Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (58 page)

neck rather than the bosom.” Demont is then asked, “how low did

the part that was uncovered extend?” and answers, “As far as here.

[Passing her hand across her breasts.]” Hand gestures were a particu-

lar problem for the prosecution, both because of the difficulty ren-

dering them in print and because not all of the Lords were positioned

so that they could see, so the Attorney General makes one more try

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to get a satisfactory answer in words: “Were the breasts covered or

uncovered?” “It was uncovered as far as here, about the middle of

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it” (
Hansard
2.2, August 31, 1820; brackets in original). “
Gorge
”

is the word Voltaire uses for the breasts of the cow-woman. Its use

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to denote the breast or bosom is not as rare as Caroline’s interpreter

suggests. The Crown interpreter must continue to use this word after

the clarification, given that Demont’s reply uses the singular pro-

noun despite the Attorney General’s plural, “breasts.”

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24. Lane substitutes the indefinite article for the definite in the first line.

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Otherwise, the quote is exact.

25. Goldsmith’s lines describe the “poor houseless shiv’ring female” dis-

placed and ruined by the enclosure of her village, who “once, per-

haps, in village plenty blest/Has wept at tales of innocence distrest”

but who is “Now lost to all, her friends, her virtue fled” (326–31).

26. Dibdin (1745–1814) was a popular playwright, poet, and song-

writer known for his songs depicting British military manliness.

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N o t e s

213

“The Soldier’s Adieu” was published in 1790 in the collection of

songs called
The Wags
. A new edition was published in 1814, the year

of his death.

27. The consistently anti-Caroline bent of Lane’s 1821 engravings is not

necessarily an indication of his own political leanings. Engravers often

switched sides fluidly, or at least, like Ashe, did not scruple to go over

temporarily to the opposition if the price was right. Cruikshank, as

his biographer Robert Patten points out, was allied with the “moder-

ate left” (Patten 152), yet he produced his own anti-Caroline engrav-

ings in 1820, including “The Radical Ladder,” a parodic response to

Hone’s pamphlet, which Cruikshank had engraved (Patten 181–83).

28. Lockhart’s responsibility for the pamphlet was disputed through-

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out the nineteenth century but was established by John Lang Strout

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in 1940. Strout discusses the authorship of the pamphlet in his

Introduction to
John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron
(49–56).

29. The quasi-serious critical aim of the pamphlet was to urge Byron to

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hone his art toward the satire of
Don Juan
and away from the “hum-

bug” of the oriental tales and epitomized by
Childe Harold
: “Stick

to Don Juan: it is the only sincere thing you have ever written; and

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it will live many years after all your humbug Harolds have ceased

to be, in your own words, ‘A school-
girl’s
tale—the wonder of an

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hour’ (82; italics in original). Strout points out in a footnote that the

original passage, from Canto II of
Childe Harold
, is “a schoolboy’s

tale” (Strout 82n52); Lockhart’s switching of the genders is a part of

the same discrediting mission that informs the ladies’ dialogue that

follows.

30. Eric Eisner calls this “an extraordinary mock-blazon of Byron’s com-

modified body” (41).

31. Jerome Christensen discusses Byron’s decision to change the hero

and heroine of “The Bride of Abydos” from brother and sister to first

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cousins (115).

32. Lockhart may echo this passage toward the end of his vignette,

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when the ladies recall discussing a passage from
Childe Harold
“on

Saturday evening at Miss Bates’s” (81).

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33. The section of
Emma
narrated most consistently from Knightley’s

point of view chronicles the development of his suspicions about

Frank Churchill’s “double dealing” (302). The proliferation of spec-

ulative language in this chapter (the word “suspect” appears three

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times and “suspicion” four times) is tempered so consistently by

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Knightley’s self-cautioning against “excessive curiosity” (306) and

“fruitless interference” (307) that the chapter reads like a didactic

counter-piece to the rest of the novel, as if Austen had temporar-

ily contemplated pairing Emma’s flawed interiority with Knightley’s

impeccable internal judgments before abandoning dialogic mono-

logism in favor of the internal
Bildung
she perfected in this novel.

Knightley’s speculations, however unerring, threaten to “irritate”

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214

N o t e s

him into a “fever,” which he can only subdue by returning, monk-

like, to “the coolness and solitude of Donwell Abbey” (
Emma
308).

34. This ranking appears undercut by the smarmy familiarity of the accu-

mulating “dears” for Harriet Smith and Mrs. Elton. But the intimacy

of address endorses social classification by replicating, in both type

and intensity, those characters’ liminality and destabilizing potential

for the novel’s community.

35. “The truth is, that in these days the grand ‘
primum mobile
’ of

England is
cant
; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant

moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life”

Letter to **********
16).

