Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (31 page)

the “did she or didn’t she” question and to evade it in a continual

tease. Caroline calls her love for Algernon “a chaste, mutual, and

disinterested love” (173), a “refined and virtuous passion” worthy of

Rousseau: a “primitive love . . . an affection natural to honest minds”

deserving “not condemnation, but applause” (172). But she also tells

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 111

her daughter, in language loaded with recognizable markers and even

semi-steamy details, that she “made no shew of affected resistance”

but “committed” herself to Algernon’s “protection,” flinging herself

“ upon his honorable, though heaving breast” (172). So what hap-

pened? We don’t know, but we feel as if we do. The scene offers both

the voyeurism of the roman à clef and the intimacy of the epistolary

mode. Like Rowlandson and the authors of the Florizel and Perdita

novels, Ashe gives his readers the thrilling sensation that they are

peering around the bed curtains of royalty, while also inviting them

to identify with the individual character-narrator.

The Spirit of “the Book”
evokes form partly to exploit it and partly

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to call attention to form’s slipperiness. When Ashe names the report’s

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familiar title within his own, he draws on its identification as a material

object that circulates and that has a narratable sequence: all familiar

markers of a book. Yet the success of his project depends on the Book’s

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failure to meet these criteria. The report is not narrative, although it

is possible to infer a story, or several stories, from it. It is a collection

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of depositions that fail to prove the Princess’s adultery but describe

a mode of living in which adultery might be expected to flourish. It

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is a document with a legal meaning (“not proven”34), and it is also

juicy reading. So juicy is it that the Book’s salacious details override

its legal meaning. In providing benign explanations for those details,

and linking these explanations in a coherent sequence, Ashe connects

narratability with legality: the Book’s truth is now consistent with

the pleasure it offers the reader.35 And that pleasure is available to

any reader with fifteen shillings or a library subscription. The Book,

on the other hand, never circulated as any bestseller must. Printed

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privately and then suppressed, it was not even seen by the public. It

was a name: a book that one holds in one’s mind as a concept, not in

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one’s hand as an object. Like money that has been taken out of cir-

culation, or like a bank note without gold backing, it does not stand

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for anything except itself. Ashe offers to reintroduce, and maximize,

the Book’s value by printing one remaining copy. His plan to publish

originates in a version of the “found manuscript” narrative. He makes

a fortuitous discovery that demonstrates his discernment, claiming

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to have “obtained” from the printer “a sight of the rough sheets in

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succession as they were printed off” (
Memoirs and Confessions
III.

83). Even this is unlikely, but the advertisement in the
Phoenix
makes

a bolder claim: that Ashe “has access to one of the extant copies”

(quoted in
Memoirs and Confessions
III. 87). Whether this threat is

directed at Perceval or Erskine, Ashe certainly expected to be bought

off: having refused to pay him for his writing earlier, Perceval—or

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112

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

someone—will now have to pay him
not
to publish. When this plan

does not work, Ashe instead recirculates the content of the Book as its

“spirit,” simultaneously evoking the Book’s essence and reiterating its

materiality. Ashe’s novel will supply—and unite—form and content

and will restore the gold backing to the scraps of paper that make up

the Book.

When The Satirist calls
The Spirit of “the Book”
“an imposter book”

and suggests that only by knowing “the character of the man” can

we know how to read it, he is arguing for an idea of fraud as some-

thing that cannot be contained within a single system. Ashe/Anvil is

an imposter: an alias (i.e., a criminal), not an esquire (a gentleman),

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a plagiarist and trickster rather than an author. And, if he is not an

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author, then it follows that his book is not a book. People who regu-

larly use aliases are imposters. Blackmailers who threaten to publish

documents they do not have are imposters. Bank notes represent-

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ing cash that does not exist, or representing transferable property of

nonexistent payees, are imposters. And books that promise to provide

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the “true” story of events about which their authors know little are

imposters.

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But imposture, as Russett points out, is not opposed to authorship;

linking forgery narrative to “the Shelleyan account of creativity as the

recovery of a buried inspiration” (29), it is built into the process of

romantic-era textual production. The Satirist insists on this connec-

tion with his reiteration of the root word. To impose meant not only

to exploit credulity by making a false representation; it also meant

to work in the production of printed documents. An imposer (or,

earlier, impositor) laid the stereotype plates on the imposing stone

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of a press and secured them so that sheets could be printed in order.

