page_title: Christopher Smart
section_title: The Midwife
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher Smart / Biography / The Midwife
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page to Christopher Smart's magazine, The Midwife.
context_page_description: Christopher Smart, was an English poet.
  He was a major contributor to two popular magazines and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.
  Smart was infamous as the pseudonymous midwife "Mrs. Mary Midnight" and widespread accounts of his father-in-law, John Newbery, locking him away in a mental asylum for many years over Smart's supposed religious "mania". Even after Smart's eventual release, a negative reputation continued to pursue him as he was known for incurring more debt than he could repay; this ultimately led to his confinement in debtors' prison until his death.
  Smart's two most widely known works are A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, both at least partly written during his confinement in asylum. However, Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939 and A Song to David received mixed reviews until the 19th century. To his contemporaries, Smart was known mainly for his many contributions in the journals The Midwife and The Student, along with his famous Seaton Prize poems and his mock epic The Hilliad.
context_section_description: The Midwife, first published on 16 October 1751 and lasting until April 1753, was produced primarily by Smart while he worked on The Student. This magazine was popular enough to be published in four editions. To hide his identity for practical and humorous reasons, he adopted the persona of a midwife, also known as a "Mrs. Midwife" in slang, and called this persona "Mrs. Mary Midnight".
  When his poem "Night Piece" was attacked by William Kenrick in Kapelion, or Poetical Ordinary, possibly out of a prearranged publicity stunt, Smart used The Midwife in December, 1750, to attack back at Kenrick and promised an Old Woman's Dunciad to be written against the other poet. However, Kenrick beat Smart to the use of the title and printed his own in January, 1751. This feud lasted as attacks published in a few issues of The Midwife, but it soon died out when Smart focused his attention to writing a prologue and epilogue for a production of Othello and using the magazine to promote it.
  His attention slowly shifted away from The Midwife when he wrote for, and won, the "Seatonian Prize" for his On the Immensity of the Supreme Being and when he began working with Newbery's children's magazine, The Lilliputian Magazine. However, Smart returned to this character full force when he established The Old Woman's Oratory; or Henley in Petticoats in December 1751. The Oratory included Smart playing as Mrs. Midnight, various songs and dances, animal acts, and "miscellany" acts. The Oratory was successful, and was completely redone on 21 January 1752. However, not everyone enjoyed the show, and Horace Walpole described the performance as "the lowest buffoonery in the world even to me who am used to my uncle Horace." Late in 1752, Smart finished and published a collection of his works as Poems on Several Occasions, which resulted in the end of the Oratory and The Midwife.
caption: Title page of The Midwife
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