Introduction

Midway through a 3 February 1846 letter to his American publisher, Henry Reed, Britain’s seventy-five-year-old poet laureate, William Wordsworth, abruptly changed topics to inquire, “Do you know any thing of a wretched set of Religionists in your Country, Superstitionists I ought to say, called Mormonites or Latter-day-saints[?]” His reason for asking, he explained, was that “a niece of Mrs W[ordsworth]’s has just embarked, we believe at Liverpool with a set of the deluded Followers” of this upstart American sect “in an attempt to join their society.” He then added, “Her name is Margaret Hutchinson, a young woman of good abilities & well educated, but early in life she took from her Mother and her connections, a Methodistical turn and has gone on in a course of what she supposes to be piety till she has come to this miserable close” (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 7: 756).

Nearly two centuries later, it is possible to piece together what became of this “deluded” niece of the poet thanks to a remarkable, if hitherto overlooked, set of documents in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. Among these is the missionary journal of Elijah Funk Sheets (1821–1904), the Pennsylvania native who baptized Margaret Hutchinson into his faith on 12 October 1845, fell in love with her in the weeks that followed, and married her on 16 January 1846 aboard the ship carrying them and some forty other Latter-day Saints to America.Footnote ¹ After reaching New Orleans on 25 March, their party took a riverboat up the Mississippi to Nauvoo, Illinois, the erstwhile Mormon capital that, following years of persecution, the Saints were then evacuating for a safer haven beyond the Rocky Mountains. Accordingly, after stopping long enough to acquire a wagon and provisions, the newlyweds set out on 1 May for Winter Quarters, the temporary Mormon encampment near present-day Omaha. By the time they arrived on 9 July, Margaret was about three months pregnant, and that autumn she fell severely ill, likely from the malnutrition or malaria endemic to the camp. While she managed to bear a seemingly healthy daughter on 26 December, she declined rapidly thereafter and passed away on 1 February 1847. Two and a half months later, Elijah buried their infant daughter next to her mother in the makeshift Mormon cemetery on the Nebraska plains.

Elijah himself would survive the trek to Salt Lake City and go on to become a sufficiently prominent civic and ecclesiastical leader in pioneer-era Utah for his papers to be preserved in the church’s archives after his passing in 1904. Among them are two notebooks that had belonged to his first wife: a spiritual diary that Margaret kept sporadically between 1840 and 1845 and a verse notebook containing thirty-eight poems that she composed between 1833 and 1837 (or between her thirteenth and eighteenth birthdays). These volumes offer a wealth of insights into journaling practices, female education, and nonconformist worship in the late Romantic and early Victorian ages; but for most literary scholars their principal appeal will lie in the unfailingly assured, consistently accomplished, and occasionally radical lyrics that this obscure niece of the era’s preeminent living poet wrote in her mid-teens. Although many of Margaret’s poems adhere to the popular sentimental and moralistic tropes of the day, others—including all six selections transcribed below—display a contrarian spirit and an ardor for radical causes rarely seen in British women’s verse of the 1830s. And, as detailed below, these were by no means private effusions, for half of her notebook poems ultimately found a broad readership during an eighteen-month stretch of 1835 and 1836 in which she functioned, in effect, as the house poetess of the Isle of Man’s principal newspaper, the Manx Sun.

Apart from her connections to Wordsworth, nothing in her pedigree or early upbringing foretold literary success, since Margaret came from a poor and dysfunctional family that was decidedly the black-sheep branch of the Hutchinson clan. Her father, George Hutchinson (1778–1864), was the second youngest of nine aspirationally middle-class siblings from Penrith, Cumberland. After losing his mother in 1783 and his father in 1785, he was raised primarily by his eldest sister, Mary (1770–1859), the future wife of William Wordsworth. Determined to become a gentleman farmer in the mold of his elder brothers Jack and Tom, he embarked in his twenties and thirties on a series of unprofitable agricultural ventures, the last of which—a five-year lease on a small, hilly, and remote farm in Radnorshire, Wales—proved so ruinous that he was at least twice committed to debtors’ prison between 1815 and 1820.Footnote ² Far more embarrassing, however, to George’s conventionally moralistic siblings was the news he belatedly imparted in May 1819 concerning his recent marriage to Margaret Roberts (1796–1869), a Welsh servant at his farm who, besides being lowborn, illiterate, and roughly half his age, went to the altar seven months pregnant with his baby.Footnote ³

