Jane Austen's "passion for taking likenesses": Portraits of the Prince Regent in Emma.

IT IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED A MERE CURIOSITY of literary history that Jane Austen dedicated Emma to "HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE REGENT" (Emma 1), George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales and the future George IV. Austen's niece Caroline provided the first written account of how this dedication came to be. In the Fall of 1815, the novelist's brother Henry was taken ill, and she stayed in London to be with him. As Caroline Austen wrote in "My Aunt Jane Austen" (1867),

      It was during this stay in London, that a little gleam of Court
   favor shone upon her....

      Two of the great Physicians of the day had attended my Uncle
   during his illness-- ... [O]ne of them had very intimate access to
   the Prince Regent, and continuing his visits during my Uncle's
   recovery, he told my Aunt one day, that the Prince was a great
   admirer of her Novels: that he often read them, and had a set in
   each of his residences--That he, the physician, had told his Royal
   Highness that Miss Austen was now in London, and that by the
   Prince's desire, Mr. Clarke, the Librarian of Carlton House [the
   Prince Regent's London residence], would speedily wait upon
   her--Mr. Clarke came, and endorsed all previous compliments, and
   invited my Aunt to see Carlton House, saying the Prince had charged
   him to show her the Library there, adding many civilities as to the
   pleasure his R. H. had received from her Novels-- ... The
   invitation could not be declined--and my Aunt went, at an appointed
   time, to Carlton House--She saw the Library, and I believe some
   other apartments, but the particulars of her visit, if I ever heard
   them, I have now forgotten--only this, I do well recollect--that in
   the course of it, Mr. Clarke, speaking again of the Regent's
   admiration of her writing, declared himself charged to say, that if
   Miss Austen had any other Novel forthcoming, she was quite at
   liberty to dedicate it to the Prince.

      (Sutherland 175-76) (1)

What were Jane Austen's emotions upon receiving such notice? In the exchange of letters that ensued, readers have long noted the novelist's subtle resistance to the royal appropriation of her talent. First, she wrote the Prince's Librarian, asking if, after receiving a "Permission" to dedicate, it was "incumbent" on her to do so (15 November 1815). Then, one month later, she instructed her publisher John Murray to provide a "Title page" reading simply "Emma, Dedicated by Permission to H. R. H. The Prince Regent" (11 December 1815). Murray, however, produced the well-known fulsome inscription, still reprinted in many editions of Emma, containing, as Claire Tomalin describes it, "a lavish supply of three Royal Highnesses and one Prince Regent" (Tomalin 247). (2) Austen's reluctance continued when further attempts were made to co-opt her talent: to Mr. Clarke's suggestion that she write a novel about an English clergyman (16 November 1815), she demurred, calling herself misleadingly, even deceitfully, "the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress" (11 December 1815).

Puzzling matters these. How serious was Austen's reluctance to dedicate her novel to the Prince? And wily would she deliberately assume this unbelievable, laughable mask of feminine ditziness and incapacity? I provide no easy answers to these questions but would rather like to suggest that the connection between Emma and its dedicatee is closer than most readers have ever suspected, for its pages contain a carefully-drawn double portrait of the Prince Regent. (3) The two figures of Emma and Frank Churchill suggest important components of the Prince's history, situation and character. Austen's disingenuous self-presentation as "uninformed Female" insured that the book would be read as only a novel and not as the subtle analysis of the Prince that it really is.

Though the Hanoverian monarchs never received the obsessive attention that seventeenth-century Englishmen had given the alternately attractive and maddening Stuarts, the Enlightenment was never inattentive as one King George succeeded another. The late eighteenth century was a golden age of celebrity culture, the newspaper, and the coarse, even obscene, political print, as we have been recently reminded by such works as Diana Donald's The Age of Caricature (1996), Kenneth Baker's George IV(2005), and particularly Vic Gatrell's City of Laughter (2006). Austen's era would have known nearly as much about the Hanoverians as we know about Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and the Duchess of Cornwall.

