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In her urban eclogue "London's Summer Morning," published in The Morning Post on 23 August 1800, Mary Robinson depicts the metropolis as a kaleidoscopic spectacle where "ev'ry shop displays its varied trade" while "the sun / Darts burning splendour on the glitt'ring pane, / Save where the canvas awning throws a shade / On the gay merchandize."1 Similarly, in the first of her essays on the "Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England," also published in August 1800 in the Monthly Magazine, she presents London as "the great emporium of commerce" and "the busy mart of literary traffick."2 One of the most acute observers of metropolitan life and culture at the end of the eighteenth century, Robinson creates a varied gallery of images of a commercialized and culturally thriving urban setting. And this archive acquires a peculiarly specific relevance if we consider that, for many commentators at the time, Robinson herself embodied a culture dominated by spectacle, commerce, consumption, and the predominance of luxury.3
Her detractors easily drew the connection between the author and immoral luxurious expenditure since, as a regular figure in more or less reputable London circles, Robinson was repeatedly associated with the worst excesses of the current cult of fashion and self-display. Her numerous critics turned her into a personification of luxury, as well as a symbol of flaunted consumption, spectacularity, and errant sexuality.4 Between the end of her affair with the Prince of Wales in 1781 and the closing decade of the century, satirical prints (for instance, James Gillray's "The Thunderer" of 1782) and verbal attacks (such as Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females, 1798) provided ample confirmation that the actress, writer, and one-time royal mistress was an embodiment of irregular behavior and luxurious excess, a powerfully disturbing persona of the eighteenth-century cliché of the irresponsible female consumer.5
Returning to this complex intersection of consumption and identity, rich both in personal intimations and public resonance, this essay seeks to recover and assess the relevance of luxury in Robinson's acts of discursive self-presentation and self-construction. In particular, it aims to throw light on those textual mechanisms by which Robinson's Memoirs (1801) rescues luxury from hostile images of the author. In her autobiography, Robinson harnesses luxury to a...