SOURCE: Wilson, Lisa M. “Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic ‘Age of Personality’: The Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 3 (1998): 393-420.

[In the following essay, Wilson first reminds us of the key role that pseudonyms and ensuing literary gossip played in the marketing and sales of eighteenth-century books, and then shows how Charlotte King's cleverly self-protective double pseudonymity (Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre) illustrates the continuing importance of pseudonymous authorship in the early nineteenth century.]

Writing in 1809, at the height of Charlotte King's career as a pseudonymous author, Coleridge remarks that his was an “age of personality, [an] age of literary and political gossiping” when “a bashful Philalethes, or Phileleatheros is as rare on the title-pages, and among the signatures of our magazines, as a real name used to be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning grandfathers!” (The Friend, 10 [October 19, 1809]). In an “age of personality,” authors increasingly sought to capitalize on the public's interest in “gossiping” in order to increase sales and make names for themselves as literary celebrities. However, this change in the way literature and literary figures were marketed, read, and reviewed did not utterly banish “shy and notice-shunning” authors, as Coleridge suggests. Even “Monk” Lewis, arguably the most recognizable literary celebrity in the period before Byron and Scott, initially published anonymously. In fact, the very tendency Coleridge noted of satirists and reviewers commenting on authors' personal lives suggests a compelling reason for authors to publish anonymously or pseudonymously.

As authors as well as critics became more acutely aware of the key role that “literary and political gossiping” about authors played in the sale and marketing of their texts, pseudonymity became more than simply a way to shield authors from critical scrutiny. Pseudonymity, like anonymity, certainly provided authors with a means of avoiding critical readings of their fiction in terms of their personal lives. At the same time, pseudonymity offered authors the opportunity to create a fictionalized authorial persona for themselves. Adopting sufficiently convincing pseudonyms allowed authors to influence those “gossiping” readings of their texts, at the same time that they provided the kind of “name recognition” important to sales and literary fame.

However, Coleridge is also correct in implying that pseudonymity was on the decline—even as he voices a common regret that the greater emphasis on celebrity represents a loss of authorial innocence (See Braudy 465-67). As critics and readers recognized the powers of self-fashioning (and self-marketing) that lay in such a strategy, pseudonymity was viewed with increasing suspicion, and so became an unlikely route to lasting fame and literary respectability. Instead, satirists demonized pseudonymous authorship by portraying it as the arena of dishonest hack writers whose only goals were mass popularity and increased circulation.

Charlotte King, alias Rosa Matilda, alias Charlotte Dacre, began her literary career in this climate of suspicion surrounding pseudonymous authorship and increased attention to literary celebrity. Since she never publicly revealed the “real” name that lay behind her pseudonyms, her career aptly illustrates the continuing importance of pseudonymous authorship well into the early decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the unusual way she achieved her celebrity also points up the means by which even “bashful” authors like King, who insisted on personal anonymity, became as much a part of the Romantic “age of personality” as the most brazen of their fellow-authors.

While a few of her contemporaries appear to have known the woman behind the pseudonyms, so successful was Charlotte King's construction of literary identities for herself that it has only been recent scholarly work that has uncovered substantial evidence that links a particular woman to the pseudonyms.¹ That Charlotte King kept her legal identity secret does not mean that she never achieved a certain literary fame, however. An avowed disciple of Matthew Lewis and Della Cruscan poetesses like Mary Robinson, King seemingly imitated their popular and successful literary forms without coveting the personal notoriety that attended their success. While as Charlotte King she never became a celebrity, “Rosa Matilda,” King's most successful pseudonym, came to represent the hordes of pseudonymous authors writing such sentimental Della Cruscan poetry and titillating, Monk-inspired novelistic prose. Instead of achieving the kind of adulation and denigration to which Lewis was subjected in the wake of the publication of The Monk, “Rosa Matilda” achieved another kind of notoriety as the representative of the anonymous writing hordes “who ape the perverted genius of the author of the Monk” (Prodigious 2: 289).

Ironically, critics' attempts to apply the logic of Romantic authorship to one of the novelizing hordes failed in its inability to name accurately—while “Rosa Matilda” and her sisters might have been excoriated as “scientifically excit[ing] the passions” by following The Monk's bad example, by their very anonymity they were exempt from accusations of following “the Monk”'s bad example (Prodigious 2: 290). Without a link to a person behind the pseudonym, critics' efforts to control scandalous texts by linking them back to their authors were doomed to failure. Faced with such faceless texts, critics did their best to speculate on their authors' moral characters, using fictional characters they created as evidence.

By choosing a pseudonym so patently fictional in its echoes of the names of Gothic heroines, Charlotte King seems to have teasingly invited critics to make just such connections between her character and her characters. At the same time, she insured the inevitable failure of such projects. By “outing” herself in 1805 as “Charlotte Dacre, better known by the name of Rosa Matilda,” King deflected the possibility of further scrutiny onto the identity of the real author assumed to lie behind “Rosa Matilda.” King's double pseudonym allowed her to create a nearly completely fictionalized celebrity. As “Rosa Matilda,” King is known primarily through her texts and those of her imitators. She becomes an author-celebrity who never appears publicly to tout her own works or to provide much evidence for gossiping speculation. Unmoored from its connection with the personal life of her creator, “Rosa Matilda” is a fictional creation whose “life” exists solely through what King and her critics make of it.

In this way, Charlotte King's literary career reveals the continuing importance of pseudonymity within the logic of Romantic authorship, which strove to map authorial character onto literary character. King's strategy allowed her to create both a convincingly “round” character (Charlotte Dacre) and a “flat” caricature of herself (Rosa Matilda), both equally fictional, which provided her with some of the positive attributes of the Romantic author without many of its negative ones. Ironically, the caricatured identity “Rosa Matilda,” unanchored as it was to a particular author, also provided her critics with a remarkable opportunity to employ King's pseudonym for their own purposes. While her pseudonyms may have protected Charlotte King from personal scrutiny, critics turned “Rosa Matilda” into an object of satire, a convenient shorthand for the kind of female hack authorship they deplored.

I

The Italianate “Rosa Matilda,” King's earliest literary pseudonym, might have been the appellation of a Gothic novel heroine—or a Della Cruscan poetess. Appropriately enough, King chooses to publish her first novel, The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, under that name, thereby capitalizing on an identity already familiar to her readers as that of a Della Cruscan-style poetess.² As Pollin and others have pointed out, the pseudonym's surname takes the name of Ambrosio's evil mistress in The Monk (which itself echoes the name of heroines in The Castle of Otranto and in Radcliffe's Castle of Athlin and Dunbayne). “Rosa” was also the name of the popular heroine of A. M. Bennett's The Beggar Girl. King may have hoped to activate connections between her authorial persona and such fictional characters, thereby encouraging her readers to interpret her as a woman of sensibility. However, King's choice to portray herself as Gothic heroine could not be seen as an uncontentious one, especially after the controversy that had raged over Lewis's immoral “Matilda.”³ While her pseudonym may have called up images of Gothic heroines, King could by no means be sure that, by 1805, such an association would be an entirely positive one in the minds of her audience.

