Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (10 page)

romso - PT

cal relationship in which they could come to know her without being

known themselves” (193).

lioteket i

Readers of the Florizel and Perdita novels did not need to be

convinced that they contained “the genuine copies of letters which

sitetsbib

passed” between the lovers in order to believe that, through reading

them, they could come to know the “real” Florizel and Perdita. What

they could come to know, however, varied according to the projects

of the books and the times of their publication. These early novels

are similar in tone to the popular “Tête-à-tête” columns in
Town and

Country Magazine
, which provided some of the earliest background

information on celebrity courtesans like Robinson. The tête-à-têtes

published accounts of illicit, often adulterous affairs, illustrated by a

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

pair of miniatures depicting the parties, usually in profile and facing

one another.
Town and Country
published two tête-à-têtes devoted to

.palgra

Robinson, one in May of 1780 and one in January of 1781. The first

chronicles her affair with an unnamed peer.20 The second, “Memoirs

om www

of the illustrious HEIR and the fair OPHELIA,” provides a brief

biography of Robinson, concentrating, as was typical for the tête-

à-têtes, on her origins and progress as a courtesan. The article con-

cludes with her affair with the Prince, who, the author alleges, fell

yright material fr

in love after seeing her play Ophelia.21 These articles, like the novels

Cop

that followed them, at once sentimentalize and satirize their subject

matter. They present the affairs as financial transactions between

highborn males and a woman of lower or uncertain status, while at

the same time idealizing both the relationships and the lovers. As

Cindy McCreery has shown, the tête-à-tête articles had to accomplish

a variety of tasks, reflecting the diversity of their readership and the

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 30

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 30

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

31

complexity of attitudes toward aristocracy and celebrity at the end of

the eighteenth century. Aimed at bourgeois and aristocratic readers,

and at women as well as men (although the identified reader was rec-

ognizably male), the tête-à-têtes worked as satire, puffery, and moral

tales. While implicitly critical of privileged males’ vice and “corrup-

tion of the lower orders,” they “also appealed to middle-class readers’

curiosity about an exotic sector of society very different from their

own,” encouraging “those outside elite London society to feel that

they remained in touch with its progress” (“Keeping Up with the
Bon

Ton
” 224, 228).

In the case of the Robinson articles, unlike the majority of tête-

veConnect - 2011-04-02

à-têtes, the authors devote as much attention to the woman’s history

algra

as to the man’s.22 “Memoirs of the Doating Lover and the Dramatic

Enchantress” presents Robinson sympathetically as a selective cour-

tesan. She repeatedly disarms “suitors of the first rank and fortune,”

romso - PT

who assume she is available for sale to the highest bidder and treat her

“with as little ceremony as if she had been a prostitute by profession.”

lioteket i

Judging their offers as “base and abject,” she rejects them “with a

proper contempt.” The author’s conclusion, “[t]hus we find the

sitetsbib

Dramatic Enchantress was not so easy a conquest as many imagined”

(235), allows his readers to share in Robinson’s intellectual triumph

over the “many” who blunder because they lack the discrimination

to recognize her worth. “Memoirs of the Illustrious Heir and the

Fair Ophelia” is more conventional in its treatment of Robinson’s

sexuality, calling her “our too susceptible heroine” (10) and attribut-

ing her first fall to the disappointments occasioned by an early and

hasty marriage. Once fallen, she is more pragmatic as a courtesan

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

than as a bride, calculating on the beauty that had made her sus-

ceptible to a faithless husband “as the means . . . of raising her from

.palgra

her wretched condition and of literally clothing and feeding them

both” (10–11). She uses her marriage to facilitate and cover her sex-

om www

ual commerce, which the author figures as entrapment: she employs

“the shadow of a husband to conceal her designs” and allow her to

“overpower unguarded hearts, before they were sensible of their dan-

ger” (10). This is a more calculating Robinson than the proud beauty

yright material fr

who turned away ready money in the first article, but she is still not

Cop

tainted by promiscuity. Although “courted by persons of the first

distinction . . . her connexions were at least contained within a narrow

circle, when our hero first beheld her” (11). This attempt to distin-

guish genteel concubinage from prostitution, as Laura Runge points

out, was typical both of contemporary anti-adultery discourse and of

Robinson’s own self-representations. Throughout her career, Runge

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 31

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 31

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

32

R o y a l R o m a n c e s

points out, “Robinson resisted the label of ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute,’

and specifically narrated the development of her subjectivity in oppo-

sition to those categories” (564), aligning her “wage-earning labor

with authorship and acting, but not with trade in sex” (575).

