A PERSIAN CELEBRITY’S FEMALE FANS

Born in 1776 to a noble Shi’ite family in Shiraz, Iran, Abul Hassan helped stabilize his country’s patriarchal monarchy during the tumultuous transition from the Zand to the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925). Having exiled himself to Hyderabad after he and his family lost Fath ʿAli Shah’s favor, he returned to Iran with immunity in 1800, after which the shah officiated him envoy to Britain on the recommendation of British ambassador Sir Harford Jones (1764–1847). He was to convince Qajar officials that the British were better allies than the French, who were planning to invade British India. Jones promised to assist the shah militarily in recapturing Tiflis in Georgia, as well as other Caucasian territories taken by the Russians, if the shah would agree to halt any eastward advances by Napoleon. This treaty was finalized in Tehran by Jones, who led the delegation to obtain King George III’s formal approval. Upon disembarking at Plymouth on November 25, 1809, Abul Hassan was disheartened not to receive in London the ceremonial istikbal, a stately reception customarily held for foreign dignitaries in Iran. To make matters worse, his meeting with the king was delayed for several weeks. To set him at ease, British officials indulged him in countless entertainments held in his honor at dinner parties, playhouses, masquerades, and breakfast gatherings, mostly presided over by aristocratic ladies “curious to look upon the visage and beard of a native of Iran.”⁹ Their attention compensated for his hosts’ improprieties. Napoleon’s defeat by Britain and its allies in 1815 prompted Abul Hassan’s final 1819–1820 visit to England in a failed bid to salvage the Anglo-Persian alliance.¹⁰ In the intervening years, he had become the “fashion everywhere,” even as European gentlemen disparaged “this diplomatic barbarian.”¹¹

Images of Abul Hassan in dashing attire were conducive to Englishwomen’s spectatorial identification with what Joseph Roach calls the “It-effect” peculiar to “abnormally interesting people.”¹² Sites for fostering this identification included Hyde Park and St. James’s Park. Fashionables rode horses in these parks to see and be seen, with women and men sporting nearly identical riding hoods, military-style colors and fabrics, and decorative bridles and saddles.¹³ In this “Garden of Eden,” Abul Hassan was shocked to see “pretty girls and handsome youths” playing polo together, besides “some 100,000 men and women parading themselves on foot and on horseback.”¹⁴ This scene recalls the Qur’an’s verses on a sensual afterlife populated by pretty boys and female virgins eager to please pious Muslim adults. Yet, this scene presented the envoy with a gender-nonconforming spectacle: Englishwomen playing torktazi, a javelin-throwing game that he and his servants played regularly during their stay. He also used another term in his diary to describe the games the women were participating in: jaridbazi, referring to a sport played predominantly by male warriors and hunters honing their skills.¹⁵

Abul Hassan’s sportsmanship among men presented equestrian Englishwomen with an occasion for asserting their public agency in upper-class, masculine-coded spaces. Beholding horsewomen such as Fanny behaving and dressing like their male counterparts, while galloping on Arabian horses (identified as Asban-e Tazi in his diary), was as strange for Abul Hassan as for his Persophilic fans.¹⁶ Prized by Europeans, Arabs, Persians, Ottomans, Mughals, and Central Asians, these horses symbolized Britain’s imperial sovereignty insofar as the accoutrements and activities associated with them invoked a stylization unique to ancient aristocratic manhood in Eurasia.¹⁷ Englishwomen’s manly “riding” oriented the envoy toward an illicit desire for heterosociality: “I thought to myself how wonderful it would be if the men—and indeed the ladies—of the Iranian Court could be in that meadow to learn how to ride and gallop.”¹⁸

However, such encounters were problematic for the foreigner. For example, an article in The Morning Post reported that while “the PERSIAN AM[b]ASSADOR was on horseback with his attendants … two Ladies, dressed in Persian costume,” attracted his notice.¹⁹ He was outraged by this report, for those women resembled dressy high-class Iranian courtesans on horses in silver and golden tack.²⁰ This news coverage accounts for the depictions of Abul Hassan in equestrian gear, a “portraitive mode” that encouraged viewers to identify with his appearance.²¹ A prime example is the sketch of him “in his riding dress” by Scottish miniature painter and caricaturist John Kay, printed with a biography extolling the bearded celebrity’s courteousness toward “gentlemen” (Figure 3.1).²² What appeared as an indecorous affront to elite Persian masculinity in Abul Hassan’s park jaunts came to signify what was decorous and genteel for his British spectators. In other words, the publicity he elicited for cavorting among men and women in the very newspapers that he decried for printing lies about his excessive libido made public heterosocialization appear normal.