Perhaps more importantly, her choice calls up celebrated poetic pseudonyms like Hannah Cowley's “Anna Matilda,” first adopted as newspaper pseudonyms by women in the Della Cruscan circle in the late 1780's. By this choice, King may have intended to indicate the sensibility of her authorial persona, just as writers like “Anna Matilda” (Hannah Cowley) and “Laura Maria” (Mary Robinson) had done before her. Like King, these women had made names for themselves by writing in literary newspapers like The World, “the Paper of Poetry.” By taking on flowery pseudonyms, these writers had managed to avoid some of the associations of such writing with hack work, with putting themselves “on the market.” As such, they must have provided an attractive example for King.

However, by 1805 the entire Della Cruscan school had also become representative of a shallow, self-consciously constructed sentimentality. For example, bluestockings and other literati had greatly admired “Laura Maria”'s poetry—and its author's sensibility—when it first appeared in literary newspapers. They were likely to have been somewhat chagrined to discover later that the melancholy “Laura Maria” was Mary Robinson, better known as “Perdita.” Robinson had earlier been a notorious courtesan and actress, a character which did not altogether fit her new self-presentation as a respectable authoress (Robinson 136-37). The Della Cruscans' most vehement critic, William Gifford, strenuously objected to the fame they had constructed under the cover of such fanciful pseudonyms. In his satiric Baeviad, he claimed that the circle's fame was ill-deserved, contrived by misleading their readers and by puffing each other's poetry. He charged that they “liv'[d] upon renown / And with eternal puffs insult'st the town,” implying that their much-vaunted sensibility was merely a cover for their indecorous thirst for fame (ll. 69-70). By choosing such a self-consciously literary, even clichéd pseudonym, King aligned herself with two debased genres: the Gothic novel, and Della Cruscan poetry. Obviously a fictional creation, King's pseudonym draws on equivocal associations between such names and the characters of women writers. She thereby reveals little about herself but that which can be deduced from her choice of literary style.

With the introduction of her volume of poetry, Hours of Solitude, King employs for the first time the double pseudonym which would prove to be so successful in thwarting her reader's curiosity while apparently satisfying it. By publishing the volume under “Charlotte Dacre, better known by the name of Rosa Matilda,” and including an engraved portrait of the author (signed “Rosa Matilda” beneath), King capitalized on the name-recognition of her earlier pseudonym. At the same time, by employing the conventionalized language of “outing,” King suggested that she was revealing her true identity to her readership.⁴ The inclusion of the portrait, the assertion “better known by the name of,” and the aura of verisimilitude surrounding the choice of a second pseudonym all contribute to the impression that “Charlotte Dacre” represents the name with which the author was born. By employing the language of self-revelation, Charlotte King takes advantage of the conventions of Romantic authorship in order to create a false impression of reality. Ironically, by relying on the contrast between the “flat” and overtly self-constructed character represented by pseudonyms and the “real” characters of the authors who are assumed to lie behind those fictional constructions, Romantic authorship leaves open the possibility of just such manipulations. By naturalizing this set of aesthetic standards as opposites, the door is opened for authors to recognize the conventionalized quality of such “realism”—and to put as much effort into the creation of their “real” personas as they did into their pseudonymous ones, as did Charlotte King.⁵ King attempted to avoid the kind of negative personal criticism to which successful literary celebrities like Matthew Lewis had been subjected by taking the creation of her “round” persona into her own hands. King's strategy of employing two pseudonyms took advantage of the conventions of Romantic authorship by self-consciously creating a second pseudonym that could pass for the natural reflection of her true self. As an attempt to create a convincing pen name that would achieve the kind of recognition that “Rosa Matilda” had attained, King's substitution of “Charlotte Dacre” could not be considered a complete success. Reviewers and critics who preferred the image of King as a literary hack clearly continued to favor the pseudonym in which she had first come to public attention, the one that neatly collapsed the artificiality of her work and that of her authorial persona: Rosa Matilda. As an attempt to create a “round” persona that stabilized and authorized her other pseudonym, however, “Charlotte Dacre” appears to have sufficed, successfully deflecting attention away from the question of King's personal identity.

By choosing the less overtly literary “Charlotte Dacre” as her second pseudonym, King appeared to be revealing her true identity to her reading public. The phrase “better known by the name of Rosa Matilda,” seemed to let her public in on the secret that this name was a pseudonym. In actuality, this revelation uncovered no new information, since the first pseudonym was patently fictional. In addition to protecting her from scrutiny into her personal life, King's double pseudonym may have been designed to distance her from her identity as Rosa Matilda, which reviewers had begun to use to denigrate her work. Without information about her life, King's critics could not subject her to the kind of strictly biographical criticism that reads work in terms of the author's life. Instead, they tried to control the shiftiness of her authorial identity by another kind of personal criticism, one which imagined a persona for “Rosa Matilda” by reading her work, and then applied that persona as a critical tool. Both journals that reviewed Hours persist in referring to her rather sarcastically as “Rosa Matilda.” Pointing to the self-conscious literariness of her first pseudonym allowed reviewers to dismiss her poetry as “Della Cruscan,” derivative and passé.

Beyond adoption of the second pseudonym, the text of Hours of Solitude does little to distance itself from such associations with the Della Cruscans. Instead, King actively courts such associations, viewing them in a different light from her cynical reviewers. Instead of seeing the Della Cruscans as deceptive hacks whose positive reputation was completely undercut by their ability to turn celebrity into sales, King adopted many of their most successful strategies to authorize her own poetic project. As we have seen, however, modeling one's style on the Della Cruscan school was a loaded choice, particularly by 1805.

For example, King's choice to address a passionate poem “To the Shade of Mary Robinson,” reveals a kind of contentious naiveté concerning the conditions in which Robinson's work circulated. Upon her death in December 1800, Robinson was one of the most celebrated female poets of her day, certainly the most respected poet of the Della Cruscan circle. However, she was also known as “Perdita,” the actress-celebrity who had seduced the young Prince of Wales and who had a scandalous reputation as a fashionable demi-rep before she turned to poetry writing. Her reputation was further tarnished by her later association with radical literati like Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Ignoring these contentious aspects of Robinson's identity, the poem casts her as “lovely Mary,” adored poetic muse and virtuous “angel,” and casts its author as Robinson's votary and slave, the devoted “Matilda.”⁶ Of course, this idealized vision of Robinson was one which the world might not share, as King acknowledges in the poem. She writes, addressing Robinson:

Oh thou! whose high virtues, angelic, yet glorious,
At once move my wonder, my pride, and my tears,
Still, still in the grave dost thou triumph victorious,
Thy fame sounding loud in thine enemies' ears!

(1: 131, italics in original).

King chooses to represent Robinson as a worthy and appropriate literary model, purging her of the scandalous associations that plagued Robinson during her lifetime. By identifying herself as “Matilda” in the role of Robinson's defender, King seems to be directly acknowledging the Della Cruscan's influence on her choice of pseudonym as well as her poetic style. The constant barrage of personal criticism to which Mary Robinson was subjected after she revealed herself to be the Della Cruscan poetess “Laura Maria” would certainly have provided an object lesson to writers like King, who might have hoped to follow in Robinson's footsteps while avoiding the kind of sexual celebrity that dogged her throughout her career.

