"The Countess of Blessington.” [Wilde, Jane F.].
Dublin University Magazine XLV (1855) 333-53.
A review of The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington.
By R.R. Madden, M.R.I.A. 2 vols. 8vo. London: T.C. Newby. 1855.
 


Note: The Countess of Blessington was a frequently contributor to the annuals and edited several.  Click here to see her contributions to the annuals.
Page 342
 
It was in Lady Blessington’s time that the epidemic of illustrated annuals broke out in England, which raged with considerable flimsiness and platitude for about twenty years. Her ladyship of course became an editress; for, as her biographer asserts, with laudable candour, “she had a great facility for versification, and her verse was quite equal to the ordinary run of bouts rhymées.”

Besides, a titled editress was indispensable as nurse to the small literary budes of fashion that lisped their pretty twaddle in gilded annuals, while the lady herself loved celebrities and display; and –
 

“This occupation brought her into contact with almost every literary man of eminence in the kingdom, or of any foreign country who visited England. But it also involved an enourmous expense, far beyond any amount of remuneration derived from editing the works. It made a necessity for entertaining continually persons to whom she looked for contributions, or from whom she received assistance. It involved her, moreover, in all the drudgery of authorship, in all the turmoil of contention with publishers, communication with artists, and never-ending correspondence with contributors. In a word, it made her life miserable.”
The whole system of the annuals was, in fact, a speculation based upon personal vanity. Court beauties had their pictures engraved with (as Dickens describes) the traditional background of flower-pots; and then verses were ordered by the editor to suit these portraits. When the mothers of the nobility were exhausted, the annualists turned to the children of the nobility, whose portraits came out with impossible eyes and hair, white frocks, the flower-pot, and a dog. For them verses were in like manner ordered; and of course the sale was unprecedented. Thus, we find Lady Blessington petitioning a contributor, and really a man of genius, though he had caught the epidemic, Dr. William Beattie, for “three or four stanzas for the work named ‘Buds and Blossoms,’ to contain the portraits of all the children of the nobility–the children for the illustration are the three sons of the Duke of Buccleuch, and an allusion to the family would add interest to the subject.”
 
To the same poet, too yielding, perhaps, not to be made the prey of these infantile bores, she writes again with lamentable pertinacity: –
 

“Will you write me a page of verse for the portrait of Miss Forrester; the young lady is seated with a little dog on her lap, which she looks at rather pensively; she is fair, with light hair, and is in mourning.”
During the palmy days of the pensive annuals, Lady Blessington made about £2,000 a-year by them; for they had this advantage to editors, that contributors were seldom paid except where a great name was sought for, at any price, to look impressive in the index. Thomas Moore was offered £600 for one-hundred-and-twenty lines, in either prose or poetry, for “The Keepsake,” which he declined. But at length, “the public were surfeited with illustrated annuals. The perpetual glorification even of beauty became a bore; the periodical pœans, sung in honor of the children of the nobility ceased to be amusing. Lords and ladies ready to write on any subject, and fashionable editors and editresses, there was no dearth of; but readers were not to be had for love or money.” A failure in Lady Blessington’s income was the result.
 

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Page 346
 
. . . The biography of a woman is always sad – a war between feeling and destiny – but that of a gifted woman especially so; for high intellect and vivid passions are hard to rule, and tame, and formalise: and such exceptional natures seem to have a singular inaptitude for the contracted sphere within which society places them.

Even in the limited space of the current half-century, how many, if not wretched, at least unhappy hearts and blighted lives can be enumerated amongst those who possessed the fatal gift of intellect. Mrs. Hemans; the beautiful and most richly endowed Caroline Norton; Lady Lytton Bulwer, who seems to have flung down the gauntlet to male humanity with helpless rage; they only smile at her indignant sense of wrong, and bid her suffer and be silent. And saddest of all, lies “L.E.L.” in her death-sleep on that fatal foreign shore; but we cannot think beside such a grave, it is enough to weep.

All these lives were no doubt beautiful in their aurora light; but the moment they rose in mental power above the proscribed level of their sex, the lightning struck them.