Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (41 page)

seminated and designed for a more literate audience. John Gibson

Lockhart’s sixty-page pamphlet, “
Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron

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B o d y D o u b l e s i n t h e N e w M o n a r c h y

149

by John Bull,” published, like Lane’s prints, in the spring of 1821,

expresses the intersection of public and private discourse in the ongo-

ing institutionalization of Byron.28 The pamphlet was written in

response to Byron’s
Letter to John Murray
, commenting on William

Lisle Bowles’ edition of Pope, and includes a satirical paean,29 that

displaces its raptures onto a series of implicitly discredited, and fic-

tional, women:

How melancholy you look in the prints! Oh! yes, this is the true cast

of face. Now, tell me, Mrs. Goddard, now tell me, Miss Price, now

tell me, dear Harriet Smith, and dear, dear Mrs. Elton, do tell me,

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is not this just the very look, that one would have fancied for Childe

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Harold? Oh! what eyes and eyebrows!—Oh! what a chin!—well, after

all, who knows what may have happened. One can never know the

truth of such stories. Perhaps her
Ladyship
was in the wrong after all.

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(Strout 80)

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The imagined commentary of an imagined community reiterates the

public meanings of the dissolution of Byron’s marriage by deliberately

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confounding the private individual with those produced for public

consumption. The fictional characters of
Emma
and
Mansfield Park

mark as “true” Byron’s “melancholy . . . look in the prints” through its

association with and revelation of the character of Childe Harold.30

This pronouncement leads them to speculate on the “truth” behind

the “stories” of the separation from Lady By ron. Lockhart is doing

what Byron does in “Fare Thee Well!” (and what Lane’s unattributed

quotation of the poem emphasizes). He instances a poem, here
Childe

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Harold’s Pilgrimage
, as both testimony and transaction. The poem

verifies Byron publicly and is inserted—along with his “melancholy”

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cast of face—as evidence to be included in the debates about his mar-

riage. The “truth” and justness of his appearance in the prints are

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verified by their correspondence to what one “fancies.”

The same “one” who fantasizes By ron as Childe Harold then

both temporizes and eroticizes judgment: “One can never know the

truth of such stories”—a disingenuous claim, given that fancy has

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already been offered as an adequate replacement for verifiable knowl-

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edge. Presumably, one
can
know the truth of such stories in the same

way that one can verify Byronic melancholy by reference to Childe

Harold’s. Following this formula, one has only to read “The Bride

of Abydos” and “Parisina” to “know” these two poems as coded dis-

cussions of the poet’s affair with his half-sister Augusta, speculation

about which almost certainly constituted a part of “such stories.”31

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150

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

Lockhart’s follow up—“Perhaps her
Ladyship
was in the wrong

after all”—is doubly ironic. Her Ladyship cannot possibly be in the

wrong according to the speakers, because she understands and rep-

resents Byron using their very formulations. As Jerome Christensen

has argued, Lady Byron, who largely authorized the dissemination

of the stories in her efforts to prove her husband’s mental incapacity,

becomes the iconic figure for the reader who understands the poet

through his texts. Like the ladies of Lockhart’s imagination, Lady

Byron “epitomizes the identificatory procedures of naïve biographi-

cal criticism,” in this case by “reading the incest of the text back onto

Byron’s life” (Christensen 81).

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The evocation of the ladies who comment on Byron’s appearance

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in “the prints” domesticates the voyeurism in Lane’s pictures while

highlighting its status as judgment. The peering figures in Lane’s

engravings have now become celebrity watchers, whose preoccupa-

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tion with the public meaning of private events signals less salacious-

ness than their own circumscribed existence. Lockhart’s choice of

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Emma
and
Mansfield Park
, Austen’s extended discussions of stifled

and incestuous provincial communities, is well calibrated to his proj-

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ect of domesticating and trivializing By romania: the discussion he

imagines echoes one that appears early in
Emma
, in both its trivial-

ity and its metonymic identification of an attractive and elusive male

with his own textual production:

Mr. Frank Churchill was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively

curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little

returned that he had never been there in his life. . . .

Now, upon his father’s marriage, it was very generally proposed . . . that

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the visit should take place. There was not a dissentient voice on the

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subject, either when Mrs. Perry drank tea with Mrs. and Miss Bates,

or when Mrs. and Miss Bates returned the visit. Now was the time for

Mr. Frank Churchill to come among them; and the hope strengthened

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when it was understood that he had written to his new mother on the

occasion. For a few days every morning visit in Highbury included

some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received. “I

suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill

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had written to Mrs. Weston? I understand it was a very handsome let-

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ter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the

letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.”