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In Jane Austen's lifetime, prints had detailed George III's fondness for the quiet domestic life, as in James Gillray's 1791 images "Frying Sprats" and "Toasting Muffins," which depict the home-loving, health-conscious King and his wife, Queen Charlotte (Figure 1). The same artist's "Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal" (1792) shows the King relishing a boiled egg (Figure 4). At the same time, artists and the press were noting the Prince of Wales's sad transformation from youthful Adonis to dissolute roue, as in James Gillray's well-known "A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion" (1792). This image, as Vic Gattrell has recently remarked, "had far greater circulation than any formal portrait could hope for, even when engraved" (215). Cartoons illustrated the key events in the Prince's history: his secret marriage in 1785 to the Roman Catholic Maria Fitzherbert (Gillray, "A Wife and No Wife" [1788]) and even his most intimate connubial relations with his bride (Kingsbury or Stubbs, "His Highness in Fitz" [1786]--note the punning title given to this image). Cartoonists also detailed the Prince's 1787 renunciation of Mrs. Fitzherbert in exchange for an extra 10,000 [pounds sterling] per annum, as in Gillray's "Dido Forsaken," in which the Prince sails off in a decrepit boat named Honor, professing, "I never saw her in my Life" (Figure 2).

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In the next decade, artists followed the Prince of Wales's ill-fated marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick and, most memorably, the royal couple's wedding night (Cruickshank, "Oh Che Boccone" [1795]). In this print, the artist Isaac Cruickshank depicts the Prince standing by the bridal bed, in abject horror at the Princess's poor personal hygiene and bad breath. As the Prince Regent's daughter, the Princess Caroline, born of this unpromising union, was to write, "The print shops are full of scurrilous caricatures & infamous things relative to the Prince's conduct in different branches" (Aspinall 22). The anonymous 1801 print "Caricature Shop" documents the intense interest aroused by such images (Figure 3). (4)

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Though the anonymous "Caricature Shop" illustrates even canine interest in public gossip--note the eager dog in the lower left--no children stand before this shop window. Did a precocious 11-year-old girl living in a provincial rectory see such satirical cartoons? Certainly not all of them, but considerable knowledge of current affairs assuredly trickled down to the young Jane Austen, whose earliest works, commenced during the era of the Prince of Wales's secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert, demonstrate wry awareness of what transpired in royal bedrooms. In "Jack and Alice," the second work in Volume the First, the young Cecilia, "aspir[ing] to the affections of some Prince," decides to leave England, "knowing that those of her native Country were cheifly engaged" (MW 29)--clear allusion to the well-known antics of Prince of Wales and his brothers. The young Jane Austen also displays awareness of the public debates about the validity of the marriage between the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert. In brief, this marriage apparently was canonically valid but nonetheless illegal: first because the bride was Roman Catholic (thus violating the Act of Settlement of 1701), and second because the marriage took place without the permission or even knowledge of the King (thus violating the Royal Marriages Act of 1772) (Gattrell 323).

Jane Austen's Volumes the First and Second are replete with events that mirror this one, unions that (to recall the caption of one of James Gillray's images) are and are not marriages. In "Henry and Eliza," the title characters celebrate a "private union" that would have been invalid (MW 35), (5) as do Emma Stanhope and William Montague ("Sir William Montague," MW42). In "A Collection of Letters," Jane--and Captain Dashwood marry illegally-and produce two children--without the knowledge of the bride's father (MW 154). In "Love & Freindship," Laura and Edward are united by a clergyman who never bothered to seek ordination (MW 82), Austen here writes in the mode characteristic of her early fiction: she comments on royal behavior with extravagance of gesture, laughing uproariously and with unabashed glee at the absurd, vastly entertaining, appalling and yet predictable acts of mortals. This comic mode, we should remember, is characteristic of the print cartoons themselves. O for the pen of a Cruickshank or a Gillray to illustrate Austen's earliest, brashest works!