Having classed “Rosa Matilda” with the Della Cruscans, reviewers assume that she must have adopted their misleading strategies for titillating their readers with hints that their poems reflected the lives of their authors. One reviewer of Hours of Solitude ironically pretends to believe that all of her poems reflect “Rosa Matilda”'s lived experiences. He writes mock-sympathetically that “The poems chiefly relate to love, of which poor Rosa seems to have felt all the vicissitudes. That she has also poetical feelings in her hours of solitude, we are far from attempting to deny. … Many poems in this second volume, which by no means disgrace it, are written by Azor, a lover of Rosa Matilda” (429, italics in original). By leaving unanswered the question of whether “Azor” and the other addressees of her poems are real men or merely newspaper muses, the reviewer manages to imply “poor Rosa's” literal promiscuity and the overactivity of her sexual imagination. He underlines the fact that, by choosing topics concerning love for her poetry, she has opened herself to such speculations about her emotional and sexual life. Taking the position of both believer and skeptic concerning the fictionality of King's pseudonym allows this reviewer to deploy several different stereotypes about female hack writers against her. In one way, applying the conventions of biographical criticism allows him to paint “Rosa” as physically as well as literarily promiscuous. In another, the reviewer's skepticism about the sources of “poor Rosa”'s sentimental poetry allows him to imply that her authorial persona is a mere pose conceived to trick the gullible into sympathizing with her plight and purchasing more copies of her book.

“The Triumph of Pleasure” and “The Exile,” the pair of poems that opens Hours, aptly illustrate what reviewers saw as the pleasures and dangers of King's poetry. Both poems thematize female seduction, and are subtitled “Written at sixteen.”⁷ “The Exile” appears here as “composed on the sea-shore, and founded on the fate of an unfortunate Female born to better hopes” (1: 11). Providing such details about the time, place, and circumstances of composition reinforces the impression that the poems arose naturally out of the author's own experience. At the same time, the poem's headnote rejects the possibility that the poem's first-person speaker, a despairing fallen woman, can be equated with the author. Even if King was not a fallen woman herself at sixteen, however, the note indicates that she knew one and sympathized with her plight—and found the woman's situation an inspiring subject for her poetry. That such precocious sexual knowledge might be merely literary and not personal makes it no less dangerous in the eyes of critics, however, who were concerned about the moral effects of such knowledge on female readers, as well as writers. While King's poems denounce such sexual frailty, they also imply the pleasures of committing the errors they so vehemently condemn. In doing so, they allow critics to raise the question of whether any literature thematizing seduction might not be read as encouraging the very activity it claims to condemn.

For example, in “The Triumph of Pleasure,” King presents an allegory of Beauty seduced by Love and Pleasure. Age attempts to save Beauty from such allurements by painting a stark picture of a woman's future when her beauty is gone:

Think, oh think! that youthful bloom
Waits not even for the tomb!
Time will dim those lust'rous eyes;
The dart of Death resistless flies:
Turn, fair daughter, and be wise!
All is misery, grief, and shame,
Pleasure lives not but in name.

(ll. 44-50)

It comes as no surprise that Beauty rejects Age's argument. After all, Beauty will lose her bloom whether or not she is virtuous, and Age offers no positive alternatives to Love and Pleasure. In fact, although Age purports to speak with the voice of morality, she could also be read as speaking out of jealousy. She tells Beauty: “Virgin, shun your treach'rous guide; / I once was fair like you,” which serves to undercut her claims that Pleasure is empty and meaningless (ll. 32-33). As Love counters: “Frosty Age no pleasure knows— / Youth and Age have long been foes” (ll. 86-87). In contrast, Love's pleasures are portrayed in quite physical, alluring, and non-idealized terms. When Cupid's arrow finds its mark, King describes Beauty's reaction as a physical sensation more akin to lust than allegorized Love:

Swift poison tingled in her veins,
Her breast throbb'd wild with nameless pains;
The more she look'd, the more she fir'd,
Nor knew 'twas LOVE her soul inspir'd.

(ll. 173-76)

While the poem's narrative and moral authority is clearly on the side of Age, Beauty has few regrets about her choice: she sails “joyful on the wind” to “that fatal shore / Where Virtue sinks ‘to rise no more’” (ll. 198-201).

Such moral ambiguities are fostered by King's Della Cruscan approach to language, defined by McGann as a style in which “a poem in not an organic structure, it is the gravity field of a mind conscious of its own physicalities” (128).⁸ King's style relies on witty turns of phrase that give rise to multiple readings, an effect particularly pronounced in her allegorical poems. Such poems theatrically emphasize the poet's role in constructing them, and invite their readers to play an active role in decoding their meanings. For example, the line “Pleasure lives not but in name” could be read “Pleasure exists only as a meaningless word.” However, it also carries echoes of the reading, “The only true pleasure that exists comes from a woman's good name—her reputation, and thereby her chastity.” Both readings fit the poem's theme of the fallen woman; the second reading invites the reader to speculate about King's attitude toward her own name and reputation, as well as those of her heroine. Read in the context of Hours of Solitude, such moves invite the reader to make connections between the poems and the life and identity of their author, “Charlotte Dacre, better known by the name Rosa Matilda.” By equipping some of her poems with such poetic hints and “biographical” headnotes, King acknowledges her audience's Romantic expectations that her poems will be the spontaneous effusions of an individual mind. At the same time, she exposes her newly-constructed persona to “personal” attacks on her sexuality and morality, as we have seen.

In fact, faithful readers of “Rosa Matilda” might have recognized poems like “The Triumph of Pleasure” as the personal expression of Cazire, the sentimental and erring heroine of King's The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1: 45-55). In this novel, which appeared just a few months before the publication of Hours, “Pleasure” appears as “The Dangers of Love,” where it functions as the heroine's fascinated response to possibility of her impending seduction. Appropriately, the poem is read aloud by Cazire's lover in a scene in which their discussion of the poem leads to a passionate discussion of sentimental versus sensual love. A stereotypical Della Cruscan reader (and writer), Cazire is seduced as much by the physicality of her own words as by the body of her lover. Awareness of this alternate context for the poem further complicates any attempts to attribute the poems to the personal experience of “Charlotte Dacre”—or Charlotte King. If we assume that King, like her heroine, has a direct biographical relationship with her poetry, then the life situations which led to their creation remain somewhat shrouded in mystery—they might be similar to those of her heroine, or they might not. On the other hand, we might assume that their creation had little or no relationship to personal events in their author's life, and were created either expressly to reflect the feelings of a fictional character, or were created entirely outside the context of the novel and were merely inserted in appropriate places. Elsewhere in Hours, King encourages the more cynical notion that the poems are altered by the context in which they are read, and have a degree of independence from their author and the circumstances in which they were written. In reprinting poems she wrote for her sister's novel The Fatal Secret, King notes that the poems that were “written for the express purpose” of appearing in a particular novel—where they might be attributed to a fictional character, or even to the novel's author—look “more generalised” when published together with other poems in an anthology of her work alone (1: 65). King suggests that the context in which her poems appear influences how they will be read and interpreted, a move which potentially alters even their relationship to her authorial persona. This contingent interpretation is not one she encourages for “The Pleasures of Love,” however, since it is the first poem in her anthology, and can be read as supporting “Charlotte Dacre”'s claims to Romantic authorship. By changing the title of the poem, she breaks the connection between the poem's role as a fictional heroine's poetic effusion, employing it instead to support “Charlotte Dacre”'s claims to poetic sensibility. Only by reading witty wordplay like “Pleasure lives not but in name” as if they apply to the author herself, can readers of Hours guess that “Charlotte Dacre” may be as fictional as “Cazire.” King's acknowledgment that her poems are substantially changed by the authorial voice and persona to which they are attributed reveals her awareness of the constructed nature of Romantic authorship and the contingency of the scene of reading. By acknowledging and yet refusing the Romantic gesture toward biography, King moves toward the radical separation of body from text that would allow her to achieve popular success.