This child—the Margaret whose work is discussed here—would be born at her father’s Radnorshire farm on 3 July 1819 and christened the next day at the parish church in New Radnor. The Hutchinsons remained in Wales until 1822, when, having given up on farming and forsaken notions of starting anew in Canada or Van Diemen’s Land, George opened a small boys’ school in the hamlet of Ballingham in southeastern Herefordshire (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 4: 33, 64; S. Hutchinson 174, 180, 201, 218, 224). While he would operate this academy until 1836, his tutelage seems not to have extended to his own children, for Margaret’s brother John would later recall that “beyond the acquisition of the three R’s under paternal and therefore very indulgent direction,” his early schooling had been “almost entirely confined” to riding horses, hunting, and getting into scrapes with “rough rustic companions on the village green” (5). By the late 1820s, Margaret’s maiden aunts Sara and Joanna Hutchinson had apparently grown so alarmed by the desultory manner in which their niece was being raised that they rescued her from her paternal home and placed her in a school in their native Penrith.Footnote ⁴ This market town at the northeastern edge of the Lake District would remain her primary home until the summer of 1833, when she joined her Aunt Joanna on the Isle of Man. For years to come her abiding affection for the people and scenery of Penrith would be a recurring theme in the poetry notebook that Margaret began six months before moving away.Footnote ⁵

Just how fully her talents and intellect developed during her Penrith years is evident in the eight poems Margaret composed in this notebook before leaving for the Isle of Man, works that display extraordinary confidence, learning, and verbal dexterity for a writer still in her early teens. That she chose verse as her primary medium is unsurprising, for there arguably had never been a better moment for British girls with poetic aspirations than the early 1830s. Between the mass popularity of Felicia Hemans, L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), and their countless imitators and a flood of new giftbooks, annuals, and magazines catering to female audiences, publishers strained to meet the surging demand for women’s verse. The lone downside of this “poetess” boom, at least in conventional tellings of literary history, was that it coincided with the consolidation of separate-spheres ideologies in Britain, which meant that a generation of women writers enjoying unprecedented access to print felt increasingly compelled to limit themselves to sentimental, religious, and domestic subjects.Footnote ⁶

To a certain degree, though, these norms may have worked to Margaret’s advantage. In fact, the clear facility that several of her notebook poems display for the sentimental and didactic styles of the age does much to explain the publishing opportunities she had at the Manx Sun while still in her teens. Her earliest known contribution to this Douglas-based weekly (or, for that matter, to any other periodical) was “The Epiphany,” a forty-two-line poem in iambic hexameter couplets composed on 6 January 1835 for the Feast of Epiphany and submitted in time to be published three days later as the work of “A. B.” of Atholl Street (the fashionable Douglas road where Margaret’s Aunt Joanna resided). When or whether the paper’s proprietor and editor, James Grellier, ever became cognizant of his new contributor’s age or identity is unclear, but he was sufficiently impressed by her talents that he published a second submission, the L. E. L.–inspired lyric “To J. C.,” two weeks later. Thereafter verses by “Anne of Atholl Street” (as she was typically identified moving forward) became a staple of the Sun, and nineteen of Margaret’s poems (eighteen of which appear in draft form in her notebook) ultimately graced its pages between January 1835 and June 1836.