Both articles represent Robinson semi-sympathetically, while

still providing the peep into the private compartments of a sexually

engaged celebrity that texts such as the tête-à-têtes promised. Their

resulting tonal instability reflects the ambivalence of voyeurism and

of the voyeur’s attitude toward the viewed object, at once objectifi-

cation and covert identification, by turns masturbatory, reverential,

and derisive. The voyeurism of these texts also shades their satire,

veConnect - 2011-04-02

which is both satire and not satire, depending on whether the reader

algra

identifies as a social critic or a celebrity watcher (McCreery points

out that readers of the tête-à-têtes could be classed as both). This

generic complexity is clearest in the novels, for which voyeurism is a

romso - PT

larger part of their projects. The tête-à-têtes, despite their title, are

not private, intimate accounts.23 Through their rhetoric the authors

lioteket i

position their heroes and heroines as objects, not subjects. They are

exposés: their authors claim to publicize facts rather than confessions

sitetsbib

or correspondence. The tête-à-têtes are secondary sources, designed

for those who are content to have their information distilled for

them. Their satire, when it appears, is in the control of its author,

who constructs it
as
satire, rather than allowing it to emerge from

an ironic distance between letter writer and reader. “The Memoirs

of the Illustrious Heir” opens with a discussion of royalty and suc-

cession that, in its evocation of Henry IV, is critical of the Prince,

but only if not taken at face value. A royal heir, the writer argues, is

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

a projection created by the “distempered fancy” of a populace that

fondly hopes he will deliver it “from all those calamities and inconve-

.palgra

niencies” blamed on the current monarch, and persuaded to believe

“that he really possesses those excellencies” with which it invests

om www

him. When he “enters into office,” however, “the heaven-born youth

is found to be an erring man,” and the fickle people “look back with

regret to the once execrated times of his predecessor.” This con-

demnation of the monarchical system anticipates Hazlitt’s 1818 “On

yright material fr

the Regal Character,” except that the critique here is so widespread,

Cop

comprehending both royalty and populace, it verges on political

nihilism. The author’s assurance that “[h]appily the many amiable

qualities of the Heir, who is the subject of this memoir, afford great

reason to conclude that no such disappointment can ensue in regard

to him” (9) has already been upended by his detailed generalizations.

He enacts the unrealistic hopes of the populace, and incorporates the

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 32

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 32

10/22/2010 6:03:01 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:01 PM

C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

33

readers’ expectations into the fantasy. It is still up to the reader to

decide whether this is satire or unambiguous praise, but this decision

depends more upon his discrimination than his information. If he is

a careful reader, he will get the illogic in the author’s introduction

and recognize that the article offers at least the possibility that the

Prince’s virtues are as fantastic as the claim that the lovers, in January

1781, “continue to reciprocate the finest feelings of which human

beings are susceptible” (11).

The irony of that last line reverts to a dependence on the informa-

tion of the reader, who either knows or doesn’t know that the affair is

already over. Readers of the tête-à-têtes, in order to get their nuances,

veConnect - 2011-04-02

needed to be more educated consumers than readers of the novels,

algra

who were not being asked either to trust or to judge their editors’

information to the same extent. Once these readers have decided on

the letters’ authenticity (or once they have willingly suspended their

romso - PT

disbelief, and accepted the narratives of discovery offered by the edi-

tors), they are granted an access that appears nearly unmediated.24

lioteket i

This fiction of direct engagement comes from what Russett describes

as the “materiality of the recovered text . . . and its occultation of the

sitetsbib

author-function” (28). Because “the naked letter cannot be found,

only fantasized” (Russett 27), however, readers are already both in

possession and imagining the letters. This is particularly true of mass-

produced texts like
Budget
and
Effusions
or the pamphlet containing

the Cumberland letters. The latter articulates this contradiction on its

title page. Are these indeed the “genuine copies” of the letters? The

letters that were read aloud in court, after all, were copies made by

Lord Grosvenor, who then relinquished the originals so that he could

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

allow the affair to progress unimpeded for the time being. The let-

ters we hold in our hands are not
those
“genuine copies,” which were

.palgra

individual, hand-written documents, and not typeset over continuous

pages, numbered, and bound together. Nor are they the “genuine”

om www

letters, which were written in a different hand, probably crossed (they

were often interminably long), directed on the outside and presum-

ably franked. The reader’s fantasy of discovery (or recovery) requires

a voluntary elision of the process of reproduction—personal, juridi-

yright material fr

cal, commercial—that is expressed in the pamphlet’s oxymoronic

Cop

title.25 This elision becomes occultation in the case of the Florizel

and Perdita letters, which originated as impostures, albeit of docu-

ments that existed in fact. The absence of an author’s name means

that their readers must either accept at face value every statement

made by their putative writers, no matter how implausible, or under-

stand as hypocrisy or stupidity what in another kind of text—say,

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian