ABSTRACT
Born in Wakefield, the only sickly child in an impoverished but otherwise healthy family of twelve children, Mary Hutton seemed destined to prove Wordsworth's melancholy prognosis as fact: 'We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness' ('Resolution and Independence'). A number of eulogistic occasional poems are addressed to royalty (see, for example, ‘Wrote upon the Marriage of our Gracious Queen’, ‘On the Birth of the Princess Royal’ and ‘On the Queen’s Second Providential Escape from the Hand of an Assassin’). Cottage Tales and Poems (1842) even bears a royal imprimatur—the name of the Queen Dowager, Charlotte, heads what is otherwise an extremely modest list of subscribers. Elsewhere in Hutton’s three published volumes, the material largely conforms to conventional moralistic or Wordsworthian locodescriptive models. Hutton’s most intense response is fired by her kinship with the poor and dispossessed: ‘unfostered flowers’ like John Clare and James Hogg, abused victims like Madame Lavalette.