This reorientation from homosociality to heterosociality is ironic given that the clean-shaven face was then the norm for Englishmen, with male beardedness coming out of vogue after the 1500s and not making a comeback until after 1850. In the interim, no British men would have dared to appear bearded, except for political radicals, Irishmen, criminals, and bohemian artists infamous for their perceived vulgarity and effeminacy.²³ Yet, some Regency ladies saw beards differently. Their views hearkened to early modern representations of Muslim men with copious beards that communicated their “fertility and virility, despite the associated carnivalesque implication” that these men were lechers.²⁴ As Eleanor Rycroft has argued, British men who styled their facial hair after Muslims rendered the fantasy of a cohesive national identity for Britain farcical. But for women like Fanny and Maria Edgeworth, the “long bushy black beard” recalled the valor, vigor, and self-confidence of a bygone Tudor era, a primal manhood that became the symbolic crux for yoking Victorian patriarchalism and sportsmanship to beardedness. Though seemingly out of fashion, Abul Hassan inspired his female fans through his public appearances to reboot outdated masculinities.

For example, in 1810, Lady Elizabeth Fielding (née Fox-Strangways) fell instantly in love with the envoy at an aristocratic assembly, drawn to his “long curly clean beard.”²⁵ However, he was too preoccupied with Lady Elizabeth Villiers (the fourth earl of Jersey’s daughter), who flirtatiously “reclined by him on an ottoman while he fanned himself.”²⁶ This luxury sitting piece was modeled after those in the Ottoman Empire. Its symbolic association with Muslim lechery sets the scene for what happened next.²⁷ When Lady Fielding asked him if he felt exhausted by his ambassadorial engagements, he replied, “ ‘No, not tired—very long evening (and putting his hands on his embroidered breast)—patience, patience!’ This answer, which he meant to be very civil, conveyed quite another idea to the company, who were all much diverted.”²⁸ Ascribing an entertaining eroticism to a foreigner near an English woman lying on an eroticized Oriental-style piece of furniture reflects the racy undertones of England’s polite culture, in which libidinous desires were invoked through innuendo, humor, and half-concealment.²⁹ Crucial to this affective register was the bushy, clean, and black beard, which has an ambivalent significance in early modern humoral theory as a phallic symbol for semen and procreation signifying barbarity, adultery, and licentiousness, as well as martial fortitude, unpretentious refinement, and innate talent. This semiotic slipperiness tended to destabilize gender and racial differentiations, given that penal-shaped beards were especially fetishized by most Englishwomen.³⁰

The parenthetical reference to “his embroidered breast” is also significant. Abul Hassan’s modish wear enhanced the sense of rarity and novelty of Eastern-styled embroideries in upper-class Englishwomen’s wardrobes. Britain’s military campaigns in Mysore (1797–1798) and Egypt (1798–1801) inspired metropolitan civilians to adapt Turkish turbans and silken fabrics to convey bodily elegance.³¹ For example, an article from the Morning Post reported that ladies of fashion with Eastern hairdos were donning “Mirza turban[s]” with a “large pearl crescent in front” (symbolizing the Islamic faith), flaunting cloaks embroidered in “pink Persian,” and dancing in balls to “Persian dance … in compliment to Mirza Abul Hassan.”³² The trendiest headgear for women in March and April 1810 was the “Mirza turban of frosted satin,” an anglicized version of the black astrakhan (with tiny crescent) shown in Kay’s sketch.³³ The Lady’s Magazine recommended the “Persian turban cap of white satin” as appropriate for women’s “riding dress.”³⁴ In 1819, decorative shawls from “the valley of Cachemire” (Kashmir) were in high demand among spectators who “beheld these rich envelopes composing the clothing of the Persian Ambassador.”³⁵ Produced in Iran and Central Asia, cashmere shawls (chal or shaal in Persian) were signature accessories for elite Englishwomen’s dress repertoire in imitation of Greek nude statuary, a style called robe á la grecque.³⁶ This fabric’s transcultural currency symbolized “class, money, and the ability to keep a woman,” as it often does today.³⁷

Abul Hassan−style clothing brands were a marketing ploy for naturalizing neoclassical garb: light vibrant drapes pressed up against the female figure to showcase corporeal transparency and authenticity, with flowing, high-waisted muslin gowns to heighten the effect of whiteness, making the women wearing them like naked animate statues.³⁸ Consider the fashion plate of Englishwomen modeling the Mirza turban in Rudolph Ackermann’s periodicals. His Repository of Arts, Literatures, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics, along with La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine, functioned as “paper shops,” a virtual storeroom “allowing shoppers to fantasize their own refashioning and … providing ongoing cultural schooling for their readers.”³⁹ Whetting consumer appetite for desirable images of the Iranian’s clothed body, ladies’ magazines were mediums through which Englishwomen could normalize an eccentric femininity.⁴⁰ Paradoxically, the more that they dressed like the macho other, the more they authenticated their classy feminine selves in domestic terms.