II

Perhaps because her Romantic-sounding pseudonym had circulated so effectively in the pages of papers like the Morning Herald and the Morning Post, “Rosa Matilda” came to represent the entire denigrated genre of “light” poetry and prose. Like the name “Monk” Lewis, which came to stand for the kind of scandalously titillating terror that brought its author underserved fame, “Rosa Matilda” came to represent the innumerable anonymous and pseudonymous sentimental effusions in prose and poetry which brought their authors little fortune and less fame. By its very anonymity, “Rosa Matilda” provided a convenient shorthand for the proliferation of the hack writing critics so detested. “Rosa Matilda-ish” came to be defined as an excessively ornamented and sentimental style that was damned as manufactured and derivative by its association with writing for the marketplace. In this name, the critical apparatus finally found a figure who represented everything against which mainstream Romanticism defined itself, from Della Cruscan aesthetic artificiality and emotional excess to Gothic sensual excess. It is significant, of course, that critics chose a label that epitomized feminine artificiality and authorial masquerade to serve this policing function. However, it is also important to note that critics did not choose just any feminine Della Cruscan pseudonym around which to construct this caricature. While there were dozens of flowery feminine pseudonyms in the pages of the Morning Post, only “Rosa Matilda” provided the right combination of literary styles, anonymity, and popularity. In her choice of pseudonym, Charlotte King attempted to evade the Romantic-critical move toward biography. Critics reacted by constructing a stereotyped persona for her, despite her efforts to remain anonymous. What is perhaps most ironic is that the effectiveness of her pseudonymic masquerade forced the critics to commit the very sin for which they repeatedly condemned her: they created an artificial, stylized caricature instead of a realistic, natural character for “Rosa Matilda.”

This caricature began to coalesce around 1809-1810, following King's success with Zofloya and The Libertine, her second and third novels. Appropriately enough, in that year two celebrated literary figures who would seem to have little in common other than critical acclaim, agreed in satirizing “Rosa Matilda.” The unlikely pair were Hannah More and Byron. More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife pokes gentle fun at the reading habits of one of her hero's marriage prospects by illustrating her fondness for “Rosa Matilda.” When asked if she likes Virgil's poetry, the woman “stared and said she had never heard the person I mentioned, but that she had read Tears of Sensibility, and Rosa Matilda, and Sympathy of Souls, and Too Civil by Half, and the Sorrows of Werter, and the Stranger, and the Orphans of Snowdon.” The woman's younger sister, who “did not rise to so high a pitch of literature” proudly claims to have read “Perfidy Punished, and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and the Fortunate Footman, and the Illustrious Chambermaid” (1: 34). In one way, the contrast between the two sisters' literary accomplishments suggests that the elder sister's reading should be admired as an improvement upon working-class chapbook literature. In another, More mocks the older sister's reading as sentimental and unintellectual when compared to the man's taste for Virgil. Most interesting is More's choice to refer to King's work by authorial persona rather than by title, as she does with the others—the woman “had read Tears of Sensibility [1773, by John Murdoch], and Rosa Matilda.” While Murdoch's title achieves More's desired effect of implying the silly sentimentality of the woman's reading, King's pseudonym serves the same purpose. By listing “Rosa Matilda” rather than The Libertine or Zofloya, More implies that King's literary identity as “Rosa Matilda” transcends her association with any particular literary text. While More may have had specific King novels in mind in this passage, her comment reveals the extent to which “Rosa Matilda” came to represent a more general aesthetic, one against which More was writing and one that she could expect her readers to recognize. By making a distinction between author and work, her comment reveals how authorial personae like “Rosa Matilda” came to represent more than a simple collection of texts by a particular author. Once an authorial persona was constructed as transcending the concrete particulars of an author's oeuvre, it provided an increasingly useful critical tool, since such personae could be more easily generalized to condemn entire classes of literature.

King's other 1809 satirist may have been one of her few critics who actually knew that Charlotte King lurked behind both “Charlotte Dacre” and “Rosa Matilda.” That satirist was Byron. Byron's portrait of “Rosa Matilda” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) became one of the most influential voices in the critical movement to caricature her. His overt and implied characterization of her in this poem contained all the threads that would be followed up by later writers: he characterizes “Rosa Matilda” as an able hack who wrote in the Della Cruscan vein, he censures both her poetry and her prose, and he appears to have been the first to identify the woman behind the pseudonym. Byron refers to King in three separate places in the poem; none of the references is particularly flattering. Interestingly, he never refers to her by her entire pseudonym, as if he assumes his readers will know that all three separate mentions refer to the same author. Instead, he refers to her in different lines as “Rosa” and as “Matilda.” In one line, he calls her “the lovely ROSA,” while referring to her elsewhere as the “MATILDA” who “snivels yet” and “scrawls on” in “Grub-Street and Grosvenor Place” among her fellow hacks (ll. 756, 762, 927). While Byron's first reference employs her familiar name to praise her body chivalrously, the last two use her adopted “patronym” to denigrate her texts, suggesting that her body only produces an assortment of waste products.

As a poet, Byron claims King has captured “CRUSCA's spirit, rising from the dead” (l. 763), which implies that her poetry is a mere imitation of a poetic style that was already objectionable. Byron portrays King as finding questionable inspiration in the ghost of Robert Merry, who had died in 1798. Byron clearly considers Merry's school of poetry to have been completely discredited by Gifford's satires.

Though Crusca's bards no more our journals fill,
Some stragglers skirmish round the columns still;
Last of the howling host which once was Bell's,
Matilda snivels yet, and Hafiz yells.

(ll. 759-63; revised fourth edition version)

As the “last of the howling host which once was Bell's [the Della Cruscan's publisher],” King is portrayed as participating in an aesthetic movement that is not only outdated but second-rate, mere uncontrolled “howlings.” In this case, Byron's choice of “snivel” is particularly successful, since it refers not only to nasal discharges, but to the false displays of emotion accompanied by such discharges. The obvious parallel is to the false sensibility displayed in her writing, as well as that of the Della Cruscans.

When Byron speaks of her prose, however, he does so with a somewhat more flattering mock-chivalric paean to her beauty. He writes:

Far be't from me unkindly to upbraid
The lovely ROSA'S prose in masquerade,
Whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind,
Leave wondering comprehension far behind.

