Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (2 page)

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C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

ix

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Introduction: The Royal Character in the Public Imagination

1

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1 Chronicles of Florizel and Perdita

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2 Wandering Royals

59

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3 The Novel, the Regency, and the Domestication

of Royalty

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4 Body Doubles in the New Monarchy

131

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Conclusion: The Late Queen and the Progress of Royalty

167

Notes

179

Works Cited

225

Index

235

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Ac k now l e d gm e n t s

Many of my colleagues in the English department at George Mason

University offered encouragement and advice, read drafts, and supplied

timely suggestions. These include Eric Eisner, Robert Matz, Erika

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Lin, Zofia Burr, Keith Clark, Deborah Kaplan, and Denise Albanese.

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Conversations with Teresa Michals and Alok Yadav sustained and

directed the writing of this book through every stage. Outside of

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my home institution, I am indebted to a community of scholars and

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friends whose interest, insight, and goodwill have guided the pro-

ject from its earliest beginnings. Included here are Laura George,

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Deborah Denenholz Morse, Mary Jean Corbett, Theresa Mangum,

Christine Kreuger, Silvana Colella, Jennifer Phegley, and the INCS

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community. Clare Simmons’s knowledge and wisdom, as always, have

been invaluable. I do not know what this book would have been like

without Mark Schoenfield’s tireless, intelligent advice and friendship.

I am grateful for the support and good humor of a long list of col-

leagues and friends, including but not limited to Sara King, Steven

Weinberger, Lisa Koch, Tamara Harvey, Katharina Fuerst, Harald

Grieshammer, Patricia Lopez, and Arlene Bubak. Priscilla Tolkein

provided delightful dinners and more delightful conversation in

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Oxford during the early stages of research. The generous support of

my parents, Verlyn and Kenneth Flieger, and of Vaughn Howland,

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made this book possible, as did two travel grants from the George

Mason University English department. To Marilyn Gaull’s insight as

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a reader and editor I owe more than I can say. And finally to my hus-

band Steve and my children Nicholas and Maia, for their love and

support, my undying love and gratitude. A portion of Chapter two

originally appeared as “Managing Propriety for the Regency: Jane

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Austen Reads the Book” (
Studies in Romanticism
48: 279–299). I

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am grateful to the Trustees of Boston University for their permission

to reprint it here.

1. Print:
King Henry VIII
(Lewis Marks, 1820), ms page 237, all

permissions; credit to The City of London, London Metropolitan

Archives.

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x

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

2. Print: “Honi. Soit. Qui. Mal. Y. Pense.” (Theodore Lane, 1821),

ms page 296, all permissions; credit to The Huntington Library.

3. Article: “Managing Propriety for the Regency: Jane Austen Reads

the Book” (
Studies in Romanticism
48: 279–299); credit to The

Trustees of Boston University.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

Th e Roya l C h a r ac t e r

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i n t h e P u bl ic

I m agi n at ion

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In November 1815, Jane Austen visited Carlton House at the invita-

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tion of the Regent’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke. A few days after

the visit she wrote him a carefully worded note:

Sir: I must take the liberty of asking You a question—Among the

many flattering attentions which I recd from you at Carlton House

on Monday last, was the Information of my being at liberty to dedi-

cate any future work to HRH the P.R. without the necessity of any

Solicitation on my part. Such at least, I beleived [sic] to be your words;

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but as I am very anxious to be quite certain of what was intended, I

intreat you to have the goodness to inform me how such a Permission

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is to be understood, & whether it is incumbent on me to shew my

sense of the Honour, by inscribing the Work now in the Press, to H.

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R. H.—I shd be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or

Ungrateful.

The work in press was
Emma
, which Austen had completed about six

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months earlier. Clarke’s reply was also carefully worded, although his

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care was dictated not by the fear of giving offense but by the need to

make an imperative look like a choice: “It is certainly not
incumbent

on you to dedicate your work now in the Press to His Royal Highness:

but if you wish to do the Regent that honour either now or at any

future period, I am happy to send you that permission which need not

require any more trouble or solicitation on your Part” (
Letters
296).

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2

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

Austen had her answer. When
Emma
appeared in December 1815,

the dedication page read:

TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE PRINCE REGENT,

THIS WORK IS,

BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S PERMISSION,

MOST RESPECTFULLY

DEDICATED,

BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S

DUTIFUL

AND OBEDIENT

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HUMBLE SERVANT,

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THE AUTHOR.

The correctness of the language highlights the irony of the dedica-

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tion, which is not only that it was made under compulsion.
Emma
is

an odd novel to dedicate to a monarch.1 In its
Bildungsroman
plot,

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Austen criticizes the narcissism and decries the isolation of those

who inherit rather than earn their status. Emma’s “disadvantages” at

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the start of the novel include “the power of having rather too much

her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself”

(
Emma
55). The highest-ranking woman in her community, Emma

has no natural peers and surrounds herself instead with sycophants

whose “ignorance is hourly flattery” and whose “delightful inferior-

ity” militates against self-improvement (80). This is political rhetoric

anchored to domestic realism. Emma’s narcissism is the same one that

William Hazlitt describes in his 1817 indictment of monarchy, “On

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the Regal Character,” and it carries the same dangers. Royal narcis-

sism is the “glare of Majesty reflected from their own persons on the

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persons of those about them that fixes” the “attention” of monarchs

and “makes them blind and insensible to all that lies beyond that nar-

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row sphere” (Hazlitt 336). Emma is not only a monarch in this sense;

she is a regent. Nominally deferring to an infirm and nearly imbecilic

father, she settles all questions herself and to her own satisfaction.

Emma is more “mistress” of her father’s “house” than she would be

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of any husband’s (117). S he reigns alone, and the trajectory of the

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novel moves her from this position of unstable supremacy to one of

married submission.

Why this critique—even implicit—of monarchy? Why should

Austen write a novel of manners with a recognizably conservative

bent (marry the heroine to her most vocal critic, swallow up her prop-

erty in his, and in the process shore up the preeminence of the rural

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

3

gentry)2 in the language of the opposition? Austen came from a fam-

ily of Tories. The Regent had fixed the Tories as the party of the mon-

archy when he retained his father’s government in 1811. Plenty of

Tories disliked and disapproved of him, but they were comparing him

unfavorably with the King, who, despite his dementia, was an icon of

conservatism and national stability. Inasmuch as Austen’s treatment

of Emma anticipates Hazlitt’s rhetoric, she lumps King and Prince

together. For Hazlitt, the son’s profligacy is part of the same malaise

that produces the father’s imbecility—both are inherent in the insti-

tution of monarchy. For Austen too, Emma’s errors arise from a dan-

gerous superiority—of mind, person, and position—compounded by

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a father’s frailty. That it would make sense in 1815 to link the interests

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of domestic realism to the rhetoric of republicanism has to do with

the place monarchy held in the imagination of the English public.

In
Royal Romances
, I look at representations of monarchs and

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