Turning the self-in-clothes into a spectacle for the opposite sex to imitate had the potential to unsettle the status quo. I have examined elsewhere how metropolitan media cast the gentlemanly Abul Hassan as a buffoonish effeminate in that his showy exterior recalled the dandy’s arbitration of aristocratic masculine taste.⁴¹ Minimalist speech, upright posture, and an air of social pretentiousness imbued the dandy with a narcissistic theatricality whereby spectators were his co-participants in producing homosocial norms. Dandies such as Beau Brummell—a man from a humble background who inspired the Prince of Wales and his coterie to wear sleek Hussar uniforms—were infamous precisely because they imitated their social superiors with precision. But, once this performance became cliché, dandies were tainted with the ascription of an alien hybridity unassimilable to the male-female binary.⁴² Abul Hassan was thus reluctantly drawn into the cult of dandyism. Although an antiquated yet potent English masculinity is conveyed through his black beard, its talismanic ability to attract women away from beardless suitors would have recalled the way that Brummell dominated the social scene through unconventional fashions.

The gender nonconformity that the beau monde attributed to Abul Hassan is evident in Edgeworth’s representation of Fanny, who coyly claims that “his Persian Highness” is interested only in her “poney” rather than her person in “a new brown habit which fits to admiration.” The insinuation is that the superstar is too self-consumed among “English gentlemen … of the first distinction” to flirt with a well-dressed fan (from the rural gentry) feigning feminine modesty. Her performative ruse has delirious effects on polite masculinity, as if heterosexual attraction must be routed through the male gaze (Mr. Whitbread’s testimony to the contrary) to disavow what might otherwise appear as a dandyish confusion of sexual orientation. In other words, this dalliance implies that gentlemanly homosocial norms are aberrant, symbolized in Abul Hassan’s pointing with his riding “stick” to signal “to the gentlemen with him” (as “interpreted” by them) his lust for a fashionable youth superior to his Circassian wife.

The equestrian subtext is crucial. Female equestrians redefined ideologies of race and empire in Britain well into the twentieth century, and the equestrian sport likewise compelled Abul Hassan to rethink Qajar protocols for how the sexes should interact in public.⁴³ Moreover, Hyde Park was where dandies displayed their tastes in clothing and horses, as male gallants dressed in Brummell-like, tight blue coats with brass buttons, stiff white cravats, leather breaches, and high boots while strutting on horseback alongside elegant damsels.⁴⁴ One of the earliest usages of the term “dandy” dates to the 1760s, when the wealthy British landowner Coke of Norfolk arrived in London wearing riding clothes to petition King George III—a fashion emulated by dandies.⁴⁵ Abul Hassan’s torktazi performances among his bearded Persian servants prompted spectators to situate him in the “dandy’s border world,” a “deeply cosmopolitan” world of constant movement, crossovers, and dislocations.⁴⁶

A CIRCASSIAN CELEBRITY’S DANDY FANS

The media fascination with the Persian ambassador’s marriage to Delarom also raised questions about the dandies who reportedly courted her in London as a fashionista worthy of female emulation. Edgeworth’s insinuation that Fanny and the Fair Circassian are sex objects exchangeable between men seems to confirm Gayle Rubin’s theory that the “exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves,” wherein female social agency is denied by domineering patriarchs—a point that is similarly taken up in chapter 9 by Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke in their critique of the hetero-domestic marriage plot.⁴⁷ Yet the bizarre fanfare following April 25, 1819, illustrates how Delarom is caught in homosocial discourses and debates over women’s fashions, in which her veils and scarves could evidence either patriarchal control or her dissent to becoming a fetishized object under the gaze of British crowds and the press.⁴⁸ On that date, crowds thronged to behold Delarom’s landing at Dover via Paris, where she was the rage among the fashion paparazzi. British newspapers reported that she was in “a hood, which covered the upper part of her head, and a large silk shawl screened the lower part of her face, across the nose, from observation.” Only her “truly beautiful” eyes and “forehead” were visible. Two days later, she arrived at her husband’s London residency in Charles Street Berkeley Square; she stayed “in one of the back apartments, the door of which is guarded all day by two black eunuchs with swords, who … dress and undress her.”⁴⁹ The fantastical notion that only these castrated men had access to her nude body and wardrobe—fantastical because her attendants were in fact two Persian servants—was spread by the tabloid news circuit, which linked racialized sexual impotency to her dandy aficionados. As reported in The Times, the envoy and his new wife rode in a carriage through London under the protection of “ten or a dozen persons habited in silks and turbans, with daggers and long beards,” and two Black eunuchs who kept her hidden from “the inquiring eyes of the hundreds of loungers and dandies.”⁵⁰ In this reportage, trafficking an enslaved woman was coded as a dandyish affront to British national virility. Her fashionable look was nonetheless lucrative for businesswomen who marketed Oriental-style clothing brands, mainly the Circassian corset that was satirized in anti-dandy visual prints and theatrical farces.

