Introduction
Biographical information about Catherine Upton is scarce. Her maiden name may
have been Creswell; her brother Samuel Creswell was a tory who died in 1786
of a cold. Her husband, John Upton, was a lieutenant in the 72nd or Manchester Regiment. This
biographical information comes from
Collections toward the History of Printing
in Nottinghamshire by
a Reverend S.F. Creswell (1863), ostensibly a history of typography
but which digresses into family history, miscellaneous information
about Nottinghamshire, lists of books and sermons, etc. She was also a teacher; the title page of
Miscellaneous Pieces identifies
her as “Governess of the ladies Academy, No. 43, Bartholomew Close.” She
may have been a widow; as Stephen Behrendt points out, “That she was by 1784
employed as a governess in a girls’ school suggests that he did not survive
the siege” (308n10); that she writes in publication, as she explains in the
preface to
Miscellaneous Pieces, with “a view to
support my children” further corroborates that suggestion. The two brief
volumes reproduced here form nearly all of what we know, or can conjecture,
about Upton.
The Siege of Gibraltar takes the form of a letter
addressed to Upton’s brother in England while she lived in Gibraltar with
her soldier husband and their children. The narrative describes her
experiences over about six weeks during the Great Siege of Gibraltar.
Gibraltar, long a point of contention between Spain and Great Britain, was
the site of fourteen sieges between the early fourteenth century and the
late eighteenth century. The final one, also known as the Great Siege, was
also the longest, lasting from 1779 to 1783. Spain attempted to claim the
territory three times over the course of the eighteenth century. Historians
Chris Gocott and Gareth Stockey explain the significance of the last siege
to Gibraltar’s place in the British cultural imaginary:
[E]ach
attempt strengthened British resolve to retain it. In particular, the
last of these attempts—the Great Siege—appeared to solidify once and for
all Gibraltar’s place in the British public imagination. By this stage,
the fortress had acquired a reputation for defensibility, but it was the
events of the Great Siege, and subsequent presentation of that siege in
countless books and pamphlets, that cemented Gibraltar’s reputation as
“impregnable fortress.” (23)
Gibraltar functioned as a symbol of
Britain’s power and strength, and much literature of the time circulated
such an image; Upton’s work is no exception. Generally speaking, it seems
that “the public,” as judged from popular publications, rallied around
British takeover of the area. Accordingly, Upton’s two poems about Gibraltar
paint Spain as a proud but erroneous force, which is defeated by the morally
just Britain. In the poem that concludes her epistolary account, “proud
Iberia” has sent “Her crafty sons [who] strain every Nerve to gain / Their
antient Rock, but all their
Works are vain” (ll. 11-12). Spain
tries its best to regain Gibraltar—which Upton’s choice of pronoun here
suggests is its possession after all—but ultimately Britain’s moral
authority sanctions its military force. In other words, no matter
Gibraltar’s “true” owner, it is Britain’s right to take it, and Spain’s
defeat is inevitable. To underline this point, late in the poem Upton urges
soldiers to “Make haughty Spain submit to British laws” (l. 22). For Upton,
a British victory in Gibraltar means, not just taking possession of a piece
of land, but, more important, compelling a vainglorious nation to recognize
the indisputable glory of British rule. While “The Siege of Gibraltar”
continues in the same vein, deploying many of the same adjectives to
describe Gibraltar, the poem focuses to a greater extent on the experience
of the soldiers. Upton chastises those comfortable at home:
Ye sons of Britain, safe within your ports,
Immers’d in pleasure, luxury, and sports;
Small your ideas of the soldier’s toils,
Who fights your causes in all climes and soils;
Patient in dangers; firm, tho’ in want of food,
And only anxious for his country’s good.
These! These! Britannia! are thy sure support. (ll. 80-86)
Upton seeks to draw attention to those (like her husband) who actually
risk their lives in support of this invincible fortress—for, after all, if
Gibraltar is in fact invincible it is due to the efforts of soldiers
stationed there. Britain has a rightful claim to the land, she implies, but
it is British soldiers who must physically carry out that claim. Upton
further calls on her fellow citizens never to turn away from a veteran “but
his wants supply” (l. 93). Upton’s position as a soldier’s wife makes her
perspective understandable; but she also emphasizes the important point that
the actual day-to-day events of war are carried out by individual soldiers,
who, furthermore, do not disappear once the battle is over.