(ll. 755-58)

Perhaps in satirical imitation of those tributes to “Rosa”'s beauty that had appeared in the Morning Post, Byron here refers to her by her first name.⁹ The first two lines also echo the patronizingly gallant gestures of reviewers who determined not to be harsh to lovely ladies. The mock tribute quickly turns biting when he characterizes her prose as nonsense. Perhaps most interesting is the ambiguous imagery of unmasking that Byron employs in the phrase, “The lovely ROSA'S prose in masquerade.” It leaves open the question of who or what is “in masquerade”—her prose? her self? The imagery of passing might, of course, refer to the patent fictionality of her pseudonym, but it may also suggest that her prose itself is passing as something better than it is. The rhetoric of outing is reinforced by the note which Byron appended to these lines, in which he identifies her connection with her disreputable father, although not with her editor-lover.¹⁰ With the combination of forthrightness and caution characteristic of the scandalmonger, he notes that “This lovely little Jessica, the daughter of the noted Jew K———, seems to be a follower of the Della Cruscan School, and has published two volumes of very respectable absurdities in rhyme, as times go; besides sundry novels in the style of the first edition of the Monk” (357). Like the line to which it refers, this note inscribes a connection between her sexualized body and the “lightness” of her texts, with the important difference that this time he refers to the body of the “lovely little Jessica” who has been masquerading as “Rosa.” The note takes its additional charge of scandal and prurient interest from the link Byron makes to King's exoticized ethnicity, as she is the “daughter of the noted Jew K———.”¹¹ Byron also cautiously but clearly identifies her as Jonathan King's daughter, leaving it to his readers to translate K———as King, and perhaps also “noted” as “notorious,” given King's reputation as a moneylender and radical. The note also makes clear her connections with not one, but two denigrated literary forms: the “Della Cruscan School” and “the style of the first edition of The Monk.” Both forms developed aesthetic reputations for nebulous eroticism at the same time that their authors developed reputations for various sorts of scandalous masquerade. Outing “Rosa Matilda” as Charlotte King, while connecting her to these discourses on the relationship between masquerading author and scandalous text, allowed Byron to bring her under the disciplining gaze of Romantic authorship at the same time that it disallowed her from membership in that select circle. That Byron should act in this case as discipliner rather than disciplined, reminds us of the contested quality of Romantic authorship in this period, when disciplined authors might serve simultaneously as disciplining critics.

Byron himself apparently saw little irony in his role as critic, since his letters suggest that he continued to employ “Rosa Matilda” as a kind of shorthand for everything in contemporary literature against which he set his own work. In a letter to his publisher dated April 11, 1814, Byron's second postscript reads: “Alter ‘potent spell’ to ‘quickening spell:’ the first (as Polonius says) ‘is a vile phrase,’” and means nothing, besides being common-place and Rosa-Matilda-ish” (Moore, ed. 248; italics in original). Here, by turning the name into an adjective meaning clichéd, Byron reveals the extent to which it had passed into the vernacular and had been abstracted from any particular connection with Charlotte King.

Another letter dated about a week later suggests that references to “Rosa Matilda” continued to be a kind of inside joke between Byron and his friends. For them, the name stood for the kind of writing that gained popular admiration, but which really represented the worst strains of contemporary poetry. Moore had jokingly claimed to confuse a poem by “Rosa Matilda” for one of Byron's. Byron writes that he was “very taken in” by the joke, which suggests a bit of real anxiety on his part over the comparison (April 20, 1814; Moore, ed. 248). One might dismiss that anxiety as merely feigned, and assume that there was no basis for such a comparison. Reconstructing his own letter in a note, Moore writes:

I had begun my letter in the following manner:—‘Have you seen the ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’?—I suspect it to be either Fitzgerald's, or Rosa Matilda's. Those rapid and masterly portraits of all the tyrants that preceded Napoleon have a vigour in them which would incline me to say that Rosa Matilda is the person—but then, on the other hand, that powerful grasp of history,” etc., etc. … Some friends of mine here will insist that it is the work of the author of Childe Harold,—but then they are not so well read in Fitzgerald and Rosa Matilda as I am; and besides, they seem to forget that you promised, about a month or two ago, not to write any more for years. Seriously.’ etc., etc. I quote this foolish banter merely to show how safely, even on his most sensitive points, one might venture to jest with him.

Moore's commentary, while portraying Byron as a genius sensitive about his work, also suggests that he truly was a bit concerned about such misidentifications. Of course, Byron's own self-conscious authorial posing left him open to such mistakes, as Moore hints at by calling him “the author of Childe Harold,” and reminding him of his misleading pronouncement that he “promised … not to write any more for years.” Moore's jokes gently remind Byron of the role that anonymity and pseudonymity have played in the construction of his own authorial persona. In this case, Byron had some slight cause to be concerned about the potential for confusion between other's work and his own. While Moore is clearly describing Byron's anonymous “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” the Morning Post would carry “Rosa Matilda's” “Irregular Lines on Napoleon Bonaparte” just a few days later (April 25, 1814; see Hindle 118). King contributed such propagandizing poems as this one to the Morning Post under the name “Rosa Matilda” throughout her later career, including a poem on the death of William Pitt, and a long poem praising George IV. By doing so, King contributed to her husband Nicholas Byrne's efforts to employ his newspaper as a Tory political tool. The extent to which the Morning Post's reading audience was aware of their collaboration is unclear, especially since the identity of the paper's editor remained unclear throughout this period.¹² Beyond the joking literary insult implicit in “confusing” Byron's work with that of Fitzgerald and Rosa Matilda (here, representative of the worst style of popular poetry), there is the added sting of implying that Byron might stoop to such political propagandizing.

Another, more admiring fellow-writer of Charlotte King's was the young Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose early romances were strongly influenced by her. He, too, was apparently accustomed to use King's pseudonym as a shorthand for a particular literary style, although his view of that aesthetic was much less critical than Byron's. During the summer of 1811, he writes to his friend Edward Fergus Graham: “I hope that you will quickly set to Music that heavenly Ode, which certainly deserves to be ranked with the most exquisite productions of Pindar. This is a most delightful place, but more adapted for the Rosa-Matildan than the Petrio-Pindaric style of rhapsodizing. Here are rocks, cataracts, woods & Groves …” (Jones 94-95). Shelley's mention of such scenery suggests that by “Rosa-Matildan” he means a style connected with the Gothic sublime, an aesthetic more usually associated with Radcliffian than King's form of Lewisite Gothic. Of course, he may be thinking of King's poetic rather than prose style. While his comment might be taken as more satirical joking at the expense of “Rosa Matilda,” his exuberant tone suggests that the “Petrio-Pindaric” and the “Rosa-Matildan” represent two equally legitimate aesthetic options to Shelley.

Shelley's biographer Thomas Medwin also noted his passion for the works of “Rosa Matilda,” although his version of events portrays Charlotte King in a much less flattering light. In his 1847 Life Medwin claims:

Anne Ra[d]cliffe's works pleased [Shelley] most, particularly the Italian, but the Rosa- Matilda School, especially a strange, wild romance, entitled, ‘Zofloya, or the Moor’ a Monk-Lewisy production, where his Satanic Majesty, as in Faust, plays the chief part, enraptured him. The two novels he afterwards wrote, entitled, ‘Zastrozzi’ and the ‘Rosicrucian’ were modelled after this ghastly production, all of which I now remember, is, that the principal character is an incarnation of the devil, but who, unlike the Monk (then a prohibited book, but afterwards an especial favourite with Shelley) instead of tempting a man and turning him into a likeness of himself, enters into a woman called Olympia, who poisons her husband homeopathically, and ends by being carried off very melodramatically in blue flames to the place of dolor.