Both words are derived from the Latin
imponere
, to impose. To be

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an imposter is to be a producer of texts. Not just Ashe’s, then, but all

novels are imposter books. The novel engages “the reader’s sympathy

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with an unreal personality” (Russett 15). In epistolary novels like

Ashe’s, that unreal person is the supposed writer of letters that were

never meant for our eyes. If the “editor” is the privileged recipient of

the documents, the readers are the privileged voyeurs. But epistolar-

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ity in Ashe’s novel is a self-conscious convention. Unlike the “spirit,”

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these letters are never intended to be taken as anything but fiction.

They are only a means of rendering the spirit. And the spirit inheres

in two elements of the text, the truth of which the Satirist contests.

On one hand, the spirit consists of the “facts” of the case: the

story to be culled from the commission report. Here, as the Satirist

points out, Ashe simply takes rumors and events that have already

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 113

been reported and fabricates plausible (in some cases barely) and

vindicatory explanations for them. But the spirit consists also in the

psychology behind the events; the emotion that generates, inspires,

and provokes the letters and gives them their peculiar character. In

allowing us to listen in on a mother’s impassioned confession to her

daughter, Ashe gives us a carefully delineated portrait of royalty. His

likeness is as intimate as any of Rowlandson’s or Gillray’s. The differ-

ence is that, where their portraits offer intimacy as a means of dimin-

ishing the stature of their subjects, Ashe’s is intended to elevate the

stature of his readers. He offers them not just a likeness
of
but a like-

ness
to
royalty: She may be a princess, but she feels just as you do, and

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now you can know—and own—her innermost thoughts.

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The Satirist aims to explode to the presumption behind this affec-

tation of showmanship. Ashe is a self-aggrandizing fool, not a confi-

dante of royalty. His failed attempts to inflate his own consequence

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(whether through blackmail or forms of imposture) reveal the impass-

able distance between him and the subjects he pretends to know. He

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cannot know the Princess, not only because he has never met her

or read the document he claims to summarize, but also because the

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portrait he offers is obviously false. Ashe’s Caroline is true to a fictive

ideal, the heroine of sensibility. She is false, however, to the pattern

of maternity that the Satirist assumes a princess must match. This

is where the superimposition of Ashe’s epistolarity becomes clear. It

takes two to make a letter a letter. An epistolary novel need not tell

as much about the recipient as about the writer of the letters, but it

perforce implies something about the relationship between the two.

Pamela’s letters to her parents reveal her confidence in them, and

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that confidence exemplifies the bourgeois familial ideal that she will

bring to a marriage with her social superior. Florizel writes to Perdita

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because he is hoping to bed her. Her responses are constrained by

similar expectations. The erotic charge of the letters provokes readers

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to imagine the relationship to which they allude. If they write
such

things to each other, what must their actual encounters have been

like?

If Caroline’s letters reveal a relationship, it is one the Satirist

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repudiates on ideological grounds. She makes her daughter her con-

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fidante and shares details of erotic encounters with both her lover

and her husband. This point alone discredits the entire production,

because no mother worthy of the title—and certainly no princess of

England—would write so to her daughter: “Reader, this requires no

comment. Only recollect that the daughter to whom this ribaldry

was addressed, was then scarcely
fourteen
years of age, and that it

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

is the Princess, whom this author affects to
defend
, that is made to

utter it!!!” (323). The Satirist doesn’t need to explain the imposture

here; the letters can reveal no truths because the relationship they

construct is a false one.

Ashe’s letters reveal a forgetfulness of audience, despite the repeated

“my Charlotte’s” with which they are peppered. Caroline not only tells

her daughter things that a fourteen-year-old girl perhaps ought not to

know,36 she also lectures her on topics, such as the constitution of her

grandfather’s government and of her own family, that a reader would

expect a princess already to know. Charlotte’s malleability, or invisibil-

ity, as an addressee is a function of the unapologetic awkwardness of

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Ashe’s vehicle, one he assumes will not trouble his readers overmuch.

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Ashe needed a way to get his material in front of the public, and let-

ters from a mother to a daughter had a solid generic lineage. They

also derive verisimilitude from the public knowledge that Caroline

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and her daughter were living apart, despite her objections.37

In pretending to assume that Ashe meant us to believe the factual-

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ity of the letters, the Satirist shifts the terms of Ashe’s offense against

the royal family. His book is now an imposter because it reveals the

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Princess to be no true mother. And, if no mother, then no princess:

“to such a letter he has had the villainy to affix the
forged
signature of