Glenarvon as a Roman a Clef
Glenarvon as Roman à Clef, by Paul Douglass
LCL never intended her novel to be a simple roman à clef (a novel with a key), despite obvious allusions to real people whom she mocked or praised. Most readers, however, wrote ‘keys’ on Glenarvon’s endpapers, so fascinated by this hunt for allusions to the denizens of London society that they really couldn’t appreciate the novel as fiction. Lady Holland identified Caroline’s cousin Harriet Cavendish as the character of Sophia (Mrs Seymour’s daughter) because she was preoccupied with embroidery. The traitorous Lady Oxford, who had encouraged Byron to write cruelly to Caroline when he broke off their affair in 1812, was identified by Lady Holland and others as the character Lady Mandeville. Lady Holland also suspected that the character of William Buchanan was based upon her own son, Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, with whom Lamb had carried on an affair in 1810-11: ‘His hands were decorated with rings, and a gold chain and half-concealed picture hung round his neck: his height, his mustachios, the hussar trappings of his horse, the high colour in his cheek, and his dark flowing locks, gave an air of savage wildness to his countenance and figure, which much delighted Calantha’.[i] Naturally, Lady Holland disliked the character of the Princess of Madagascar, because ‘every ridicule, folly and infirmity (my not being able from malady to move about much) is portrayed’. No doubt upset, she commented rather temperately, ‘The work is a strange farrago’, and confined herself to sympathizing with the real victims: ‘I am sorry to see the Melbourne family so miserable about it. Lady Cowper is really frightened and depressed far beyond what is necessary’.[ii] Glenarvon caused a mild hysteria among those who believed they had glimpsed their own caricatures. Many who took offense did so because of scenes in volumes one and two satirizing London society in the houses of Lamb’s friends, especially Lady Holland. The Princess of Madagascar is accompanied by a cadaverous sycophant Fremore (the name is misprinted as ‘Tremore’ three times in the first edition), who was based upon Samuel Rogers, and a cast of characters from Holland House makes its appearance in those scenes. Rogers, a man with a famously sardonic tongue, was only one of several figures ripe for satire then and after. Miss Emily Eden later wrote of him:
We have had the most alarming visit from Rogers the Poet this morning, the very recollection of which would make my hair, black pins, combs and all, stand on end, if they ever subsided since his first appearance. I never saw such a satirical, odious wretch, and I was calculating the whole time, from what he was saying of other people, what he could find ill-natured enough to say of us. I had never seen him before, and trust I never shall again.[iii]
As John Clubbe says, Glenarvon captured the ‘wit and artificial bonhomie’ of Whig culture so perfectly that twenty years after Glenarvon appeared, friends still called Lady Holland the ‘Princess Madagascar’ behind her back.[iv]
Some readers of Glenarvon could be dispassionate in assigning ‘originals’ to its characters. Robert Wilmot was an acquaintance of Lady Byron’s, and he wrote to her with his own key to the novel, most of whose characters he perceptively described as ‘compounds’ rather than ‘portraits’:
Of course Lady C[aroline] & W[illiam] L[amb] you will easily recognise. Miss Monmouth perhaps you do not know, but I do, & can assure you that she is a most delightful person [he means Lady Byron herself]. Lady Mandeville is Lady Oxford – P[rincess] of Madagascar, Lady H[olland] . . . as to the other characters, I much question their being portraits, but rather compounds . . . there are traits in Lady Margaret meant for your dear Aunt [Lady Melbourne]. Some say that Buchanan is Sir G[odfrey Vassal] Webster, others that Lady Augusta is Lady Jersey, others that Lady Margaret is the present D[uchess] of D[evonshire]. Mrs Seymour is I should think compounded of parts of the character of the late Duchess & Lady Bessborough [Lamb’s own mother].[v]
Wilmot was right that Glenarvon’s characters cannot be quickly and simply keyed to a list of real persons. The attempt to do so has led to highly contradictory lists of ‘originals’. For example, Mrs Seymour was often understood by readers as a version of the sisters, Georgiana and Harriet (Lamb’s aunt and mother). Yet Mabell, Countess of Airlie, thought that Lady Melbourne, Lamb’s mother-in-law, was ‘probably represented under the name of Mrs. Seymour’.[vi] Another later commentator, Marjorie Villiers, tells us that the character of Lady Margaret is the Duchess of Devonshire.[vii] And Paston and Quennell are confident that Lady Melbourne is represented in the novel by the character of Avondale’s aunt, Lady Mowbrey (also called on one occasion Lady Monteith, after the estate on which she dwells).[viii] This brings more confusion than clarity, and points to the limit of the roman à clef as applied to Glenarvon.
