Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (50 page)

romso - PT

daily evinces itself among all classes of the people” (“Present State of

the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England,”

PMLA
119.1 [2004] 118: quoted in Mole 189).

lioteket i

18. Beginning in 1762, Garrick introduced a number of innovations,

most of which had either the intention or the effect of moving the

sitetsbib

watchers further away from the players. He shifted the audience off

the stage to make more room for the newer style perspective scenery,

and he replaced the traditional chandeliers with oil lamps, whose

intensity could be increased by the use of reflectors, making the stage

and actors more visible from farther away.

19. Both Chris Cullens and Craciun write about the rising discourse of

sexual dimorphism in the later eighteenth century and its impact on

representations of female celebrity and professionalism. Increasingly

throughout the century, anxieties about the delicate balance between

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

public and private were “grounded in women’s bodies” (Craciun 55;

see also Cullens 268). For Craciun the dialectic between bourgeois

.palgra

domesticity and sexualized public display in women crystallizes for

Robinson in the figure of Marie Antoinette, whom Robinson met in

om www

1782 and about whom she wrote in her
Monody to the Memory of the

Late Queen of France
(1793) and in her
Memoirs
. In both texts, she

suggests, Robinson celebrates equally the Queen’s public sexuality

and her (ostensibly) private bourgeois domesticity. “Robinson . . . iden-

yright material fr

tified with the Queen’s position as a public female figure in an era

Cop

when this position was sexually suspect, and increasingly defined as

dangerous and unnatural” (83).

20. The full title of this article is “HISTORIES of the Tete-a-Tete

annexed: or, Memoirs of the DOATING LOVER and the

DR AMATIC ENCHANTRESS.” The likeliest candidate for the

doting lover, in May 1780, is Lord Malden, although the timing of

the tête-à-têtes was sometimes off (the January 1781 tête-à-tête ends

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_08_not.indd 184

9780230616301_08_not.indd 184

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

N o t e s

185

with the assurance that the Prince and Robinson “continue to recip-

rocate the finest feelings of which human beings are susceptible”

[11], several months after their relationship had ended). Claire Brock

identifies the hero of the article as the Prince’s friend Sir John Lade

(84), who is mentioned anecdotally in the article, but references to

“his lordship” would rule out a baronet. It’s also possible that the

“doating lover” is a fabrication. McCreery points out that the tête-

à-têtes had a reputation for being inventions, and suggests that the

editors may have occasionally “permitted wholly fictional
tête-à-têtes

to be inserted to maintain reader interest” (“Keeping Up with the

Bon Ton
” 211).

21. The choice of Ophelia reflects the tête-à-têtes’ emphasis on sexual-

veConnect - 2011-04-02

ity. Ophelia is a much more sexualized Shakespearean heroine than

algra

Perdita, whose name in the play is ironic.

22. McCreery observes that most women appeared in tête-à-têtes as “a

pretext to a discussion” of their “aristocratic lover’s personal history”

romso - PT

and were often “dismissed in the articles . . . without censure of their

behaviour, but likewise without interest in their individual personal-

ity” (217). An exception to this rule was the case of “[m]ore famous,

lioteket i

established women,” whose “individual accomplishments” occasion-

ally “overcame the handicap of their sex.” Women like Catharine

sitetsbib

Macaulay “were treated as the primary characters in the histories”

(220).

23. McCreery suggests that the phrase “tête-à-tête” was chosen as the

title for the series because it both conveyed and replicated intimacy:

“The series embodied both the literal and figurative definitions of

the term ‘
tête-à-tête’.
The illustrations showed the man and woman

literally ‘head to head’, and the articles described their intimate ‘tête-

à-tête’ meetings” (208). Like the phrase “vis-à-vis,” which both

described a style of carriage in which passengers were “face-to-face”

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

and conveyed the potential for sexual intimacy that such carriage

rides implied, “tête-à-tête’s” mirror construction literalizes the inti-

.palgra

macy it conveys.

24. The letters in the novels are always mediated to the extent that we

om www

accept that they have been edited. The editor of
Effusions of Love

footnotes his letters and provides translations where he thinks his

readers will need them. He also numbers them, and both editors

order their letters and alternate between writer and recipient so that

yright material fr

we can trace and understand their narrative. Accepting that the

Cop

letters have been edited, however, means embracing the fiction of

their authenticity. It means agreeing to believe that we are reading

the actual words of the writers, and not reportage as in the tête-à-

têtes.

25. Likewise, in
The Budget of Love
’s narrative of discovery, Perdita keeps

copies of her own letters to Florizel and reads them to her maid, who

then copies them yet again before reading them to her lover, who

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_08_not.indd 185

9780230616301_08_not.indd 185

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

186

N o t e s

persuades her to give them over to an editor to be typeset, bound,

and published.

26. Happily, his error in defrauding an innocent man of his conjugal

rights was of short duration: ten days from start to finish.

27. Florizel also writes letter 44 in French, and the editor translates this

one also. The translations are provided for the reader (Perdita does

not seem to have needed any help) and stress the cosmopolitan and

continental éclat of the main characters.