The prose account itself pays even greater attention to the day-to-day
experiences of both soldiers and their families. From the very beginning,
Upton foregrounds her and her family’s suffering, writing, “Heat and cold in
extreme, hunger and thrift I bore with some degree of firmness; but since
the haughty sons of Iberia have poured their shot and shells with
unremitting fury into Gibraltar, I have been an unhappy object indeed.” As
the account continues, Upton details their hunger and thrift. Indeed,
perhaps one of this work’s most significant features is its economic detail.
Upton notes the prices of food, including meat and eggs, as well as tea,
soap, and more. Upton can only purchase for her family inferior candles that
won’t even burn for an hour, biscuits full of maggots, watered-down goat’s
milk, and the like. In this way Upton provides a specific account of the
lived experience of a soldier’s family in wartime. She also contributes to a
notable trend in late-eighteenth-century women’s writing: a focus on money.
The “consumer agenda of women’s fiction” (1) is the subject of Edward
Copeland’s
Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in
England, 1790-1820 (1995). He writes, “Women found themselves
vulnerable as economic beings, as authors now regularly noted in their
novels that featured heroines with specifically economic lives: heroines
barred from the possession of land (the period’s single most important
source of capital), or heroines with fixed incomes, usually in trusts,
annuities, and stocks” (17). Upton’s works appeared just before the period
Copeland examines, and, although she did not write fiction, Copeland’s book
demonstrates that money was a significant concern for women writers of all
stripes, who frequently placed the subject at the center of their literary
output. When Upton details her financial troubles, then, she joins a
tradition of women whose own precarious economic statuses informed and
shaped the work they produced.
Upton follows another trend in women’s writing of the period: she deploys
various strategies to preempt potential criticism. In the preface to
The Siege of Gibraltar, Upton addresses the
unfavorable reception of her poem of the same name, chalking it up to
sexism. If her versification is bad, she tells us, she has joined the
company of Dryden and Pope, whose flaws, as men, are routinely forgiven. But
she also preemptively defends more specific criticisms of this new work: she
writes that she not only has “but little time to write, or [to]
correct what I write,” but that she writes
exclusively “with a view to
support my children, not to extend
my own fame.” These are strategies similar to those of many women
contemporaries. Charlotte Smith, for instance, discussed in the preface to
Elegiac Sonnets her financial
troubles and her need to support her children. Stephen Behrendt explains,
“Women writers knew what they were doing when they launched preemptive
strikes to forestall critical churlishness by pleading everything from lack
of educational refinement to straitened economic circumstances to sheer lack
of time for ‘polishing.’ Upton herself offers a good illustration” (88). But
many of these women also wrote novels, which were generally more profitable
than poetry, if less well-regarded within British literary culture.
Charlotte Smith perhaps most famously “sold her sorrows,” but although her
Elegiac Sonnets (published in 1784, the same
year as Upton’s
Miscellanies) “generated both cash
and reputation for Smith,” she “wrote poetry to uphold her sense of self and
to pursue the individuality her culture withheld from the married woman, she
wrote novels and other prose works to bring in the money necessary to
support her children” (Labbe 12). Smith is a good example here because she
illustrates a crucial point: poetry was a matter of artistic validation for
Smith, and novels her principal moneymaker. Upton’s strategy is rather more
blurred (and this is so partly, and quite simply, because we know so little
about Upton). While she is careful to point out the gendered prejudices of
literary criticism, she also asserts that she sought publication only as a
means of earning income for her children, not as a matter of personal
artistic expression.
In her poetry, her addresses to the muse continually deflect her own status
as a writer. “The Siege of Gibraltar” begins with an address to the muse, as
in an epic of war: “My Muse awake, and sing that awful day, / When Spain
determin’d with tyrannic sway / To crush this rock!” (ll. 1-3). Unlike in,
for example, the
Aeneid (“I sing of arms and the
man”), Upton does not invoke a muse to aid her own performance, however, but
instead presents herself as recorder or vehicle of the muse’s performance,
in recording a part of history that emphasizes Britain’s strength.
Throughout the poem, she continues to remind us of the Muse’s presence. In
the second stanza, Upton urges the muse to proceed, and in the last, asks
General Boyd, the book’s dedicatee, to “permit my artless muse / To speak
thy worth” (ll. 99-100). Upton even couches emotional response in terms of
the muse’s feelings: “Permit the Muse to drop a grateful tear,” she
implores, for the potential failure of two leaders’ military careers (l.