Often, readers apparently thought they knew the identity of a particular character when they recognized some element in the plot connected with that person. The story of the birth of Sidney Albert, the disappearing heir who reappears as Zerbellini, was read by some as based on a malicious rumor that the Marquis of Hartington – later the 6th Duke of Devonshire – had really been the illegitimate child of his mother’s friend and father’s lover, Lady Elizabeth Foster. To accept this reading meant equating the devious Lady Margaret with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – a ‘key’ that makes little sense.[ix] Similarly, assuming Lord Avondale is meant to stand for William Lamb, then Lady Elizabeth Mowbrey, sister of Lord Avondale, would seem to allude to Emily Lamb (later Lady Cowper), William’s sister. And yet the name ‘Elizabeth’ recalls the hated Elizabeth Foster, who outraged Lamb when she married her uncle, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, after the death of her beloved aunt Georgiana. Alternatively, the name ‘Elizabeth’ also recalls Lady Melbourne – whose maiden name was Elizabeth Milbanke, and whose grandmother had been named ‘Delavel’. Indeed, there is something uncanny about the names in Glenarvon. Lord Avondale shares certain characteristics with Lamb’s husband William and with Lord Byron, and his name constitutes a mirror image of Glenarvon’s: Glen and dale – these words evoke Glenarvon’s mystical Irish countryside.
If many originals may constitute one character, several characters may derive from one original—or if not traceable to originals, they may appear in alternate versions, a doubling effect of which Lamb seems to have been particularly fond. Byron’s identity is manifested in Glenarvon, de Ruthven, and Viviani (admittedly merely his alias), but also in William Buchanan, who flatters Alice Mac Allain, delights in being supposed her seducer, and even returns to flatter Calantha herself before Glenarvon makes inroads into her heart. Calantha, too, is only one of several characters with whom Lamb identified. Other reflections of Lamb are found in Alice Mac Allain, who becomes pregnant by Glenarvon and begs in vain for his help, and even in the little page-boy, Zerbellini (a.k.a., Sidney Albert, the Duke’s heir).[x] Lady Caroline’s breeches-roles often featured a page’s outfit of hussar jacket, feathered cap and silver buttons, and she was sometimes called pejoratively, by her in-laws, ‘Cherubina’ – an Italian nuance retained in ‘Zerbellini’. Elinor St. Clare, with her penchant for playing the harp, writing songs, and dressing like a man, also embodies aspects of Lamb, and after Calantha dies, Elinor steps forward to re-invoke the ‘broken heart’ motif before expiring herself in a suicidal leap on horseback, ‘bleeding to death from her wounds’ sustained in the ill-fated rebellion and in her affair with Glenarvon, whose estate is burning to the ground.[xi] Even the scheming Lady Margaret herself exhibits characteristics derived from Lamb, for she has a ‘fierce spirit which never yet had been controuled – which deemed itself born to command, and would have perished sooner than have endured restraint’.[xii] Most readers, however, identified Calantha as Lamb’s character, pure and simple, though they failed to appreciate the literary allusion which makes Calantha a symbol of her class.
Named after the protagonist of John Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633), Glenarvon’s Calantha Delaval is no simple authorial self-portrait. Parallels between the two Calanthas make it obvious that Lamb structured her novel around the allusion to aristocratic stoicism conveyed by the choice of the name.
Ford’s Calantha is a princess of Sparta who is betrothed to her cousin, Nearchus, the Prince of Argos. She is in love, however, with Ithocles, and together they persuade Calantha’s father – and even Nearchus himself – to accept their marriage. Ithocles’ twin sister, Penthea, is in love with Orgilus, but her brother, despite his insistence on a love-match for himself, demands that she marry Bassanes, who is wealthier, but much older. Penthea eventually starves herself to death rather than continue in a loveless marriage to a jealous older husband. The spurned lover Orgilus murders Ithocles in revenge. In the ensuing scene at a festival dance Calantha hears that her father, her friend Penthea, and her husband-to-be Ithocles are dead. Nonetheless she forbids the dance to stop. Once it has reached its conclusion, she takes up the mantle of queen, sentences Orgilus to death for the murder of Ithocles, then gives her kingdom to Nearchus. Her last acts are to put her wedding ring on the finger of Ithocles and to die of a broken heart. The scene is an exhibition of an aristocratic ideal of self-control under duress – an exemplification of how one must never forget one’s place as a member of the nobility.
Ford had undergone a minor revival during the Romantic period. Charles Lamb had included an extended discussion of Calantha and The Broken Heart in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare, which appeared in 1808, and in a new edition in 1811. As T. J. B. Spencer notes, contemporary critics William Hazlitt, William Gifford, and Francis Jeffrey all discussed Ford’s accomplishments as a playwright.[xiii] As Leigh Wetherall Dickson has documented, Ford also drew Byron’s attention for his candid approach to the theme of incest. Ford became a significant source for Lamb’s writing because one of his major themes is the importance and integrity of the aristocracy as occupying an ‘intermediary position between the people and the monarchy’. Ford’s depiction of ideal behavior for the aristocracy provides Lamb with a framework for delineating the moral bankruptcy of the aristocrats of her era. Additionally, as Byron appreciated, Ford dealt non-judgmentally with taboo sexual relationships, writing sympathetically about those who are trapped by their own strong passions.
