Mariana Starke (?1762-1838) was best known in the nineteenth century as a travel writer. Her guidebooks, such as Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent (1820), give copious advice on sightseeing, routes, museums, and tipping, and were reissued in various forms throughout the nineteenth century. Starke is almost certainly the inventor of typographical rating system for tourist sights and destinations, which we now know under the guise of "four-star restaurants" or "five-star hotels": she accorded one, two, or three exclamation points to each painting in a gallery, so that the footweary tourist would know which ones merited his limited attention. When the information in her guidebooks was absorbed, without attribution, into the lucrative and famously successful Handbooks for Travellers series begun in the 1830s by publisher John Murray, Starke began to fall into an obscurity that has only now begun to be remedied. (1)

The Sword of Peace; or, a Voyage of Love, a sentimental comedy in five acts, was probably first performed in the private theater of drama patron Mary Champion Crespigny of Camberwell; it premiered at the Theatre Royal at Haymarket, with a prologue by George Colman the Elder, the theatre's manager, and an epilogue by George Colman the Younger, on Saturday, August 9, 1788, the last new piece of the summer season. It was performed six times in 1788 and four times in 1789. It received mixed reviews. The actors—Miss (Elizabeth) Farren, Mrs. (Stephen George) Kemble, and Mr. (John) Bannister, Jr.—were particularly praised, and a contemporary diarist records general applause for the play from a crowded house. (2) But Starke was also blasted for a lack of verisimilitude, and despite her efforts at self-defense, this opprobrium is still attached to the play's reputation as late as 1832. In her self-defense, Starke also denied a rumor that called her a grocer's daughter and an adventuress who wrote the play only to keep her family from starving. Her distress and embarrassment are palpable in the preface to the 2nd edition of Sword of Peace (1789) and in a letter to the Morning Chronicle, (3) and she declares her intention to disappear from the public gaze.

Because The Sword of Peace depicts the replacement of a corrupt British official in an unnamed India colony by a more just regime, it obliquely but unavoidably participates in the controversy over the impeachment of Warren Hastings, raging in the House of Commons at the time of the play's premiere, and comments on the recent replacement, in 1786, of Hastings as Governor-General of India by Lord Cornwallis. The Hastings trial served as a lightning rod for powerful, unresolved issues in British colonial policy and the class conflict of the late eighteenth century. Hastings' success and ruthlessness as a military leader, especially in the Rohilla War of 1774, forced Britons to recognize that the EIC, a mercantile enterprise, was in fact functioning as a government, with almost no accountability to recognized civil authorities. Corruption in the EIC was widespread, and salaries were so low that EIC personnel, often from the lowest classes of society, were almost invited to engage in private trade within India. The phenomenal wealth of the nabobs—Britons who returned to England enriched—led Horace Walpole to lament in 1773 that English identity was now lost in "a sink of Indian wealth" and exacerbated the fears of the aristocracy that their privileges were being usurped by these upstarts from the lower orders. Some hope was brought to the situation by the appointment of Cornwallis, who began implementing reforms as soon as he arrived in India in 1786. Starke's preface to the 1789 edition declares that all Anglo-Indians would immediately recognize in her character Northcote, the "noble and unbounded goodness" of Cornwallis. Even before she acknowledge this link, Starke's audience, fascinated by and saturated with the Hastings trial, could not have divorced a play about India from the figures of Hastings and Cornwallis.

In Starke's abolitionist subplot, Jefferys (spelled various ways), the head servant of the Moreton cousins, becomes intrigued by Caesar, an African slave owned by Mrs. Tartar as part of an extravagant system, in which one slave carries Jefferys' coat to another, who brushes it, and in which slaves carry the cards to the table and pick up the card tricks during a game played by indolent Anglo-Indian women. Jefferys buys Caesar, frees him, and instructs him in the meaning of true English liberty. Caesar cannot imagine any freedom better than serving such a kind master, so he remains in Jeffrey's' employ. Though she writes about the relatively small presence of African slaves in India, Starke capitalized on the current outrage against the Atlantic slave trade, marked by the founding in 1787 of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In May of 1788, the year of the play's premiere, William Pitt the Younger, the Prime minister, had persuaded the House of Commons to debate the slave trade in the next session; abolitionists responded by waging the largest petitioning campaign on a public matter Britain had ever seen. 1788 saw the minting of Josiah Wedgewood's famous medallion of the kneeling slave ("Am I not a man and a brother?") and the publication of numerous abolitionist poems, such as William Cowper's "Pity for Poor Africans" and Hannah More's Slavery, A Poem. As with her depiction of the changing of the guard in British India, Starke had her finger on the public pulse.

The apparent contradiction, to present-day scholars, between the conservative stance she takes on India and the radical abolitionist position, is fruitfully seen within the nationalist discourse of late eighteenth-century Britain. Starke's presentation of a myth of a restored English national identity is an oblique strategy for addressing practical political issues, such as the Hastings trial and the cause of abolitionism, a strategy that attempts to evade the disreputability of women discoursing about the masculine sphere of politics.

Notes

1. The Sword of Peace has recently been reprinted for the first time in a modern edition in volume five of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the Britihs Romantic Period, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). (back)
2. Mary Julia Young, Memoirs of Mrs. Crouch, including a retrospect of the stage during the years she performed , 2 vols. (London: James Asperne, 1806) vol. II, p. 45. (back)
3. Mariana Starke, 'Letter to The Morning Chronicle,' rpt. in Biographica Dramatica; or, a companion to the playhouse: containing historical and critical memoirs..., ed. David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed, and Stephen Jones, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812). (back)