During Austen's next decades, the Prince and his very extensive family serve only as backdrop to the novelist's daily life. Her letters include newsy references to sightings or near sightings of the Hanoverians (26 December 1798, 14 September 1804), to alterations in social schedule or wardrobe because of royal deaths real or anticipated (27 August 1805, :30 August 1805, 6 June 1811), and to public celebrations of royal birthdays (31 May 1811). In 1801, Austen reports to Cassandra that Wilhelmina Welby, the wife of a distant relative, "has been singing Duetts with the Prince of Wales" (16 January 1801). In the next decade, Austen was sufficiently abreast of private royal strife to express an opinion on the disastrous relationship between the Prince and the Princess of Wales at the time of the Princess's 1813 letter to her husband. This letter, in which the Princess Caroline depicted herself as wronged mother, was much printed in newspapers around the country. The day after it appeared in the Hampshire Telegraph, Austen wrote her old friend Martha Lloyd, "I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales's Letter. Poor Woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband" (16 February 181:3). In the same year, in a whimsical poem, Austen's nephew James Edward jokes that, now that his aunt has published both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the Regent will make her a "countess at least .../And indeed if the Princess should lose her dear life, / You might have a good chance of becoming his wife" (Austen-Leigh 27).

A year after this poem and a year after Austen voiced her support of the abandoned Princess of Wales, the novelist commenced Emma, in which she provides a concentrated cluster of commentary upon the monarchy; in particular upon the strained relations between the Prince Regent and his father. Here, unlike in Volumes the First and Second, the commentary is understated, delicate, indirect--the typical mode of the six novels. Frank Churchill-secretive, charming, simultaneously servile and independent--provides one reflection of the Prince of Wales; Emma, ruling Hartfield in place of her incapacitated father, provides the other. Through the novel's title character, Austen suggests a road not taken and provides the Prince with a lesson in how he could better have handled a difficult and demanding parent--for that is exactly what Mr. Woodhouse and all Hanoverian fathers were.

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Nearly a century before Austen's Emma, George I had broken with his eldest son, the future George II (a rupture noted in Book I of Gulliver's Travels). This same pathological pattern was to be repeated between George II's grandson George III and the latter's eldest son, George Augustus Frederick. George III demanded total obedience and sensible behavior from his numerous offspring, especially from the Prince of Wales. Untouched by the Enlightenment interest in picturesque scenery and travel, George III valued the simple life, hard work, and plain living that he established for himself and Queen Charlotte at Kew and then at Richmond Lodge, his favorite residences. He was a creature of routine and conservative habit, with a fondness for quiet evenings (he liked card games) around the domestic fire, in the company of his wife and their numerous children. He was known as "Farmer George" (Black 137) and displayed a decided preference for simple home-grown food, as suggested by Gillray's "Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal" (Figure 4). The day for the royal family began with a modest breakfast of "tea and dry toast." The big meal was dinner, served at 3 or 4 o'clock: "soup 'when not very strong or heavy,' followed by 'plain meat without fat, clear gravy and greens' or fish 'without butter.' Dessert was 'the fruit of a tart without crust' and on Thursdays and Saturdays the special treat of an ice of whatever flavour [each prince or princess] preferred. A glass of wine was allowed to end the meal, with coffee twice a week" (Smith 7). Anyone offering such plain fare in Austen's fictional village of Highbury would have received the hearty commendation of the apothecary, Mr. Perry, or even of Mr. Woodhouse.

Mr. Woodhouse's similarities to his Sovereign are obvious. He is a stay-at-home health fanatic, a creature of unswervable habit, zealously avoiding anything that suggests excess, expenditure, and the high life. He is scrupulously moral, dependent upon the familiar and the routine. He prefers the dull to the novel. But despite his mild and courtly manners, he has a core of possessiveness--or, as the narrator charitably expresses it, "of gentle selfishness" (8)--in particular directed to "'poor Miss Taylor that was'" (252) and, of course, to Emma.