36. The wide sweep of John Bull’s hyperbole (“every” school “in the

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empire”) makes it unclear whether he refers to boys’ boarding

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schools, or girls,’ or both, although the presence of Harriet Smith,

the parlor-boarder at Mrs. Goddard’s “real, honest, old-fashioned

Boarding-school” (68) suggests that he is more interested in Byron’s

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impact on school-age girls than boys.

37. Austen registers Mrs. Elton’s sexuality in a number of ways in the

novel, most often in an inappropriate fondness for fine clothes and

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an excessive and cloying intimacy with other characters, male and

female. She is also given to discussion/disclosure of the various ways

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in which a woman’s life changes with marriage—plausibly a coded

announcement of sexuality.

38. As Christensen points out, Lady Byron’s biographical criticism origi-

nates in an impulse marking her as a naïve, “suggestible reader of

her husband.” In the course of the separation proceedings, however,

naïve reading becomes both a strategy and a rhetoric—the compan-

ion to Lady Caroline Lamb’s nascent Byronism (80).

39. Strout adds that the tactic was “typical of the
Blackwood
group! and

may be added to their other numerous japes in these early years of

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Maga
” (56). He attributes the review to John Wilson, along with

Lockhart one of the principal editors of
Blackwood’s
during its

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first years. In a letter to William Blackwood dated May 24, 1821,

William Maginn, another frequent contributor to the magazine,

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wrote, “I cast my eye over John Bull, which is a mighty shabby

performance. . . . I have a mind to review it q uite seriously & attri-

bute it to Jeremy Bentham or Alderman Wood” (quoted in Strout

Bibliography
8). Blackwood’s reply—”I wish to God you had time to

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fill up your sketch” (quoted in Strout 81n)—suggests that, whoever

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wrote the review, it was not Maginn. Blackwood may have passed

his idea along to Wilson, although it’s possible that Lockhart at least

contributed to the review. The kind of smokescreen, collaborative

or otherwise, that
Blackwood’s
engaged in, as Mark Schoenfield has

demonstrated, was crucial to the romantic-era periodical industry’s

construction of identity. “Poaching” (the term is Peter Murphy’s) of

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N o t e s

215

the kind Maginn proposes and Wilson/Lockhart practices “desta-

bilizes the identity of the self—real or fictive—with itself” (
British

Periodicals and Romantic Identity
252n9).

40. “In his Church of Englandism, he had this sentence: ‘Come for-

ward,
Dean Kipling
—Come forward,
Dean Andrews
—Come for-

ward,
Bishop Burgess
—Come forward,
Bishop Marsh
—Come forward,

Bishop Howly
[sic]—Come forward,
Archbishop Sutton
’, etc.” (425).

The review is quoting from Bentham’s 1818
Church of Englandism

and its Catechism examined
. The italics are in the original (the

reviewer misspells Howley).

41. Fanny’s temporizing tends to go unnoticed when contrasted with the

more transparent selfishness that moves nearly every other character

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in the novel, hence her reputation as almost unnaturally upright and

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more than a little dull. In his essay on
Mansfield Park
, originally

published as his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel,

Tony Tanner suggests that she “stands for the difficulty of delicate

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right thinking in a world of inadequate perception and subtly cor-

rupted instincts” (157). Set against the “dangerous energies and

selfish power-play” (172) particularly of the Crawfords, but more

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generally practiced by all of her relatives from Sir Thomas down,

Fanny “is never, ever, wrong” (143). Most recent criticism, on the

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contrary, has tended to see Fanny’s correctness as a construct, more

contingent than steadfast. Mary Poovey observes that “the confeder-

acy of principle and feeling” (
The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer

219) she achieves by the end of the novel is hard won rather than

innate, the product of her complex social and psychological position

as dependent female: “Young Fanny is effectively pushed and pulled

into becoming a textbook Proper Lady” (217). Ellen Pollak suggests

that all moral choices in the novel are contingent, in the context of its

participation in contemporary debates on miscegenation and incest.

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Austen is engaged in “exposing the inherently interested and thus

contingent nature of all moral choices in a world where the pres-

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ence of
outsiders within
has always already disturbed the possibility

of domestic purity” (
Incest and the English Novel
184).

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42. Poovey suggests that the energy of the novel is directed toward

assigning “moral authority and power” to Fanny’s feelings (218) so

that she can be positioned “to superintend the moral regeneration of

Mansfield Park” (219).

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43. The satisfactory outcome of Austen’s courtship plot is a matter of exer-

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tion rather than morality: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every

body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to

have done with all the rest” (312). The narrator’s impatience to have

done replicates the willfulness (laziness?) of her characters. Henry