Read Online Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy by Kristin Flieger Samuelian - Free Book Online

122–23; quoting Steele, Memoirs of
    Mrs. Elizabeth Baddely , 1787). Newspapers scrutinized and reported
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    her public behavior, chronicling when she began wearing his min-
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    iature around her neck, for instance, or when she began driving a
    new carriage with an ambiguous blazon that looked, from a distance,
    like a coronet. The affair with the Prince was first mentioned in the
    newspapers—and the couple was first referred to publicly as Florizel
    and Perdita—in July 1781 (Byrne 117). Both novels drop plenty of
    references to details and events the public was likely to recognize.
    10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
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    Effusions of Love records the gift of a “miniature picture,” which
    Florizel promises to wear “ever” on his bosom, attached with a rib-
    bon, “as it would be imprudent to fix it to my watch” (28). The phras-
    ing here possibly alludes to Lady Craven’s The Miniature Picture , in
    which Robinson played Sir Harry Revel, one of the “breeches” roles
    for which she became famous and which she was playing on her last
    night at Drury Lane before retiring from the theater. In her Memoirs ,
    Robinson reports that the Prince once proposed that she meet him
    dressed as a boy, but that she refused because of “The indelicacy of
    such a step, as well as the danger of detection” (II. 50). The Budget of
    Love reverses the transaction: Florizel gives Perdita a diamond-framed
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    miniature, and she assures him that “The setting is most excellent;—
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    the brilliancy of the diamonds are [sic] surpassed by nothing but the
    celestial lustre that sparkles in the eyes of FLORIZEL!” (72).16 She
    tells him she has decided to have her portrait painted, “presuming that
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    my FLORIZEL may give it some indifferent place in his Cabinet,”
    although she adds disingenuously, “perhaps it will not be proper to
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    present, or be thought a gift worthy his reception” (78–79). This is
    most likely a reference to one of a pair of portraits of her by Romney.
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    According to Robinson’s biographer Paula Byrne, she began sitting
    for this picture two weeks after her breakup with the Prince, and it
    “was published as an engraving at the height of the letter negotiations
    on August 25, 1781” (Byrne 154).
    The authors of both novels include details like these, which they
    can assume the public already knows, in order to establish the verac-
    ity of those they encounter in these stories. Theirs is a finely calcu-
    lated management of the “hermeneutic of intimacy” that Tom Mole
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    describes, in which direct personal engagement with a celebrated fig-
    ure is “marketed as a commodity” and at the same time offered as “an
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    escape from the standardised impersonality of commodity culture”
    ( Byron’s Romantic Celebrity 25). Mole and others locate the origins of
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    modern celebrity culture at the end of the eighteenth century, when, as
    Eric Eisner puts it, the public “emerged not just as an abstraction but
    also as a spectatorial body; “a ‘gazing [. . .] multitude”—produced by
    an accelerating set of technologies of publicity” ( Nineteenth-Century
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    Poetry and Literary Celebrity 21).17 Eisner is quoting from a passage
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    in Robinson’s Memoirs in which she describes being “overwhelmed
    by the gazing of the multitude” at the height of the public’s preoccu-
    pation with the affair (II. 67). This multitude, “massive, anonymous,
    socially diverse, geographically distributed” (Mole, Byron’s Romantic
    Celebrity 3), is not only the crowd that inconveniences Robinson at
    the shops or that, with “staring curiosity,” gathers around her