One can respond to such a demanding parent in two ways: with open rebellion or with deference laced with manipulation. The Prince of Wales, disastrously, took the former path, Emma the latter. The Prince established a separate residence with separate friends (the Carlton House set and especially the Whig Charles James Fox) and publicly associated himself with promoters of a new Whig government. In contrast, Emma remains at home, deferring, cajoling, and skillfully directing conversation so as to avoid dangerous topics. Yet, through such deference, Emma gains considerable power. She invites the guests she chooses; she arranges the social events in Highbury, including her father's contact with his neighbors; she allows--and sometimes even encourages--her guests to eat what her father prohibits. And she even convinces him to change his dear, ingrained habits: she convinces him to put away the family's old Pembroke dining table, "on which two of [Mr. Woodhouse's] daily meals had, for forty years, been crowded" in favor of a 'large modern circular" one (347). The result is that at Hartfield "woman, lovely woman, reigns alone" (71)--a phrase from Mr. Elton's contribution to Harriet's and Emma's charades, but also the indicator of the real hand at Hartfield's helm. So great is Emma's power that, as the narrator tells us, one of the "real evils" of "Emma's situation [was] the power of having rather too much her own way" (5)--a state of affairs that the frustrated Prince of Wales must have envied.

Though Austen mostly approves of Emma's diplomatic, manipulative control of Mr. Woodhouse, she clear-mindedly suggests that such victories come accompanied with a heavy psychological cost. By perpetually deferring to her father, Emma limits her vision. She never ventures or travels. During the course of the novel--exactly a year--she visits nearby Donwell Abbey only once. She never visits her sister in Brunswick Square, only sixteen miles from Highbury (7), but instead lets the town Knightleys come to her. She has never been either to Box Hill, only seven miles distant, or to the sea, a day's distance away. She is tiros symbolically denied both the panoramic vista of England and the sublime, terrifying, humbling, and rejuvenating sight of tile ocean; she is denied what we today would call "the big picture." Her undoubted talents and energies must focus primarily and narrowly on her father: when he is out of sorts, she must spare "no exertions to maintain [a] happier flow of ideas" and must hope "by the help of backgammon, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own" (9). It is little wonder, then, that Emma seeks a wider scope of activity in recreating Harriet Smith. Whether Harriet benefits from Emma's interference is not our concern. Readers feel that Emma's talents deserve a wider sphere of operation, something worthy of her intelligence and energy. Such a limitation of scope, Austen suggests, would have been the cost to the Prince of Wales had he taken Emma Woodhouse's path of duty and manipulative deference.

The Prince, however, did not take Emma's path. He was alternatively rebellious, surreptitious, charming, and groveling--much like Frank Churchill, who provides the second analogue to the Prince Regent in Emma. Both Frank and the Prince are patrons of the arts. The Prince, as is well known, was one of the greatest royal collectors and builders, leaving his mark on London, Windsor, and Brighton. He had studied music with Johann Christian Bach, had "a fine baritone voice and was always fond of singing rounds and other songs at musical parties" (Smith 9). In 1792, no less a figure than Josef Haydn commented that "[t]he Prince of Wales ... has an extraordinary love of music" (Landon 118). When Haydn conducted his symphonies from the piano, "[t]he Prince of Wales sat on my right side and played with us on his violincello, quite tolerably" (Landon 118). Similarly, Frank Churchill displays "a delightful voice, and a perfect knowledge of music" (227), and he patronizes Jane Fairfax's piano-playing through his gift of the forte-piano and the most recent musical publications from London (242).

