Table Of ContentSOMETHING NEW
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SOMETHING NEW:
OR,
ADVENTURES
AT
CAMPBELL-HOUSE.
Anne Plumptre
edited by Deborah McLeod
broadview literary texts
Review Copy
©1996 Deborah McLeod
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
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infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Plumptre, Anne, 1760-1818
Something new: or, Adventures at Campbell-House
(Broadview literary texts)
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN 1-55111-079-2
I. McLeod, Deborah, 1954- . II. Title.
III. Title: Adventures at Campbell-House. IV. Series.
PR5187.P27S6 1996 823'.7 C96-930154-5
Broadview Press
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Road, Hadleigh, Essex SS7 2DE
Broadview Press is grateful to Professor Eugene Benson for advice on
editorial matters for the Broadview Literary Texts series.
Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Canadian
Heritage.
Typesetting and assembly: True to Type Inc., Mississauga, Canada.
PRINTED IN CANADA
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Anne Plumptre: A Brief Chronology xxvi
A Note on the Text xxix
Something New: on Adventures at Campbell-Howe 3
Appendix: Eighteenth-Century Views of Beauty
and Ugliness 341
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Isobel Grundy for her help and interest in every phase
of this project. I would also like to thank the staff at the Bruce Peel
Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta for their assis-
tance; I am particularly grateful for the support of librarians John Charles
and Jeannine Green. As well, I am pleased to acknowledge the support of
the Killam Trust and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. Finally, I thank Ted McLeod, Jean Renner, and Linda
Sinclair for their generous sacrifice of time and effort on my behalf.
Deborah McLeod
Victoria, British Columbia
vi ANNE PLUMPTRE
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Introduction
Anne Plumptre's Life
Anne Plumptre was born into a well-established and respected Norwich
family, the Plumptres1 of Fredville. The family was an old one; it had
derived its name from the village of Plumptre near Nottingham and rep-
resented the borough in Parliament from the time of the Plantagenets.
The family could boast of a number of distinguished scholars and clergy-
men in its ranks: Anne's great-grandfather, Henry Plumptre, was the pres-
ident of the Royal College of Physicians from 1740 to 1745; her cousin
John was a classical scholar who became the Dean of Gloucester; and her
father, the Rev. Dr. Robert Plumptre, served for twenty-eight years as the
President of Queen's College, Cambridge, and was Prebendary of
Norwich. Anne was named after her mother, the second daughter of Dr.
Henry Newcome, her father's former schoolmaster. The third of nine
children,2 Anne was likely born early in February 1760 since records indi-
cate that she was christened at Cathedral Church in Norwich on February
22nd of that year.
Anne Plumptre had three brothers. Joseph, the eldest, became a cler-
gyman; Robert, the second son, a barrister; and James, the youngest of the
family, a playwright, critic, editor, and divine. At least two of Anne
Plumptre's five sisters married: Diane to her cousin, the Rev. John
Plumptre, and Jemima to Frederick Layton, a captain of the Marines.
Little is known about Mary or Lydia Plumptre. Annabella, like Anne,
remained unmarried and became an author, publishing at least one poem
("On Moderation" in The Cabinet, Norwich, 1795), a cookery book
(Domestic Management; or, The Healthful Cookery-Book, 1810, rpt. 1812), and
a number of translations including The Mountain Cottager (1798), Domestic
Stories (for children, 1800), and plays by Iffland and Kotzebue. She also
produced three pieces of fiction: Montgomery; or, Scenes in Wales (1796), The
Western Mail (1801), and Stories for Children (1804). Tales of Wonder, of
Humour, and of Sentiment, a collection of stories written with Anne, was
published in 1818.
The education of the Plumptre girls was unusually liberal for the time.
According to A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain
and Ireland (I816) Robert Plumptre gave his daughters
an education very different from what generally falls to the lot of even well
instructed females. The doctor was himself of a studious turn, and he took
a delight in cultivating the inclination of his children to letters, particularly
his daughters, who became by his tuition proficients in several modern lan-
guages. (277)
SOMETHING NEW vii
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Anne, for example, was fluent in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
By all accounts Anne Plumptre was an enthusiastic supporter of
Napoleon, a position that gained her the contempt of a number of her
contemporaries. Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, vilifies Plumptre in
his memoirs as a woman "revolting in her sentiments," giving as an illus-
tration her assertion at a dinner party in 1810 that she would welcome
Napoleon's invasion of England:
People are talking about an invasion. I am not afraid of an invasion. I
believe the country would be all the happier, if Buonparte were to effect a
landing and overturn the government. He would destroy the church and the
Aristocracy, and his government would be better than what we have.3
Plumptre's estrangement from the church—obvious in this fragment of
reported conversation—was apparently shared by her mother and one of
her sisters and was the source of a family rupture.4
Henry Crabb Robinson not only denounces Anne Plumptre's politics
in his memoirs, he also questions her moral soundness and judgement.