(1: 30-31)

Recalling these events many years later, it is interesting to note how Medwin's memory works to elevate Shelley's interest in the Gothic and to caricature and downplay “Rosa Matilda”'s importance to him. Beyond his clichéd and inaccurate summary of the plot of Shelley's novel (St. Irvyne, as it turns out), Medwin's commentary places Shelley's work in a familiar aesthetic hierarchy—he claims that Shelley admired Radcliffe's works most, and implies that he read King's “Monk-Lewisy production” because the original was not available (that is, because The Monk was “then a prohibited book”). By associating Shelley's tastes with the two Gothicists who had, by the Victorian period, achieved a certain respectability, Medwin credits Shelley with greater discernment than he could gain by admitting that he was “enraptured” by King's Zofloya. In fact, both Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne owe a great deal more to her work than to any other Gothics. Both romances echo names, plots, and even word choices peculiar to King.¹³ Medwin's prejudices are reflected in his characterization of King's work as belonging to the “Rosa-Matilda School,” a phrase which, as we have seen in other writers, encapsulated stereotypes of Gothic horror. Here, Medwin attributes to her the influence of founding an entire “School” of imitators, much like the Della Cruscan “School” to which earlier critics had insisted she belonged. That his memory of the specifics of such texts is faulty is glaringly evident from his summary of the plots of both The Monk and St. Irvyne, since his most vivid memory is of the principal character “being carried off very melodramatically in blue flames.” Although there are no blue flames in the final scene of either novel, such stage trappings had become a part of the stereotype surrounding Gothic novels, and so Medwin conveniently adds them. While they do not provide a particularly accurate account of Shelley's aesthetic debt to King, Medwin's literal inaccuracies provide a very telling portrait of the Gothic clichés which continued to be associated with the name of “Rosa Matilda” well into the Victorian period.

As might be expected, distance continued to grow between the caricature which was rapidly growing up around “Rosa Matilda” and the works penned by Charlotte King. One good example is her portrayal in the 1815 verse satire The Modern Dunciad. This poem, which takes its cue from Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, claims to be relieved that Gothic and Della Cruscan nonsense is on the wane, since “scarce thrice a year / Matilda's woeful madrigals appear” (II.5-6). The anonymous author's note to this line even echoes Byron's own, when he writes that “Rosa Matilda, as she poetically styles herself, is the daughter of the notorious Jew King; and the writer of innumerable Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, and sundry volumes of ‘Horrors;’ very terrible and meritorious productions.” This author's satire is somewhat more heavy-handed and less cautious than Byron's, however. He mocks her pseudonym with the phrase “as she poetically styles herself,” suggesting that it is affected, and then goes on to name her outright as “the daughter of the notorious Jew King.” Furthermore, the writer implies that she is a hack by listing her works as “innumerable” poems and “sundry volumes of ‘Horrors,’” rather than by listing them by title. Other lines follow up the theme of poking fun at her remarkable productivity in order to paint her as a hack: “Like Rosa's sonnets, in themselves a host, / Rosa, the Sappho of the Morning Post” (I.32). This line, as we have seen earlier, mocks her literary pretensions and also implies that her status as “Sappho of the Morning Post” might be due to sexual as well as literary talents. While “Sappho” was a standard honorific of the period that connoted “female literary genius,” when qualified as “Sappho of the Morning Post,” the title certainly belittles King's talents as suitable only for a morning newspaper. Furthermore, the epithet carried with it suggestions of sexual promiscuity, perhaps suggesting King's role as the mistress (although later the wife) of the paper's editor.¹⁴

In this way, the Modern Dunciad satirist's position on “Rosa Matilda” mostly follows the example of Byron and other satirists. However, his assumption that her novels must have been published by that most notorious publisher, Minerva, reveals the extent to which her reputation was coming unmoored from factual specificity. After a section lamenting the Gothic strain of contemporary drama, the author follows by arguing that “bawdy” and “loose” novels like King's pose an even greater threat: “But these [dramas] are harmless, Satire must confess, / To the loose novels of Minerva's press; / Such melting tales as Meeke and Rosa tell” (I.100). The note appended to this section repeats the author's assumption that Rosa Matilda must be one of Minerva Press's hack writers. It reads: “Innumerable are the caterers for the Minerva Library. Lady Morgan, Mrs. Meeke, Rosa Matilda, Bridget Bluemantle, Ann of Swansea, Honoria Scott, Captain Hewitsone, Captain Williamson, Cervantes Hogg, Theodore Melville, Francis Lathom, ‘A Native Officer,’ and a whole tribe of ‘single and double pinks’ who live upon the bad taste of the public …”¹⁵ While the list does not contain only women writers, it is significant that the list opens with women's names and that they are the primary object of the author's lampoons in the main text. More importantly, while the spirit of “Rosa Matilda's” works may have been akin to those published by Minerva Press, she did not, in fact, ever write for them. As Ann Jones points out, King's publishers, especially Longman, who published Zofloya, and Cadell and Davies, who published both The Libertine and The Passions, were both fairly respectable (316-17, n.1). The author's final reference to King underlines the reason she made such a convenient target for satirists intent on policing hack writing, especially by women. By mocking “Matilda's motley hash of prose and rhyme” (I.103), the author can paint her as the quintessential hack, one who writes indiscriminately. While most of the Modern Dunciad's satire amounts to mere name-calling, it reflected the growing estrangement of the caricature of “Rosa Matilda” from the character of Charlotte King Byrne.

As Medwin's commentary on Shelley's relationship with King's work indicates, the caricature of “Rosa Matilda” found a life far beyond its connection with a particular woman, or even with particular texts she produced. Startling evidence of the wide-ranging currency of the caricature comes from Edgar Allan Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in the April 1842 Graham's Magazine. After lamenting the lack of “American tales of high merit,” Poe goes on to criticize the effeminate state of literature in terms which employ a familiar figure. He writes: “We have had a superabundance of the Rosa-matilda effusions—gilt-edged paper all couleur de rose: a full allowance of cut-and-thrust blue-blazing melodramaticisms; a nauseating surfeit of low miniature copying of low life, much in the manner, and with about half the merit, of the Dutch herrings and decayed cheeses of Van Tuyssel” (qtd. in Pollin 410-11). As Pollin notes, there is no evidence of an American edition of Charlotte King's works, nor did she ever write tales in the sense that Poe means (that is, what we now call short stories). It is possible that Poe never encountered King's texts at all, and might have been familiar with her only through satires like Byron's. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Poe uses the term to refer to three different objectionably “feminine” literary styles: the sentimental (“giltedged paper all couleur de rose:), the Gothic (“cut-and-thrust blue-blazing melodramaticisms”) and the prosaic realistic (“low miniature copying of low life”). What is surprising is that the name would still have had currency in America in 1842, a generation and a continent away from the woman who originally created it.

Considering that Charlotte King's novels, unlike The Monk, did not continue to be reprinted into the Victorian period, the currency that the name “Rosa Matilda” retained becomes all the more remarkable. Although the cultural convention that associated the name with female hack writers admitted of an occasional variant like “Laura Matilda,”¹⁶ King's pseudonym remained a sign of the worst literary and moral excesses committed by women writers. That it could do so is a testament to the critical establishment's continuing uneasiness with the masquerade function pseudonyms served, especially for women writers. Ironically, it is also an indication of her personal success as both popular writer and authorial masquerader. The case of Charlotte King aptly illustrates the increased importance of pseudonymous and anonymous authorship in the face of a critical establishment that employed biographical interpretation as a tool to police bodies and texts. The eagerness with which that establishment grasped at her pseudonym and the force with which they wielded it as a critical weapon suggests both the perceived power and danger of King's authorial strategies. In its very opacity, “Rosa Matilda” summed up fears about the pseudonym's ability to blur essential lines of social demarcation, lines delineating boundaries between masculine and feminine, genius and hack, author and reader. As we have seen, perhaps the most potent of these fears was that such pseudonyms represented class as well as gender masquerade: if “Ladies” might publish anonymously in order to escape censure, might not others who were not entitled to call themselves such claim the upperclass status of a “fair and elegant author”? The critical response to Charlotte King's work reveals the numerous fears which lay behind such literary conventions. While such conventions came into existence to help negotiate the changing relationship between authors and the marketplace, they came to be the site where authors, critics, and readers struggled over meaning as well as market-share.