Parallels between The Broken Heart, Glenarvon, and Lamb’s life are founded upon the heroine’s rejection of what Wetherall Dickson labels the ‘dynastic marriage’ in favour of a love match. Ford’s Princess Calantha rejects Nearchus for Ithocles; and Lamb’s Lady Calantha rejects her cousin William Buchanan for Lord Avondale, just as Lady Caroline Lamb rejected her own cousin, the Marquis of Hartington, for William Lamb. In several scenes of Glenarvon, Lamb borrows from Ford and revises his telling of the tragedy that ensues when true love (the love of Orgilus for Penthea in The Broken Heart, and the love of Calantha for Glenarvon) is thwarted. In many places in the novel Lady Calantha Avondale’s stoicism is evoked. The literary allusion of ‘Calantha’ is driven home in chapter thirteen of volume two of Glenarvon, when Calantha’s friend, Lady Augusta, asks her if she has ever read The Broken Heart (she has not). ‘At this moment’, continues Lady Augusta, ‘you put me vastly in mind of it. You look most woefully. Come, tell me truly, is not your heart in torture? and, like your namesake Calantha, while lightly dancing the gayest in the ring, has not the shaft already been struck, and shall you not die ere you attain the goal?’
John Ford’s drama provides a touchstone for Glenarvon’s moral and dramatic structure, focusing as it does upon the failure of the aristocracy and the disaster of denying true love, even if it is taboo. No where is the message more clearly stated than in Calantha’s speech, delivered to her aunt, Lady Seymour, shortly before she dies in chapter 16 of volume three. It is a confession of the failure of the British aristocracy to adhere to the high principles of behavior demanded of the privileged few:
‘From the deep recesses of a guilty, yet not humble heart, in the agony and the hopelessness of despair,’ said Calantha, ‘I acknowledge before God and before man, that for me there is no excuse. I have felt, I have enjoyed every happiness, every delight, the earth can offer. Its vanities, its pleasures, its transports have been mine; and in all instances I have misused the power with which I have been too much and too long entrusted. Oh, may the God of worlds innumerable, who scatters his blessings upon all and maketh his rain to fall upon the sinner, as upon the righteous, extend his mercy even unto me. . . . Tell them I do not hope that my example can amend them: they will not turn from one wrong pursuit for me; they will not compare themselves with Calantha. . . . Yet when they read my history – if amidst the severity of justice which such a narrative must excite, some feelings of forgiveness and pity should arise, perhaps the prayer of one, who has suffered much, may ascend for them, and the thanks of a broken heart be accepted in return.’
The exact phrase, ‘ broken heart’, occurs eight times in volume three of Glenarvon; and the word ‘heart’ occurs over 500 times in the novel. In Elinor’s final appearance, her last words before plunging to her death from the cliffs of Heremon include, ‘Peace to the broken hearts’.[xiv]
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Notes
[i] Glenarvon, vol. 1, p. 228.
[ii] Thomas Creevey, The Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence & Diaries of the Late Thomas Creevey, 3d ed., Sir Herbert Maxwell (ed.) (London: John Murray, 1905), pp. 254-55.
[iii] Letter to Lady Buckingham dated June 4, 1819, in Emily Eden, Miss Eden’s Letters, Violet Dickinson (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 35.
[iv] Clubbe, ‘Glenarvon Revised – and Revisited’, pp. 209, 213.
[v] Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Family: Annabella, Ada, and Augusta 1816-1824, Peter Thomson (ed.) (London: J. Murray, 1975), pp. 32-33.
[vi] Mabell, Countess of Airlie, In Whig Society: 1775-1818 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), p. 184.
[vii] Villiers, The Grand Whiggery (London: John Murray, 1939), p. 321.
[viii] Paston and Quennell, ‘To Lord Byron’, p. 72.
[ix] Villiers, The Grand Whiggery, 321.
[x] In most “keys” to Glenarvon, characters who seem to personify other aspects of the author, like Zerbellini, Alice Mac Allain, and Elinor St. Clare, are not listed at all. Calantha is actually taken for Zerbellini by Glenarvon, who greets her on the heath above the cliff with these words: ‘Ah! my / little trembling page, my Zerbellini, welcome to my heart’.
[xi]Glenarvon 3:292). Note that in speeches similar to Calantha’s, St. Clare has struggled with guilt over having incurred ‘a father’s curse’, and confesses ‘my heart is breaking’ (3:198).
[xii] Glenarvon vol. 1, chapter 2, p. 18.
[xiii] See T. J. B. Spencer, ‘Introduction’ to John Ford’s The Broken Heart, T. J. B. Spencer (ed.), (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 27-29.
[xiv] Vol. 3, chapter 33, p. 294.