75). This may be an authorial strategy to anticipate accusations of
sentimentality. Upton’s obscuring of herself in this way aligns with the
book’s preface, in which she likewise deflects criticism by insisting that
she only published for essential money, not for literary fame. The range of
literary references in both of her books, though, testify to her education,
specifically to her knowledge of great poetry—she mentions classical authors
such as Ovid and Homer in addition to English poets including Milton, Pope,
and Prior.
The poem that follows “The Siege of Gibraltar,” “Wrote at Gibraltar . . .”
(the same one included at the end of her previous book, with minor edits),
changes tack. Upton writes, “For once Æolus hear a female Muse, / And be
propitious—when a Woman sues” (ll. 1-2). Now she herself may be the muse,
but she nevertheless appeals to a god, the ruler of the winds; her poem
serves the practical purpose of seeking assistance. Many other poems in
Miscellaneous Pieces function as “useful”
literature, deflecting criticism by their very nature. Following the poems
about Gibraltar are several verse epistles to her friends and family; an
epitaph; instructional dialogues; and brief prose reflections on love and
marriage and on education—the volume is truly a miscellany. The most unusual
and amusing piece is entitled simply “Intended for the Lady’s Magazine.” It
recounts a dream Upton had in which she becomes wealthy, travels to
Laputa—one of the lands to which Gulliver traveled—ingratiates herself with
the people by distributing her money to those in need, and finally incurs
the ire of the greedy king, who wants to claim all her money for himself.
The aim is didactic; Upton emphasizes the value of humility and the dangers
of wealth. Nearly every piece in the collection could be said, like this
one, to have either a didactic or a practical function: it instructs the
reader or serves as an address to mark some occasion; Upton's strategy
appears to be to disarm criticism of her works by presenting them as
practical compositions, not as studied works of art.
As it turns out, Upton seems to have avoided negative criticism of
Miscellaneous Pieces. Contemporary
criticism of the volume is rather scarce, but it seems to take her
introduction at face value, evincing a patronizing tone to her and her work.
Volume 4 of
The English Review (1784)
delivers an ambivalent verdict:
Though there be nothing in this
collection that tends to impress us with a high opinion of the writer’s
poetical talents; yet it exhibits the picture of a chearful and placid
temper, a competent share of discernment upon common subjects, and such
a portion of tenderness and humanity, as may probably render Mrs. Upton
extremely respectable in the path of life she has chalked out for
herself.” (467)
Volume 73 of
The Monthly Review (1785)
contains a brief entry on the work, similar in tone: “These pieces, as the
Authoress ingenuously confesses, are sent into the world ‘to support her
children, not to extend her fame.’ We heartily wish her publication all
imaginable success, which no criticism of ours shall obstruct” (237). Both
of these reviews indicate that Upton is a competent poet; they essentially
wish her well and, having done so, dismiss her.
Modern literary criticism of Upton is nearly nonexistent; what does exist
mostly amounts to entries in biographical dictionaries. A notable exception
is Stephen Behrendt’s
British Women Poets and the Romantic
Writing Community (2009), which includes a discussion of “The
Siege of Gibraltar” in a chapter on women's writing about war. In
A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers
1660-1800 (1985) Janet Todd notes the “pedestrian verse” of “The
Siege of Gibraltar,” though she also identifies a verse letter addressed to
Upton’s father as “engaging.” Upton’s entry in Virginia Blain, Isobel
Grundy, and Patricia Clements’s
The Feminist Companion to
Literature in English (1990) succinctly comments that Upton “is
better in informal than heroic poems.” If Upton’s versification may leave
something to be desired, as Upton anticipated, her small body of work
remains of interest. The importance of
The Siege of Gibraltar lies in
its valuable, detailed insights into the economy—literal and figurative—of
war. As Paula Backscheider notes, “Few of us would read poetry as a means of
social advancement, as a source of news, or as mass entertainment, but
eighteenth-century people increasingly did. For example, miscellanies,
anthologies, and collections of poems rode the obsession with developing and
displaying taste” (36). Upton attempts to adopt just such a role—an arbiter
of taste, at least for a certain subset of people, particularly young
women—in
Miscellaneous Pieces, and in
The Siege of Gibraltar she
attempts to shed light on the conditions of soldiers and their families in
wartime. For that reason Upton’s work deserves our continued attention: she
produced documents of war with an eye to social justice as well as socially
engaged pieces that reflect both the multitude of interests and ideas to
which eighteenth-century women writers were open, and the variety of work
they produced.
Works Cited: Introduction
Backscheider, Paula R. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and
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Behrendt, Stephen C. British Women Poets and the Romantic
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