Most important, however, both the Prince of Wales and Frank are Crown Princes--he former the heir to the British throne and the latter the adopted heir of the great Churchill estate at Enscombe. Yet these heirs-in-waiting must of necessity dance to the tune played by implacable power-figures. In dealing with their situations, and especially with the multiple demands placed upon them, both Frank and the Prince rely upon their extensive personal charm and wit; the Prince had, as even George Knightley grudgingly says of Frank, "'very good manners, and [can] be very agreeable'" (149). In Emma, Frank writes charming letters, makes charming conversation, inspires confidences from Emma, and in general has cultivated the ability to make himself liked whenever and wherever he is present. As Austen's narrator tells us, giving voice to residents of Highbury, "liberal allowances were made for the little excesses of such a handsome young man--one who smiled so often and bowed so well" (206). Similar sentiments were voiced about the Prince Regent, widely known as "the first gentleman in Europe," capable of ingratiating himself with conversants as diverse as Haydn, Lord Byron, and John Constable (Hibbert 25-26). After meeting the Prince, Mine. de Stall announced that no one could have been more "aimable" (Hibbert 25), the very word Mr. Knightley reserves for Frank Churchill (149).

Of course, George Knightley does not intend to compliment Frank by calling him "aimable." Knightley becomes the novel's chief critic of Frank, censuring him for the same faults that late eighteenth-century--and many subsequent--moralists have ascribed to the Prince of Wales: namely, that his public charm enables a life of selfish indulgence. Frank, Mr. Knightley argues, "'care[s] very little for any thing but his own pleasure'" (145). Frank, Knightley continues, "'cannot want money--he cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other'" (146). Here Austen recalls the Prince Regent's role in making Brighton into a popular seaside resort. When, later in the novel, George Knightley exclaims "over a newspaper he held in his hand, 'Hum! just the trifling, silly fellow I took him for'" (206), we are permitted to wonder if he is thinking of Frank's trip to London to have his hair cut or of some recently-published account of the Prince of Wales's latest selfish extravagance.

Frank's and the Prince's addictions to pleasure have involved both men in patterns of secrecy and multiple identities. In between periods of pleasing his father, the Prince of Wales was art connoisseur in the galleries, sybaritic man-about-town in theatres and brothels, and political partisan with his Carlton House set. Similarly, Frank must attempt to please many, and he finds it difficult to make his charm triumph simultaneously at Enscombe with his aunt and uncle, at Randalls with his father and step-mother, and at Weymouth and other fashionable watering places with his young friends. Frank enters a secret engagement with Jane Fairfax and visits Highbury under false pretenses. In these scenes, Jane eerily recalls the unfortunate Maria Fitzherbert, for Jane is fiancee and no fiancee, and in the novel's final volume she almost, like Mrs. Fitzherbert, becomes Dido forsaken.

Austen interests herself in the psychological damage done by a period of long, inactive waiting. She finds in Frank a nagging, restless dissatisfaction. Frank expresses his deep unhappiness on the occasion of the fete at Donwell Abbey. His description of his own condition could just as easily have been spoken by the Prince of Wales about his own situation: "'I am tired of doing nothing. I want a change.... I am sick of England--and would leave it to-morrow, if I could.... I do not look upon myself as either prosperous or indulged. I am thwarted in every thing material. I do not consider myself at all a fortunate person'" (365). The Prince expressed these sentiments more succinctly when he wrote to his father, "There ought to be some serious object to which my time should be devoted" (Brooke 348).

Austen is famously reported to have said that, in the person of Emma Woodhouse, she had created "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like" (Sutherland 119). Austen approves of Emma for many reasons, but partly because the novelist and her title character share a rash intrepidity at drawing. Emma, as every reader will recall, is the Austen heroine who dares to sketch portraits--and not just a few, but portraits of everyone: her father, "'poor Miss Taylor that was,'" Isabella and John Knightley, their children, and finally Harriet Smith. Emma has, as she herself announces, "'a great passion for taking likenesses, ... and was thought to have a tolerable eye in general'" (43). In this talent, Emma distinctly recalls her creator, the author who set herself up as royal portraitist. Emma's best portraits were her most incomplete--"the least finished" (44)--but always "her style was spirited" (45), producing sketches that in a few quick strokes suggested individuality. Similarly, with a few quick, spirited strokes, Austen suggested the personal dilemmas of the Prince Regent. I imagine Jane Austen surprised, diverted, and also made slightly self-conscious by the unexpected "gleam of Court favor" that came to her in autumn 1815, for she would have known that the sitter for her most daring portrait was soon to be examining his image.