Then, however, after the publication of her lines “To a Lily Plucked in Castle Mona’s Ground” on 24 June 1836, the pseudonymous songstress disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived on the scene eighteen months earlier. Judging from Margaret’s verse notebook, this was not owing to waning interest on her part, given that she wrote nine additional poems between July 1836 and May 1837, two of them explicit sequels to lyrics she had published in the Sun. Consequently, it seems likely that the abrupt halt to her publishing career was connected to the four-year training course that she began in June 1836 at a girls’ academy in Douglas, where her new supervisor, Mrs. Margaret George, may well have had reservations about her trainee’s highly conspicuous, if technically anonymous, role of “Anne of Atholl Street.” Regardless, there is no record of Margaret’s ever again attempting to publish after the summer of 1836.

While, in ensuing years, the girl’s long-term prospects would become an increasingly common subject of concern in the correspondence of the Hutchinsons and Wordsworths, these letters betray no awareness of Margaret’s literary proclivities, let alone her recent stint as the Isle of Man’s answer to L. E. L. From all indications, the young writer seems never to have approached her Uncle William either for advice on her poems or introductions in the literary world. Despite the frequency with which her lyrics invoke contemporary authors and the beauties of Cumbria—a region that by the 1830s was fast becoming known as “Wordsworthshire”—her poems are devoid of allusions to her famous relation (a pattern that extends to the spiritual diary she kept from 1840 to 1845). Yet this does not necessarily indicate a fraught or strained relationship. As seen above, Wordsworth would in 1846 characterize his niece as something of a religious fanatic but, at heart, “a young woman of good abilities & well educated.” And the want of references to him in Margaret’s two surviving notebooks seems far less egregious when one considers that, excepting her guardian Aunt Joanna, none of her other relatives, immediate or extended, receives more than passing notice therein.

Margaret’s apparent disinclination to capitalize on her kinship with the renowned Poet of the Lakes is therefore perhaps best taken as yet another manifestation of the independent spirit she displayed throughout her short but eventful life. In her mid-twenties, this impulse toward self-determination would lead her to forsake her family, country, and childhood religion in a quest for spiritual rebirth in the American Zion; and a decade earlier it became manifest in her move to the Isle of Man, her short but successful literary career, and a body of works that alternately conform with and spurn prevailing models for the demurring, self-deprecating, and tenderhearted poetess. The six poems transcribed below represent the more oppositional strand of Margaret’s verse, showing her confidently inserting herself into some of the era’s most heated political debates and writing lyrical rejoinders to poets decades her senior. Three of these selections (“To J. C.,” “The Ocean,” and “Yes,—the Isles Are Awake”) were published in the Manx Sun over the course of 1835, and the other three (“On Reading a Song in the Cumberland Pacquet,” “In Imitation of Moore’s ‘Minstrel Boy,’” and “Address to Mona”) have never before appeared in print.

Despite being all of thirteen when she wrote the earliest of these pieces, “On Reading a Song in the Cumberland Pacquet,” Margaret positions herself therein as the advocate of underappreciated women everywhere in chiding the anonymous author of a “Song” recently printed in her local newspaper for effectively effacing his birth mother by self-identifying as a “child of the Sea” who in middle age still yearned for the ocean’s “female breast.” The other Penrith-era selection featured here, “To J. C.,” admonishes no less an authority than L. E. L. for having assured her readers of the immutability of true love in her 1824 poem “Constancy.” Evincing a world-weariness befitting a writer several times her age, Margaret retorts that it is, in fact, entirely natural for the “wild throbbings” of passion to be “conquer’d” and “shorn of [their] force” with time, and she forthrightly counsels that an inattentive lover is a surefire sign that “[t]he spell is now broken—and thou art forgot.” Two years later, she returned to the poetic rebuttal genre in “The Ocean,” a sixty-line experiment in Dark Romanticism that responds to the poem “The Ocean of Eternity,” by the Manx writer “R. E. C.” This earlier work had presented the ocean as a comforting symbol of eternity, since it both predated humans and is destined to outlast our species. Margaret countered with an eerily prescient vision of a planet desiccated by global warming, fusing traditional Christian eschatology with a gothic apocalypticism redolent of Byron’s “Darkness” to imagine a coming time when “[t]he blazing sun, the crackling sky, / Have lick’d [the ocean’s] boiling waters dry.”