Notes

1. See Jones 226-7 and Craciun 1995, 90 n. 1. Most commentators refer to the author using the second pseudonym she adopted, Charlotte Dacre, assuming that this name represents her true identity. Some of these critics go as far as to infer her marital status from this pseudonym. Sandra Knight-Roth, Devendra Varma, and John Garrett in their prefatory comments in the Arno Press reprints of her novels, for example, all refer to her as “Miss Dacre.” Montague Summers, having uncovered evidence of her marriage, refers to her as “Mrs. Dacre,” assuming that Dacre must be her married name. The entry on Dacre in A Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990) repeats this error, assuming that Dacre must be the name of Charlotte's first husband, if Byrne is the name of her second. Charlotte King's works are still most commonly catalogued under “Charlotte Dacre” with “Rosa Matilda” sometimes listed as “Dacre's” pseudonym. Contemporary biographical encyclopedists also follow this practice of their early nineteenth-century counterparts in listing her under “Dacre.” (See Watkins and Shoberl (1816), Watt (1824), Summers [1968], Shattuck, ed. [1993]). I have chosen to refer to her as Charlotte King, since this was her legal identity throughout her literary career; she did not legally marry Nicholas Byrne until July 1, 1815. Page numbers in the text refer to the Arno Press facsimiles of King's novels and to the Garland facsimile reprint of her volume of poetry, .

2. Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer was published several months before Hours of Solitude, although both appear in 1805. The contents of Hours of Solitude indicate that many of her poems have previously appeared in the morning newspapers under the name “Rosa Matilda.” As Craciun indicates in her chronology of King, she had published poems in The Poetical Register as early as 1804 under the name “Rosa” (Craciun 1997, 35).

3. See Parreaux and my article, “The (Round) Character of the Romantic Author: ‘Monk’ Lewis and The Monk,” forthcoming in Criticism. Contemporary critics argued that confusion over Matilda's gendered identity (she appears first as a lusty woman in monk's clothing, and then as a demon) undercuts the novel's moral. Reviewers suggested that the moral danger of the novel lay in its insistence that surface and deep selves are easily confused, even indistinguishable from one another.

4. My use of this term follows Siskin as he applies Foucault to Romantic authorship: “The Author function enacts an institutionalized form of ‘outing.’ Once identified, the gendered writer, as an object of knowledge, becomes subject to power” (32).

5. These oppositions between “round” and “flat” character and Romantic genius and literary hack are themselves products of the Romantic movement. As Andrea Henderson argues, during this period a “market-based” model of identity developed, which “situates identity along a continuum that includes, on the one hand, an “essential” and private identity that is, paradoxically, developed through labor, and, on the other, a social identity that is relationally determined and associated with consumption.” Henderson notes that while canonical romanticism largely focused on the one pole, creating images of depth and individual interiority, the early gothic novel tended to highlight the other, “making character a matter of surface, display and ‘consumption’ by others” (226). “Man-and-his-work” criticism also privileges the “romantic” pole of this continuum, giving primacy as it does to the essential and private identity of the man as he produces himself through his literary labor and de-emphasizing the product of that labor as a more superficial commodity. In doing so, this type of criticism employs gendered terms that connect the consumption and display of hack authorship with femininity and the private individuality of professional romantic authorship with masculinity.

6. Charlotte King's relationship to the living Mary Robinson is unclear; the poem suggests that they never met. Her father, however, was reported to have had an affair with Robinson sometime around 1781, the year of the publication of his scurrilous Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite and His Answers to Them. While reports of the affair are unconfirmed, this text is likely to have been the result of Jonathan King's unsuccessful attempt to blackmail Robinson for political purposes. McCalman rightly notes that during this period, blackmail and extortion were an accepted part of radical political action and did not carry the taint of self-interested illegality they do now.

7. As Ann Jones points out, King may not have been as youthful as she claimed. According to burial registers, Charlotte was fifty-three at her death in 1825, which would indicate that she was born in late 1772 or 1773, thus making her about twenty-six, not sixteen, at the time these poems first appeared in print. In her introduction to Hours of Solitude (1806), Charlotte claims to be twenty-three, a date consistent with her earlier claim in Trifles of Helicon to have been born around 1782. If we are to believe the burial registry, then we must believe that the sisters very consistently and successfully falsified their ages, a not-uncommon practice, but one which belies the modestly unself-conscious schoolgirl pose assumed throughout her early career.

8. Defining the Della Cruscan aesthetic against Wordsworth's, McGann writes that “whereas Wordsworth's poetry typically aspired to the spontaneous and the sublime, Della Cruscan poetry seems self-conscious and erotic … The Della Cruscans court passion and intensity, but in doing so they leave no doubt that these are all splendid and wonderful impermanences” (79). As we have seen in “Pleasure,” thematizing such impermanence results in moral ambiguity as much as any overtly erotic imagery.

9. See, for example, a tribute by “Amoroso” entitled “On Rosa Matilda,” which appeared in the September 13, 1805 edition of the Morning Post. In it, the male poet praises Rosa's beauty and addresses her as his poetic muse, comparing her to Horace's Lydia and Ovid's Chloe (qtd. in Roth 5).

10. Byron himself appears to have been aware of all the pieces in the Rosa Matilda-Charlotte Dacre puzzle, although his editor, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, did not quite put them all together correctly. In 1816, Byron added to his note connecting Charlotte King to her father, one which connected her with Nicholas Byrne. E. H. Coleridge records the penciled note as “possibly in another hand” than Byron's: “She since married the Morning Post—an exceeding good match; and is now dead—which is better.” Although King was still alive in 1816, she had indeed “married the Morning Post” the previous year. (The phrase itself employs a fascinating choice of words in light of King's literary connections with the paper, implying that she married the paper itself, not the proprietor—perhaps because it, and he, could further her literary career.)

    E. H. Coleridge notes that “The novelist, ‘Rosa,’ the daughter of ‘Jew’ King, the lordly money-lender who lived in Clarges Street and drove a yellow chariot, may possibly be confounded with ‘Rosa Matilda,’ Mrs. Byrne,” a correct supposition (357, n.1). On the next page, his editorial note states: “Charlotte Dacre, who married Byrne, Robinson's successor as editor of the Morning Post, wrote under the pseudonym of “Rosa Matilda” and published poems (Hours of Solitude) and numerous novels (Confessions of Nun of St. Omer, Zofloya; or the Moor, The Libertine, etc.) (358, n. 1). The only piece of the puzzle that the editor did not correctly deduce was that Charlotte Dacre, too, was a pseudonym, a piece of information which he might have inferred from Byron's identification of her as “Jew” King's daughter. He, like Pollin, seems to have assumed that King's daughter's first name must have been “Rosa,” rather than “Charlotte.” Byron knew of John King in his capacity as a moneylender, although King does not appear to have been one of Byron's own creditors.

