Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762) risked his neck. Your own and someone else’s. The writer, daughter of the Duke of Kingston, ran away from home when her parents showed their rejection of the man she wanted to marry. From the name of Edward Wortley Montagu They did not hang noble titles. The Englishman worked as a civil servant. He did not accumulate overwhelming fortunes or fertile lands throughout the United Kingdom. He was just another member of the British Parliament. Until 1716 he had to stop being one. Montagu was appointed ambassador of England to Constantinople and lady Mary, now his wife, headed with him towards the capital of the Ottoman Empire. For two years the writer explored Turkish soil and its social circles. There she found the remedy for the evil that years before had injured the skin of her face and stolen her eyelashes. Inoculation with the smallpox virus, she found in present-day Istanbul, allowed those vaccinated to avoid it. She was able to observe it in her own home. Her guinea pig was her son. In Spain, Letters from Istanbul (The Horizon Line) collects the story and description of the technique he learned during his months in Turkey.
Colored portrait (after a lithograph by A Deveria based on a painting by Christian Friedrich Zincke, 1830s) of the English aristocrat lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Dress, 1700s.
Photo Researchers/Getty Images
Healthy patriotism
Back in the United Kingdom, the scandal that arose around the initiative that Montagu promoted driven by a question of “patriotism,” he writes Isobel Grundy in biography Comet of the Enlightenment, made headlines in British newspapers with his surname. His popularity, he notes, became a celebrity. Social chroniclers and clerics took her for crazy. She was accused of putting her children in danger. She, that woman, was, they roared, an “unnatural” mother. The Princess Carolinewife of the future king george ii, However, he gave in to curiosity. After getting his father-in-law, Jorge I, accepted scientific experimentation with orphans and prisoners, decided to try the “graft” on her own daughters. For Montagu, then, medicine made a place in history. At the beginning of the 18th century, the writer became the vehicle that brought the technique after the smallpox vaccine to the United Kingdom. Until 1796, however, Edward Jenner He did not popularize his use.
From his childhood, Grundy explains, Montagu had to face adversity. After having completed her studies in Greek, Latin and French, she had to complete her training in a semi-self-taught manner, guided by the Bishop of Burnet, a friend of the family, and by searching herself among the volumes of her father’s library. . Of her mother, who had died when she was three years old, she was left with rumors and the relatives who raised her. At age 12, she wrote in her own memoirs, she hated cakes and pastries. At 20, she loves sweets. They were “too childish” for those who could already enjoy more solid pleasures.
Poet and gossip monger
His were born in the pen. If smallpox inoculation was recorded in the history of medicine, Montagu’s correspondence was inscribed in that of literature. Her letters, he said Horace Walpolecontained a “wit and style superior to all those he had read, except those of Madame de Sévigné”. Twenty years after his death, the poet Edward Young He even wanted to protect the public from what Montagu had entrusted to paper. For the pleasure of the author of Night ThoughtsExplain Lewis Melville in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Her Life and Letters, the letters were excessively “indecent.” Almost a century earlier, Montagu’s closest relatives would have shared that opinion with him. The year in which lady Mary left the family home to go to the altar, her sister destroyed the diary she had left behind. Decades later, her daughter would repeat her gesture. Although they claimed that she had deep respect for Montagu, the young lady Louisa Stuart was aware of the writer’s tendency toward hyperbole. “It was his habit to magnify all the scandalous rumors of the day without considering their veracity or even their probability, believing in certain stories that grew like mushrooms and had a short history, but which tended to defame people of immaculate reputation. Now everything ends up being published and the name of lady Mary Wortley would have aroused curiosity. If these details had been made public, they would not have contributed to the betterment of the world nor would they have done justice to the memory of her.”
Milestones and rumors
Despite his weakness for gossip, in Constantinople Montagu put his pen at the service of observation. In the trial The prudent woman. Teachings of Turkish women The writer compared British customs with the Eastern ones that she was beginning to know. Her literary history was also filled with ballads and poems, which achieved such recognition, Grundy notes, that the Duke of Buckingham publicly opted for Montagu as his successor. Nicholas Rowe, last poet laureate of the kingdom. The prose fiction, like much of his correspondence, was unfinished or destroyed.
While her husband managed to build prestige and fortune in the coal industry, she made a dent in the poet’s public image. Alexander Pope, who, according to Grundy, had sent him more than fifty laudatory letters in which he compared his talent to that of Sappho. The poet even commissioned the painter Godfrey Kneller a portrait of the writer wearing a traditional Turkish costume that ended up hanging in one of her offices. The relationship of admiration, already reciprocal, ended up truncated. In The Dunciad, a three-volume satirical poem about British vulgarity and stupidity, readers guessed references to Montagu. Pope wanted, it was rumored, to take revenge on her after some of her intimate letters were leaked or after she, they also said, mocked a declaration of love from the poet. By hand or on a screen, the written word is carried by the devil.
2024-02-25 07:49:14
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