Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (8 page)

Perdita letters, but rather substitute for them. “To remove any doubt

in this respect,” he invites his imagined reader to “satisfy himself with

seeing some part of the Originals” of the “Letters alluded to”—that

is, the Cumberland letters—“at the Publisher’s.” Their authenticity

stands in for and deflects attention from the probity of “the following

Billets.” The mystification of this process gives the editor authority,

partly because he is an editor—one of a group of print profession-

als who, as Andrew Piper has recently observed, were rising socially

and financially throughout the later eighteenth and early nineteenth

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centuries. In the romantic period, “not just authors, but also edi-

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tors, translators, booksellers, printers, librarians, critics, and bibliog-

raphers all assumed an elevated professional status” (Piper 3). This

editor’s membership in a coterie of professionals gives him access to

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information and the power to regulate his readers’ access to the same

information; “[t]he reason why it would be imprudent to produce the

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other part” of the Cumberland letters on display at the publisher’s

(he does not mention which publisher) “must be obvious to every

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peruser.” If you have to ask . . .

Insofar as
Effusions of Love
is an epistolary novel and not a collection

of letters, however, its author-as-editor functions like the editors of

other epistolary novels and fictive memoirs of the eighteenth century.

This kind of editor supplanted the actual writer of the text, particu-

larly of novels, like Gulliver’
s Travels
, which were sold as memoirs:

The editor’s function was to affirm the ownership of the text by a par-

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ticular individual (Gulliver, Werther, Cleveland) and to disaffirm the

ownership by another individual, the author. The editor-function was

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an effective vehicle to combine the novel’s dual claims to the suspen-

sion of referentiality (through its fictiveness) alongside its affirmation

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of referentiality through ‘realist’ narrative techniques. (Piper 109
)

The editor convention also produces a secondary narrative: the story

of how the memoirs/letters came into the hands of the person who

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offers them to the public. Often this is a story of affinity and verifica-

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tion in cooperation. The documents are entrusted to the editor who

establishes their bona fides and his own by carefully examining them

and submitting them to the judgment of colleagues whom he trusts

(and vouches for). Richard Sympson, the putative editor of Gulliver’s

Travels
, declares that his “antient and intimate friend” (v) Lemuel

Gulliver “left the Custody of the following Papers in my Hands, with

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liberty to dispose of them as I should think fit” (vi–vii). Having “care-

fully perused them three Times,” determined that “there is an Air

of Truth apparent through the W hole,” and consulted “the Advice

of several Worthy Persons” (vii), he is now ready “to send them into

the World” (vii–viii). The editor of
Clarissa
also seeks the advice of

“several judicious Friends” as to how best to arrange the letters, which

he has been authorized to publish “in such a Way as he should think

would be most acceptable to the Public” (v). The studied transparency

of these processes is a fiction that, as Russett points out, “seeks to

elicit the reader’s sympathy with an unreal personality,” making the

novel “a text that lies
about its own origins
” (
Fictions and Fakes
15).

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The readers willingly accept the lie, however, knowing that they

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are reading fiction masquerading as factual documents. In contrast,

the editors of the Florizel and Perdita novels either mystify the pro-

cess of origination (as in
Effusions
), or they construct a narrative of

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fortuitous discovery. The preface to
The Budget of Love
acknowledges

that “It may be a matter of some surprize, that the following Letters

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should have made their way to the public” but assures the reader that

their discovery was “accidental” (v), Perdita having read the letters

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to “her favourite chamber-maid” (vi) in an indiscreet moment. The

maid then showed them to her own lover, who convinced her to sell

them to a publisher, “for the gratification of the public and her own

emolument” (vi). The editor offers this transaction as “an instrumen-

tal caution to all those who place too great a share of confidence

in a favourite servant” (v). Russett has shown that the fraudulent

manuscripts of the later eighteenth century positioned their editors

“as the rightful inheritors of the treasures they find—they are, in

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this sense . . . ‘gifted’ individuals” (29). Gifted, in this case, in being

uniquely qualified to understand what they are reading, to know a

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goldmine when they see one, but they are also the recipients of a gift,

the reception of which plays a central role in its value. In the preface

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to
The Budget of Love
, the line of inheritance begins with the cham-

bermaid, frail and untrustworthy, but not an especially perceptive

reader, beyond thinking them “the sweetest Letters in the world”

(vi). Piqued after “some unfortunate contention with her mistress,”

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she copies the letters and reads them to “her sweetheart.” He, it turns

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out, is the rightful heir, the one “who had sense enough to know the

value of so popular a matter” (vi) and to “dispose of them” in a way

that will both gratify “the public” and enrich his lover (and himself).