28. Robinson held on to the bond after relinquishing the letters, and

in 1783 Fox used it to negotiate an annuity of 500 pounds, half of

which would continue to be paid to her daughter after her death. As

with the letters, however, the bond’s value was more likely in what

veConnect - 2011-04-02

it revealed about the Prince (in this instance, bad faith) than in its

algra

enforceability as a legal document.

29. Walpole knew other details of the Prince’s life as well. He reported an

escapade at the home of Lord Chesterfield that certainly happened

romso - PT

(Walpole II. 361). The King makes this episode a subject of remon-

strance in a letter to his son dated May 6, 1781, and it appears again

in the 1784
Memoirs of Perdita
.

lioteket i

30. The prince’s equerry, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Lake, wrote to him

in January of 1781, warning him against “becoming the dupe of

sitetsbib

those who have no other design than to make use of you for their

own advantage.” This is before Robinson had made her blackmail

threat but during the time when Malden and Hotham were negoti-

ating for the letters. Lake does not mention Robinson by name, but

it is clear that he is thinking of potential damage to the royal fam-

ily from the letters: “Recollect what a large family yours is and you

will see how necessary it is for you
all
to live well together, & I am

thoroughly convinc’d that it is for your own interest so to do, & that

you will by that means not only enjoy more real comfort but that you

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

will be more at your ease in every particular. I make no doubt of a

most excellent & sensible speech of the Duke of Cumberland’s hav-

.palgra

ing struck you as forcibly as it did me; it was, let our family stick by

each other, we need not fear the world.” The Duke had recently, and

om www

briefly, reconciled with his brother the King. The paragraph imme-

diately following this begins with “one wish more, which is to beg

that you will not write any more letters to a certain sort of ladies, &

I should hope that what you have already suffer’d will be a sufficient

yright material fr

warning. . . .” (Aspinall 45).

Cop

31. This is the episode Walpole describes in his journals. It shows up

again in
Memoirs of Perdita
, as “a kind of princely frolic, when in his

cups” that the editors “cannot forbear relating” (107)
.
The author of

Effusions
uses this story to stand for two separate adventures. In the

second iteration the Prince includes. “T—n” (probably Robinson’s

longtime lover, Banastre Tarleton, a friend of the Prince of Wales)

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_08_not.indd 186

9780230616301_08_not.indd 186

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

10/22/2010 6:05:09 PM

N o t e s

187

and Anthony St. Leger, whom Walpole identifies as having been at

Lord Chesterfield’s.

32. Siddons returned to Drury Lane in 1782 after touring in the prov-

inces for several years. The reference to her as a phoenix rising from

the ashes of her earlier efforts (she had been hired first in 1775 but

fired because of poor reviews) may suggest a later dating for the novel.

Michael Gamer and Terry F. Robinson point out that the debate

over whether Siddons’ “brilliance would prove lasting or ephemeral”

(219) dominated the London newspapers during the 1782–83 sea-

son. The other possibility is that Florizel and Perdita are referring to

her growing reputation in the provinces. Perdita’s comparison of her

with Mrs. Yates (“she wants the fine pathos of Mrs. Yates”), whom

veConnect - 2011-04-02

Siddons identified as a rival during her first stint at Drury Lane, sug-

algra

gests that this is not yet the Siddons who took the theatrical world by

storm in the 1780s. Stone and Kahrl discuss Siddons’ early years at

Drury Lane in
David Garrick: A Critical Biography
(352).

romso - PT

33. Stanley Ayling starkly outlines the disastrous effects of the Marriage

Act in his biography of George III: “Thus a law had been enacted

whose paternalistic severity, coupled with the interpretation, long to

lioteket i

be preserved, that Protestant royalty must wed none but Protestant

royalty, was to make it impossible for George III’s sons to marry the

sitetsbib

women of their choice (in effect to limit it to German princesses); to

bastardise the children of Augustus, Duke of Sussex; to persuade the

Prince of Wales into the most disastrous of marriages; intolerably to

limit the marital field for the King’s daughters, so that they were forced

either into prolonged spinsterhood or into subterranean liaisons; and

in general to exacerbate the quarrels and resentments that were in any

case to be expected in so large and vulnerable a family” (214).

34. The editor upends the “lost manuscript” claims that introduce the

earlier novels, by providing no explanation for how the letters came

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

into his possession and by undercutting his own authority as edi-

tor. The volume opens with the following circular dedication: “To

.palgra

Himself. Being as good a judge of the subject, as any other man in

the kingdom, this publication is dedicated, with the greatest respect

om www

and regard, by the Editor.” Given the reference to the Duke of

Cumberland’s efforts to recover the letters,
Poetic Epistle
was prob-

ably written after the relationship had ended and Robinson and the

Prince were negotiating for the letters. Cumberland did intercede on

yright material fr

his nephew’s behalf, as the Prince reports in a letter to his brother in

Cop

April of 1781. The editor references these negotiations: “Hitherto all