11. “Jessica” was a common stereotypical name for a woman of Jewish descent, clearly taken from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

12. Nicholas Byrne, King's lover and then husband, is a shadowy figure in the accounts of this period. His name appeared on the masthead of the Morning Post as printer and then editor between 1803 and 1833, when he was apparently murdered, possibly for political reasons. Under Byrne, a staunch Tory, the Morning Post became a party organ supporting William Pitt, as well as the Prince of Wales from his regency through his reign. Byrne was reportedly a personal friend of Pitt, and named a son after him, although no correspondence between them exists to verify the report. In the 1830's, Byrne was attacked for his strong stand against the Reform Bill, which may have led to rumors that he had been assassinated by radicals. The announcements of his death read that he died “after an illness of many months, in his 72nd year” (qtd. in Herd). There is some suggestion that his illness was the result of an attack on the Morning Post offices in which Byrne was injured. A man of some substance, he lived at 12 Lancaster Place, and originally intended to leave £ 10, 000 to his daughter Maria in his will. After she married against his wishes, this amount was reduced to the interest on £ 2, 000, to be paid only to her. He left his second son Charles £ 2, 000 and a one-quarter interest in the Morning Post; the rest of his estate, including his proprietorship of the Morning Post, was left to his eldest son William. From his will, it seems clear that he had no surviving children by his first wife, Louisa Lowe, although how that marriage was dissolved remains unclear. See Herd 40-56 and Hindle 105-22.

13. Shelley's Zastrozzi owes much of its plot to Zofloya, although the genders of some of the characters have been reversed. Critics denounced Shelley's Gothic jargon particularly harshly, some of which he had adopted wholesale from King. In their reviews of St. Irvyne, for example, both the British Critic and Anti-Jacobin Review note his use of terms like “enhorrored” and “enanguished,” terms which may be found in several of King's works (qtd. in Barcus 50, 51). Character names found in both King's work and Shelley's include Cazire, Verezzi, and Ginotti; Shelley's eponymous “Zastrozzi” appears to be a variant of King's Megalena Strozzi. Shelley's romances also feature a “Matilda,” a name which he might have taken from King or Lewis. Shelley scholars continue to “discover” less disreputable influences on his early romance than King's Zofloya: Godwin's St. Leon, Paradise Lost, Radcliffe's The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis's The Monk and the Bravo of Venice, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Schiller's The Robbers, Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. See Birkhead 121-126, Blunden 40-42, Cameron 43-49, Halliburton, Hogle, Hughes, Young and Zimansky. While such searches for specific forerunners could go on indefinitely, King's influence on Shelley is clear.

14. See Lipking and DeJean. As Lipking notes, “Sappho” was a common epithet used to denote the female literary genius as abandoned woman. During this period, it carried with it connotations of female sexual promiscuity, although primarily male-identified rather than female-identified promiscuity.

15. The phrase “the tribe of single and double pinks” comes from Tilburina's highly sentimental speech in Sheridan's The Critic (first produced in 1779), in which the heroine unfolds a seemingly interminable list of flora merely to establish the fact that it is morning—but also to establish the literary talents of the egotistical author, Mr. Puff (II.ii.224). The phrase seems to have become a satirical reference to hack authors who write in the sentimental vein.

16. This variant, of course, neatly collapses “Laura Maria” (Mary Robinson) and “Rosa Matilda” or “Anna Matilda” (Hannah Cowley).

Works Cited

Barcus, James E. ed. Shelley: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, eds. “Charlotte Dacre.” A Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. 259-60.

Blunden, Edmund. Shelley: A Life Story. New York: Viking, 1947.

Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire.” The Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Vol. 1. New York: Scribner's, 1898. 289-384.

Cameron, Kenneth Neill. The Young Shelley. 1950. New York: Collier, 1962.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “On the Errors of Party Spirit: or Extremes Meet.” The Friend 10 (1809). Rpt. in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 4, pt. 2. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. 134-45.

Craciun, Adriana. “‘I hasten to be disembodied’: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover and Representations of the Body.” European Romantic Review 6 (1995): 75-97.

Craciun, Adriana, ed. Zofloya. Peterborough: Broadview, 1997.

Dacre, Charlotte [Matilda, Rosa] [King, Charlotte]. Hours of Solitude: A Collection of Original Poems, Now First Published. 1805. Ed. Donald Reiman. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1978.

———. The Libertine. 1807. Ed. John Garrett and Devendra Varma. 3 vols. New York: Arno, 1974.

———. Zofloya; or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. 1806. Ed. G. Wilson Knight and Devendra Varma. 3 vols. New York: Arno, 1974.

DeJean, Joan. Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Gifford, William. The Baeviad. London, 1791.

Halliburton, David G. “Shelley's ‘Gothic’ Novels.” Keats-Shelley Journal 16 (1967): 39-49.

Henderson, Andrea. “‘An Embarrassing Subject’: Use Value and Exchange Value in Early Gothic Characterization.” At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist and Materialist Criticism. Ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. 225-45.

Herd, Harold. Seven Editors. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955.

Hindle, Wilfrid. The Morning Post, 1772-1937: Portrait of a Newspaper. 1937. Westport: Greenwood, 1974.

Hogle, Jerrold E. “Shelley's Fiction: The Stream of Fate.” Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981): 78-99.

“Hours of Solitude.” Review. British Critic 27 (1806): 428-29.

Hughes, A. M. D. “Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne.” Modern Language Review 7 (1912): 54-63.

Jones, Ann H. Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age. New York: AMS, 1986.

Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. 1796. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

Lipking, Lawrence. “Sappho Descending: Eighteenth-Century Styles in Abandoned Women.” Studies in the Eighteenth Century 12 (1988): 40-57.

Matilda, Rosa [Dacre, Charlotte] [King, Charlotte]. Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, A Tale. 3 vols. 1805. Ed. Devendra Varma. 2 vols. New York: Arno, 1972.

———. The Passions. 1811. Ed. Devendra Varma and Sandra Knight-Roth. 4 vols. New York: Arno, 1974.

McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1793-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

Medwin, Thomas. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London, 1847.

“The Modern Dunciad.” 1815. 6th ed. in The Modern Dunciad, Virgil in London and Other Poems. London: William Pickering, 1835. 1-121.

Moore, Thomas, ed. Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron. London, 1839.

More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. 8th ed. 2 vols. London, 1809.

Parreaux, André. The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event, 1796-1798. Paris: Librairie Marcal Didier, 1960.

Pollin, Burton R. “Byron, Poe, and Miss Matilda.” Names 16 (1968): 390-414.

Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London. 3 vols. London, 1818.

Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson (1758-1800). Ed. M. J. Levy. London: Peter Owen, 1994.

Roth, Sandra Knight. “Charlotte Dacre and the Gothic Tradition.” M.A. thesis. Dalhousie U, 1973.

Shattuck, JoAnne, ed. “Charlotte Dacre.” Oxford Guide to Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 126.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol. 1: Shelley in England. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964.

Sheridan, Richard. “The Critic.” The Plays and Poems of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Ed. R. Crompton Rhodes. Vol. 2. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928. 175-244.

Siskin, Clifford. “Eighteenth-Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel.” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 26-42.

Summers, Montague. “Byron's Lovely Rosa.” Essays in Petto. London: Fortune P, 1928.

———. Introduction. Zofloya. By Charlotte Dacre. London: Fortune P, 1928.

Watkins, J. and F. Shoberl, eds. A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1816.

Watt, Robert, ed. Bibliotheca Brittanica. 4 vols. London, 1824.

Young, A. B. “Shelley and M. G. Lewis.” Modern Language Review 1 (1905): 322-24.

Zimansky, Curt R. “Zastrozzi and the Bravo of Venice: Another Shelley Borrowing.” Keats- Shelley Journal 30 (1981): 15-17.