As with
Effusions of Love
, the actual editor of the volume is a minor,

almost invisible figure. He does not tell the story of how he bought

the letters from the couple, because the discovery is the real story.

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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

25

A neutral professional, he is neither the brilliant but untutored finder

of a rare manuscript, nor the savvy working man who knows how to

profit at the expense of the upper class.12 His middle-class profession-

alism authenticates the letters, but he is not the true inheritor.13

To what extent are the readers of this novel willing consum-

ers of its fiction of origins? The Florizel and Perdita novels are not

fabulae masquerading as fact as a way to confront “the problem of

‘belief’ that has dogged mimesis since Plato” (Russett 15). In this

case masquerade is more than a literary convention, however much

that convention might be epistemologically driven. The authors of

these novels seem to want their readers to believe that they are read-

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ing actual letters written by real people.
Did
they believe they were

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reading anyone’s actual letters? Probably not. The Cumberland letters

were part of court record; they were extracted in the newspapers, and

then published in book form. Their ubiquity makes it clear that, had

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the Prince’s letters been at large, they would have appeared first in

some medium other than a pamphlet with a flowery title. Whether

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they were purloined or just available in the undefined way the editor

of
Effusions
suggests letters have of getting about, readers of these

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letters would already know a lot about them. They would not have

believed that they were getting a privileged first look. Readers of

the Florizel and Perdita novels might have embraced their pseudo-

pastoralism as a familiar and pleasing convention, but they knew it

was nothing more. They were not reading a pastoral romance; they

were reading an urban romance about two well-known figures who

were much more public than their correspondence was. The fiction of

origins allowed readers to imagine a true account, without believing

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that they were reading
that
account. They could persuade themselves

that they were experiencing reality through the filter of these books,

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whose claim of documentation becomes a claim of representation.

These are not the real Florizel and Perdita, but they are close approxi-

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mations of what the real Florizel and Perdita must be like.

The “real” Florizel and Perdita are personae, a point useful

for those who wished to capitalize on the currency of their affair.

Journalists and satirists regularly used code or initials when writing

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about members or associates of the royal family, more as a conven-

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tion than as protection against prosecution for libel. Here were two

soubriquets ready to hand, instantly recognizable, whose sugges-

tive possibilities partly directed the tone of popular responses. On

one hand, the names placed the principals neatly into the pastoral

romance from which they were originally drawn. In his adaptation

of
The Winter’s Tale
Garrick focuses on the courtship of the prince

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

and the shepherdess, relegating Leontes’s jealous rage and banish-

ment of his wife to a back-story. The reclamation of his “lost” daugh-

ter becomes a family romance rather than a tale of redemption and

reconciliation. The Prince’s use of these names legitimizes and makes

innocent his seduction of an actress from a middle-class mercantile

and demiprofessional background. Rumors that Robinson was the

illegitimate daughter of Lord Northington, which she tacitly con-

firmed, would have accorded with this version of the affair.14

This context would have led readers to expect letters that, for all

they chronicled an illicit sexual liaison, were sentimental and effusive.

They would be the letters of two relative innocents experiencing their

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first taste of true love.15 They would balance innocence and carnality,

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as in this declaration from Florizel to Perdita in
The Budget of Love
:

“They say, stolen fruit is always best; and so, perhaps, the opportu-

nity that we have of Love, being stolen, may make it so delicious!—I

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never was in Love before; therefore, I cannot decide on the subject

so well” (74–75). They would have to be such letters as might strike

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a chambermaid as the sweetest in the world without being so sweet

as to prevent her wanting to profit from them. They would, in short,

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have to answer the expectations created by their public context, and

particularly by the intertextual layering the Prince provided when he

chose his mode of address. Paula Byrne’s assessment over 200 years

later that the letters in
Budget
“were written by someone with both a

reasonable knowledge of the course of events and a good ear for the

kind of language the Prince and the actress would have used in their

letters” (139) suggests that their editors were successful in persuading

readers that they were “just like the real thing.”

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In 1781 it was not difficult to have a reasonable knowledge of

the course of events. Robinson was prone to talking about details,

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although her conversations may have increased strategically after the