Equally extraordinary are the three remaining poems included here, in which, without apologizing for either her age or her sex, the young writer agitates for religious freedom, political reform, and home rule in Ireland and the Isle of Man. Nothing of the known facts concerning Margaret’s early home life or education would seem predictive of these radical works from her teens, since her parents appear to have been largely apolitical and her paternal aunts and uncles (including her guardian Aunt Joanna) were by the 1830s staunch church-and-king Tories. Consequently, the progressive views that she first articulated in the autumn of 1833 may reflect the influence of the revivalist Methodist community she joined shortly after moving to the Isle of Man. Years later she would credit this congregation’s preacher with sparking her spiritual awakening, claiming that from his sermons she “obtained clearer views of experimental religion, and of a present Salvation” (Journal 62–63). And given the inherently nonconformist and frequently reformist bent of early-nineteenth-century Methodism, it is entirely possible that this minister and his congregants also played a crucial role in her political awakening.

One of the more curious aspects of Margaret’s early radicalism is that, despite her apparent lack of personal or familial connections to Ireland, the so-called Irish Question takes center stage in her first two overtly political poems.Footnote ⁷ The earlier of these is a lyric composed on 30 October 1833 in imitation of “The Minstrel-Boy,” a popular song from the 1813 edition of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies that mourns a brave Hibernian lad who died fighting for his nation’s freedom. Updating this poem for the Age of Reform, Margaret turns Moore’s valiant minstrel into a “saintly” Irish priest who, having previously enlisted heaven’s help in the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, now pleads for additional aid to ensure his “[s]weet land of Faith & Purity” shall “[n]ever again…be / Shackled by galling slavery.”

In February 1835 the young poet again took up the causes of political reform and Irish freedom in her blistering rejoinder to “The Isles Are Awake,” a triumphant Tory anthem lauding William IV’s replacement of the liberal ministry of Lord Melbourne with a conservative government headed by Robert Peel. That Margaret first encountered this poem in the Manx Sun, a paper that tended to support conservative causes, was hardly surprising. Far more remarkable, though, was the Sun’s willingness not only to print her fiery rebuttal but also, despite the era’s general aversion to politicking women, to do so under her nom de plume, “Anne of Atholl Street.” Margaret’s bluntly titled retort, “Yes,—the Isles Are Awake,” evinces a fury reminiscent of the invectives Byron and Shelley had penned a generation earlier against William IV’s father and brother (“Lines”). Her rejoinder skewers her conservative counterpart’s risible, and counterintuitive, notion that the masses of England, “Scotia,” and “Erin” would “burst out into song” in praise of a king who so blatantly disregarded their demands for reform (Story). Ireland, however, emerges as her particular focus in stanzas that counter the Tory polemicist’s fantasies of a united nation abounding in peace and plenty with vivid images of a starving, disenfranchised, and brutalized Irish populace pushed to the brink of revolution.

Two years later, in the final overtly political poem in her notebook, an “Address to Mona” composed in early 1837, Margaret resumed her anticolonialist campaign. Expanding on a trope from “Yes,—the Isles Are Awake,” she again wrote of Anglo-Saxons sucking the lifeblood from their Celtic neighbors. This time, however, as signaled by her title (“Mona” is the Roman name for the Isle of Man), her focus was squarely on Britain’s relationship with her adopted island. Specifically, her “Address to Mona” channels the surge in anti-British sentiment on the historically independent Isle of Man since 1829, when the Crown had assumed administrative control over the island and raised the prospect of bringing its traditionally low customs duties in line with those of the rest of the United Kingdom (Belchem 18–32). Revealing just how fully she had come to identify with the Manx in less than four years among them, Margaret adopts the tones of the Old Testament prophetess in imploring her neighbors to rouse from their “deadly” slumber lest they awake to find their culture and economy are in ruins and their cherished “Independence is gone.”