It was, indeed, a highly-prized letter. (
Emma
64)

Like Lockhart’s dialogue, these exchanges highlight the discrep-

ancy between the fascinating absentee, more talked about than

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B o d y D o u b l e s i n t h e N e w M o n a r c h y

151

known, at once native son and foreigner, and a community united

equally in its approval of as in its speculation about him (“not a dis-

sentient voice on the subject”).32 Interiority is a measure of intel-

lectual acuity and social class in
Emma
. Hence, the group’s capacity

to prize without understanding or analysis unifies them and marks

them off as second tier characters, from whom the heroine must re-

learn to distinguish herself. Her own tendency to fantasize about

Frank Churchill contrasts with the sober assessments of the nov-

el’s moral and social arbiter, Mr. Knightley, who refuses to accept

popular opinion of him “without proof” (159) and who, unlike

Mr. Woodhouse, sees not the handsomeness of the letter but its

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effeminacy: “It is like a woman’s writing” (268). Emma must aban-

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don her fantasies in favor of Knightley’s measured judgments and

intellectual asceticism if she is to take her place as his consort by

the end of the novel.33

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Both Lockhart and Lane are preoccupied with the embodiment

of ephemerality: the “melancholy” of Byron and the Byronic as well

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as the intangibility of unsubstantiated allegations. Like Lane’s cari-

catures, like Caroline’s 1813 letter, and like Caroline’s body itself,

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Childe Harold
, in Lockhart’s representation, is a public document

that both signifies
a private individual and renders him available for

appropriation and speculation by a domesticated, consuming pub-

lic. That this public is drawn from Austen’s fiction demonstrates his

sense of the novel as a repository for the laws of manners. Novels

like Austen’s generalize notions of propriety relevant not only to the

private domestic space of characters but to the public arrangement of

governmental power. Lockhart’s familiarity with her novels is sug-

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gested by the ease with which he navigates among major and minor

characters as well as by his nomenclature: each character from
Emma

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or
Mansfield Park
is addressed by the name most appropriately hers

according to custom and law, and the one authorized both by the

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novel’s trajectory and by the narrator’s judgment—titles appended

to the surnames of married characters or those admitted to gentry

status.34

The relationship of the narrator to the imagined speakers shifts,

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in the course of the paragraph, from representation to direct identi-

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fication and then back to an ironic representation that locates Byron

as the imagining author of the dialogue: “How you laugh in your

sleeve when you imagine to yourself (which you have done any one

half-hour these seven years) such beautiful scenes as these:—they are

the triumphs of humbug” (81). The passage begins unmistakably in

the putative John Bull’s voice: “But enough of Bowles. I say he is no

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152

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

poet, and you are a great poet; and I go on with the entity, leaving

the nonentity to those who do love it” (80). This praise is followed

by a dismissal of By ronic melancholy as “humbug” (Lockhart’s

substitution for Byron’s “cant,” which, in the original
Letter
to

John Murray , he had claimed was “the grand ‘
primum mobile
’ of

England”35). Initially locating belief and reverence for “the amazing

misery of the black-haired, high-browed, blue-eyed, bare-throated,

Lord Byron” in “every boarding-school in the empire” (80), he

then settles it, and himself, in Austen’s imagined community —or

his imagined Austenian community.36 The interlocutor of “Now,

tell me” functions as a kind of showman—albeit a more genteel one

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than Lane’s salacious outrider—first directing Byron’s attention

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toward his own image (“How melancholy you look in the prints”),

then shifting his audience to the ladies, whom he interrogates with

theatrical hyperbole. He then becomes indistinguishable among the

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varied rhapsodies and speculations, a tactic that allows Lockhart to

assign to Mrs. Elton the most sexually laden of the comments on

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Byron:

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Perhaps her
Ladyship
was in the wrong after all.—I am sure if I had

married such a man, I would have borne with all his little eccentric-

ities—a man so evidently unhappy.—Poor Lord By ron! who can say

how much he may have been to be pitied? I am sure I would; I bear

with all Mr. E.’s eccentricities, and I am sure any woman of real sense

would have done so to Lord Byron’s. (80–81)

It is unclear when Mrs. Elton takes up the dialogue, although this very

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uncertainty is an accurate distillation of her tendency to overwhelm a

scene. Perhaps the speech becomes feminine at the exclamatory cata-

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logue (“Oh! What eyes and eyebrows!—Oh! What a chin!”), or at the

gossipy speculation about “what may have happened.” Certainly the