The Prince of Wales and Mary Robinson meet on the pavement near a gate in a high brick wall. He wears a tailcoat, white breeches, and stockings, and offers her a purse. She wears a dress that has worn to rags and stands with stooped posture, gesturing towards her feet. Three playbills are pasted to the wall behind them; two titles are visible, they are 'Jane Shore' and 'Florizel and Perdita'. Below the image, the title is printed: 'Perdita upon her Last Legs.'

Perdita upon her last legs

Anonymous

1784

Etching

British Museum 1868,0808.5371

Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

In 1783, Mary Robinson became partially paralysed, possibly the result of a miscarriage.

This anonymous etching makes heartless play on her altered circumstances, and on the annuity she had been granted by the Prince of Wales. She begs him for money beneath two pointed playbills.

One advertises Florizel and Perdita, the adaptation of The Winter’s Tale in which she had originally caught George’s eye. The other is for Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore (1714), a tragic tale of another royal mistress, ‘Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s Style’.

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