nebulous at the time, carrying no clear idea beyond that of factual recollections centering on a particular person or group.’²

(Dublin: Printed for the Author, 1748). Vol. 2, xvi, 299pp.; pp. 220–32.