It is not known if the Prince Regent recognized himself in the pages of Austen's Emma, the novel he attempted to imprint with his own stamp but the novel that, I wish to argue, already contained his own portrait. The Prince had received far rougher treatment from the savage political cartoonists of the day, so we should hardly expect him to resent so comparatively light--sometimes even sympathetic--an indictment. Perhaps the Regent was pleased to recognize himself: as Austen herself writes of Emma's drawings, "A likeness pleases every body" (45). We know that in his final years, when he was at last George IV, when he was a lonely recluse in Windsor Castle, derided by most of his subjects, he took pleasure in having read to him the works of Lady Morgan, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen (Hibbert 322). It is tempting to imagine the aging rake, finding himself in the pages of Emma and thinking his gratitude toward the novelist whom he had never met but who had understood him so well.

WORKS CITED

Aspinall, A., ed. Letters of the Princess Charlotte 1811-1817. London: Home, 1949.

Austen, Jane. The Works of Jane Austen. Ed. R.W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1933-69.

Austen-Leigh, James Edward. Fugitive Pieces: Trifles Light as Air: The Poems of James Edward Austen-Leigh. Ed. David Selwyn. Winchester: JAS, 2006.

Baker, Kenneth. George IV: A Life in Caricature. London: Thames, 2005.

Black, Jeremy. George III: America's Last King. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.

Brooke, John. King George III: American's Last Monarch. New York: McGraw; 1972.

Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

Doody, Margaret Anne, and Douglas Murray, eds. Catherine and Other Writings. Oxford: OUP, 1993.

Gattrell, Vic. City of Laughter: Ser and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. New York: Walker, 2007.

Hibbert, Christopher. George IV: Regent and King. New York: Harper, 1973.

Landon, H. C. Robbins. Haydn in England, 1791-1795. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.

Sheehan, Colleen A. "Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Charade in Emma." Persuasions On-Line 27.1 (2006).

--. "Jane Austen's 'Tribute' to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty." Persuasions On-Line 27.1 (2006).

Smith, E. A. George IV. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Sutherland, Kathryn, ed. A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections. Oxford: OUP, 2002.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Vintage, 1999.

NOTES

(1.) Caroline Austen's anecdote was the basis for all subsequent versions of this event, including the first published account, found in Caroline's brother James Edward Austen-Leigh's 1870 A Memoir of Jane Austen (Sutherland 91-92).

(2.) The dedication reads "TO/HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS/THE PRINCE REGENT/THIS WORK IS,/BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS'S PERMISSION,/MOST RESPECTFULLY/ DEDICATED, / BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS'S / DUTIFUL/AND OBEDIENT/HUMBLE SERVANT,/THE AUTHOR" (3).

(3.) Only Colleen A. Sheehan notes the presence of the Prince Regent within the text, finding allusion to the future George IV in Mr. Elton's charade and in various other places in the novel. Sheehan finds the Regent in some of the novel's details, and I find him in two of the major characters.

(4.) It is, of course, impossible to prove that Austen saw prints such as these, but they were displayed in print-shop windows and bought by those with disposable income. Austen spent a considerable portion of her life in towns where they would have had wide currency: in Bath between 1801 and 1806, in Southampton between 1807 and 1809, and in London with her brother Henry.

(5.) "Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act (1753) required either the publication of banns or a special license from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Here the duchess's chaplain is guilty of a felony; he is liable to fourteen years' transportation" (Doody and Murray 298-99).

Douglas Murray is Professor of English at Belmont University and editor with Margaret Anne Doody of Catharine and Other Writings (Oxford World's Classics). He has published essays on Austen, Dryden, Pope, Swift, English hymnody, and musical settings of British poetry. He is organist of Nashville's First Presbyterian Church.