This volume contains four poetry collections bound in leather with a gold-lettered spine label reading “Poems by Mrs. R. Trench.” The poetry collections contained within include:

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• Campaspe, an Historical Tale and Other Poems. Southampton: Printed by T. Baker, 1815.

• Aubrey, in Five Cantos. Southampton: Printed by T. Baker, 1818.

• Laura’s Dream: or, the Moonlanders. London: Printed for J. Hatchard, 1816.

• Ellen: A Ballad: Founded on a Recent Fact. And other poems. Bath: Printed by Richard Cruttwell, 1815.

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Their unnamed author, Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench, was born 1768 in Dublin. Mrs. Trench would experience the death of her parents and a series of aged guardians as a child, and as an adult, her first husband and four of her nine children would precede her in death. Trench uses poetic engagement to reckon with personal mourning, drawing in themes from Irish folklore and the Spenserian tradition.¹ Recent revisionist scholarship based on archival records has corrected the sanitizing, revisionist biography of her letters constructed by her son, Richard Chenevix Trench, which lessened the emotional duress of the loss of her children and omitted certain celebrity relationships.²

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While Trench’s name is withheld from the title pages of these poetry collections, given the highly autobiographical nature of her early poetry, it is likely that Trench neither sought to obfuscate nor capitalize on her authorship.³ In the New York Public Library copies of Trench’s poetry, many are noted “Not Published” in Trench’s hand; in 1820, excerpts of Laura’s Dream: or, the Moonlanders made a cameo in Literary Gazette, which noted the collection had been “printed about three years ago, but for private reasons, we understand, withdrawn from circulation.”∗ Despite the limited circulation of Trench’s poetry, the editors go on to note that the collection “possesses considerable merit.”º Laura’s Dream has since been read as science fiction for its depiction of a lunar society through the conventions of the pastoral, predating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.ª

 

Pictured to the right is marginalia added to the poem “On the

Loss of Elizabeth Melesina Trench, an only Daughter, in her

fifth year,” dated in manuscript November 3, 1816, from Ellen,

reading: “There is no suggestion in the account of the deep

loved subject of the following lines, but no attempt is made

to paint her heart, for, disposition at which were so engaging

as entirely to elude description.”∠The series of poems

included in Ellen also contained substantive alterations to the

printed text: the first printed lines of Kresge’s copy,

for example, read:“Sleep her sweetest opiate shed,” but

replaced by handwritten corrections:“The sweetest dews of Sleep are shed.”

 

 

The letters of Mary Leadbeater, a personal friend of Melesina, note that

Trench’s “personal trials did not cause her to relax in her consideration

for others. She applied the profits of the sale of her beautiful poems of

‘Ellen’ and ‘Campaspe’ to acts of benevolence, by assisting some

charitable friends in England; and our poor people also partook of her

bounty.”∪ Indeed, the title page of “Ellen” notes that the ballad is

“sold for the benefit of the House of Protection.”

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OU’s copy has been cobbled together, evidenced by its discontinuous

pagination and distinct coloration separating the disparate poems.

Because of the difference in order of the poems and the difference in

emendations bound into volumes, it is likely that these composite

volumes were “prepared at different times, perhaps for different

purposes, “and very likely without Trench’s access to copies of the

notations and alterations she had inserted in other copies.”×

Hand-corrections of the Princeton Library’s copy of Laura’s Dream,

for example, available in Google Books, contain emendations similar to

but not verbatim of those found in OU’s copy. Alternately, New York

Public Library’s volume of Trench’s poetry contains the four poetry

collections plus four other pamphlets.∇

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¹David H. Radcliffe, "Laura's Dream; or, the Moonlanders," 

Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579-1830,

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=37330.

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²Katharine Kittredge, “Missing Immortality: The Case of Melesina Trench (A Neglected,

Celebrated, Dismissed and Rediscovered Woman Poet of the Long Eighteenth Century.”

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, 1 (2011).

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³Trench would go on to write….

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∗Laura’s Dream; or, the Moonlanders,” The London Literary Gazette and

Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc. June 24,1820, 403-4.

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º ibid.

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ªKittredge, "Missing Immortality."

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∠For more on women writing within the Romantic tradition, see Stephen C.

Behrendt's British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community. Johns Hopkins UP, 2009.

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∪The Leadbeater papers; The annals of Ballitore, by Mary Leadbeater,

with a memoir of the author: Letters from Edmund Burke heretofore unpublished:

and the correspondence of Mrs. R. Trench and Rev. George Crabbe with Mary Leadbeater. 359

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×Stephen C. Behrendt, “Regency Women Writers, the Archives, and the Task(s),”

Keats-Shelley Journal. 55 (2006): 48–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30210642.

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∇ibid.