WHEN Canon Adrian Empey unveils a memorial tablet to Mrs Laetitia Pilkington at St Ann's Church in Dawson Street, Dublin, tomorrow afternoon he will focus attention on one of the most remarkable Irish women of the 18th century.
Mrs Pilkington was the daughter of the Irish physician and obstetrician, Dr John van Lewen. She married a curate, the Rev Matthew Pilkington, a poet of some local fame. During their married life both became close friends of Dean Swift and Patrick Delany, but Swift abandoned them when Laetitia was divorced on grounds of adultery with no less a person than the handsome young surgeon Robin Adair.
Mrs Pilkington fled to London, where her friendships with the novelist Samuel Richardson, the playwright Colley Cibber, and the notorious manager Worsdale, led to the eventual publication of The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington in 1748.
These fed the public appetite for, in her words, "the most minute circumstances relating to the great" and took the form of a racy narrative full of detail, reminiscence and scandal about many more people than Jonathan Swift and his circle.
The Memoirs won a minor fame for the author although, despite threatening to name every married man who had propositioned her if they did not subscribe to the volumes, she was never to prosper.
The University of Georgia Press is now publishing a critical edition of the Memoirs by A.C. Archer, an American scholar specialising in Swift and other AngloIrish 18th century writers and a founding trustee of the American Society for 18th Century Studies.
To mark the publication, Archer, who believes that Mrs Pilkington has never been given the attention she deserves, has commissioned a memorial tablet from the Cork sculptor Ken Thompson.
On her deathbed in 1750, Mrs Pilkington insisted that she be buried with her father, and not her husband. While she claimed she had been made "the football of fortune", she hoped that if her son, Jack, should ever grow rich, he would erect a "little square, marble stone" with her own chosen inscription.
Jack, who spent most of his life in a debtors' prison, never grew rich. Yet at last her words are inscribed on the tablet at St Ann's Church where Mrs Pilkington lies in the crypt next to her beloved father.
The inscription reads: "In the crypt of this Church near the body of her honoured Father, John Van Lewen MD, lies the Mortal Parts of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, Whose Spirit hopes for that Peace, thro the infinite Merit of Christ, which a cruel and merciless World never afforded her."
On the back of the tablet in tiny lettering are added the words: Advena Posuit MCMXVII - A Stranger Set This Up.