After discounting her politically as one of the "old Jacobins" who refuse
to give up their "political prejudices," he mounts an attack on her char-
acter in the continuation of his dinner party anecdote:
After dinner literature was the theme. "Did you ever read La Guerre des
Dieux?" said she [Plumptre] to Will. Lloyd [the host]. "No, What is it?"
"Oh! The cleverest thing that ever was in the World. Pray get it".... "Do
you know it?" said Mrs. Lloyd to me .... "Did you ever read it?" "I began
it, Mad[ame]: but it is so filthy & obscene, that I was not able to finish it"—
"to the pure all things are pure" said Miss Plumptree [sic] with a toss of the
head. (punctuation added)
Robinson's view of Plumptre as a moral degenerate is balanced by George
Dyer's mention of her in a letter to Mary Hays. Dyer writes that although
he knows Anne Plumptre "only by letter," he has been informed that she
"is an excellent moral character, a practical philosopher."5
Robinson, who has earlier in his memoirs referred to Plumptre's "ugly
person," concludes his recollection of her by recounting Charles Lamb's
reaction to the news of her death:
It was many years after this when some one said, Anne Plumptree [sic] is
dead. "Dead" exclaimed Lamb, "What an ugly ghost she will make."
Henry Crabb Robinson's assertion that Anne Plumptre was physically
unattractive is particularly interesting given her determination to create
an ugly heroine in Something New. It is possible, however, that Robinson,
whose dislike of Plumptre is obvious, was simply making a clean sweep
viii ANNE PLUMPTRE
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of her in his memoirs, presenting her as irreclaimable politically, rotten
morally, and monstrous physically. Plumptre certainly is not physically
repellent in the engraving included in her Narrative of a Three Years'
Residence in France, 1802-5 (1810). This engraving, taken by Henry Meyer
from a painting by John Northcote, shows a reasonably attractive woman
with strong features and dark hair and eyes.
In The Sexagenarian; or the Recollections of a Literary Life (1817) William
Beloe makes no comment about Plumptre's looks. He does claim, how-
ever, that Plumptre made herself "generally obnoxious" except to fellow-
worshippers of Napoleon, those "who considered all as deserving of the
burning fiery furnace, who did not fall prostrate before the shrine of
Bonaparte, and adore the Briarean Idol of the French Revolution" (363).
Beloe's view of Plumptre is more moderate than that of Robinson; to
Beloe, Plumptre is a talented but misguided miss, led astray by a sojourn
in London and her friendship with the "perverted writer" Helen Maria
Williams (359):
On the death of her parents, and at the accursed crisis of the French
Revolution, she [Plumptre] came to the metropolis. Here she immediately,
with unreserved confidence, threw herself into the kindred arms of
H. M. W.[,] divided her enthusiasm, and partook of all her follies. (365)
This linking of Plumptre's radicalism with London and Helen Maria
Williams is still generally accepted. Roger Lonsdale, for example, writes
that "[a]fter Dr. Plumptre's death at Norwich in 1788 ... Anne ... went to
London and under the influence of Helen Maria Williams, became an
ardent enthusiast for the French Revolution."6 Two points must be kept
in mind, however. First, although we know that Anne Plumptre was liv-
ing with Annabella in London by 1799,7 it is not certain exactly when she
moved there. Because available references tend to place Anne in Norwich
rather than London in the early 1790s, it seems likely that she continued
in Norfolk during this period. At the very least, she spent a good deal of
time there. On January 4th and 6th in 1791, for example, the "Misses
Plumptre" took part in a production of Adelaide, a play by Anne's "inti-
mate friend" Amelia Alderson [later Opie]. According to Margaret Eliot
Macgregor, Alderson received her father's permission to produce the play
at the private theatre of his friend, Mr. Plumptre [probably James], and
two performances resulted with Alderson and the Plumptre sisters taking
the principal parts.8
In 1794 Anne Plumptre was again with Amelia Alderson in Norwich,
this time supporting her friend while she gave a political speech.
According to a letter from Sarah Scott to her sister Elizabeth Montagu
dated July 15th, 1794, a "most curious incident" occurred during a politi-
cal gathering at which the Norfolk Whig MP William Windham was
reelected:
SOMETHING NEW ix
