"The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers": Marvell's portrait of tender conscience

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003 by Samuels, Peggy

Competing claims to tenderness, beauty, innocence, and passivity are prevalent in the polemics of this period and can be seen vividly in some of the pamphlets connected to the occasions of Norwich guildhall sermons, presented at the election of new mayors.7 As public events that brought together ministers, towns-people, and city magistrates, the Norwich guildhall sermons of 1646 and 1647 became occasions for rather blunt commentary about the controversies surrounding the delays in the settlement of the kingdom. Marvell would certainly have been familiar with the broader pamphlet controversy between Presbyterians and Independents, and it is likely that he would have been familiar with pamphlets arising out of significant political controversies in the most important city of East Anglia, Norwich, especially those associated with the election of a new mayor. Although we do not know precisely the date of Marvell's return from the Continent, we do know that he was in the neighboring county of Cambridgeshire in December of 1647 and may have been present in late 1646 in relation to the sale of some family land at Meldreth just north of Cambridge.8 Aside from the pamphlets themselves being available in London as well as Norwich, the controversies surrounding the June 1647 sermon would have been a likely part of any local person's attempt to understand the quickly changing fluctuations of power between Army, Scottish Presbyterians, Parliament and King as first the Presbyterians, then the Army, took control of the King's person. In addition, Philip Nye, an Independent minister in Marvell's home town of Hull, played an active role in the pamphlet controversy between Independents and Presbyterians and is named as having stolen away papers that would have provided evidence of a broken covenant between Norwich Presbyterians and Independents (Vicars, Schismatic 17). Thus, it is likely that in addition to Marvell's familiarity with the broader discourse between Independents and Presbyterians, he would have been aware of the Norwich controversies.

By looking at self-representations and accusations in these pamphlets, we can gain access to the way Marvell reuses images to create a portrait of his contemporaries. "The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers" resignifies the claim to be delicate, sweet, passive, and tender and to harbor only "simplicity." The poem is part of the larger cultural project that James Loxley has described, in which civil war writers attempted to fend off or oppose polemical misnamings (111-18). "Little T.C." undertakes to undo the misnaming of "tender consciences" and uses all of its poetic resources to iconoclastically undermine that term's image of innocence and to reposition the audience in relation to it. The poem uses both the image of femininity and the figure of the chaste Diana that was associated with the Independents. The lyric also draws attention to other terms and images in the conflicts that were intensifying in 1646-47: the separation of pure from even more pure, the competing visions of a reformation of errors, a reformation that becomes tyrannical in a move to crush all opposition by means of a wheel with eyes, and the expectation that new violence will erupt. The poet combines the images that had been associated with Presbyterians, Independents, and sectarians, warning that those sectarians who claim tenderness will "spin" or be uncloaked to reveal a Presbyterian-like violent pose.