Delarom’s full biography and portrait first appeared in La Belle Assemblée, owned by the bookseller John Bell and published by the fashion entrepreneur and innovator Mary Ann Bell, his daughter-in-law. For John, the magazine was meant for “the education of young ladies in the way of modesty,”⁵¹ but for Mary, the magazine had a commercial end potentially at odds with its didactic tone. She held monthly fashion shows catering to the nobility at her shop on London’s Upper King Street and advertised them in the magazine’s plates, which were designed so that ladies could craft their unique sartorial personalities by freely adapting the featured dresses according to their tastes and economic means.⁵² The tension between moral prescription and consumer autonomy subtends Delarom’s biographical sketch. “Delarom” (meaning “Heart’s Ease”) is described as a “barred and bolted female” inaccessible to “the male sex.” She is “dressed in the more becoming potency of loveliness” rather than in the hard armor formerly worn by the masculine women who descended from ancient Amazonian warriors.⁵³ The sketch rehashes racial stereotypes about the celebrated beauty and bravery of women from Circassia in the Caucasus, a region extending from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Many of them became concubines to Ottoman elites.⁵⁴ Their fabled connection to the Amazons, a Scythian tribe famous for their skilled horse-riding and military prowess, was a common trope since Robert Shirley’s Circassian wife, Teresa Sampsonia, traveled with him to Tudor England on his embassy from the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I.⁵⁵ Keen on tracing their European ancestry to Caucasians, readers are to identify with Delarom’s off-whiteness; her “complexion is brown” but with a “soft and very clear” skin, even as her “face is very far from Grecian.”⁵⁶ Having lost her Amazonian ferocity, she was sold by her poor shepherd parents to “Turkish slave merchants” bound for Istanbul, where she was purchased by Abul Hassan, falsely rumored to have four wives and twenty concubines in Iran (in truth he had one wife). Despite her humble upbringing, she possesses “a sweet and native politeness, which evinces itself in a genteel address, and in a manner perfectly graceful,” as relayed by the Englishwomen who had the privilege to meet her.⁵⁷

Magazines’ biographical sketches were usually printed with head portraits like the one of Delarom taken by “a female artist of superior eminence.”⁵⁸ These portraits “tended to reify gender roles,” translating bodily features into prescriptive knowledge.⁵⁹ While the Circassian’s life story is supposedly unmediated (coming “chiefly from her own lips”), her portrait is said to be a “faithful” copy. This piece of information was conveyed to the artist by someone in Abul Hassan’s suite. Delarom is shown in “the dress of London and Paris,” with a pendant of precious stones, as customarily worn by Circassian concubines to enhance their commercial value.⁶⁰ Her head reflects Englishwomen’s neoclassical tastes in two regards: the hair bundled into ringlets on the back side recalls Greek or Roman statues, and the white-complexioned oval face with large eyes, soft pouting lips, small mouth, and rosy cheeks reflected a typical portraiture style for fashionable ladies, as in Figure 3.2. These ladies were keen on imitating the “Oriental” look of beautiful women from Circassia and Georgia.⁶¹ Most notably, an ornate shawl drapes Delarom’s shoulders. Her face was an imaginary mirror through which fashion-savvy viewers could appropriate, or rather domesticate, foreign ideals of feminine beauty. Thus, although the portrait “is neither the work of imagination or hearsay,” a footnote by the magazine’s “distinguished female correspondent” contradicts this claim: Delarom has told her that the “imagined costume” appeared to her “like a bundle of rags,” unlike the “thick yellow veil” she had worn on her arrival to London, and that she had “no white satin with gold fringe; no diamond on my hair.”⁶² Her sartorial resistance induces the viewer to imagine in realistic portraiture’s artifice the enslaved celebrity’s willful subjectivity. In this sketch-portrait pairing, biographical intimacy functions as an invitation for female consumers to reject, refashion, and revalue what they see on display.⁶³

Verbal and visual satires about Delarom’s salacious rumored threesome with the Persian envoy and the prince regent cast her as a “fictional non-person,” a pornographic object trafficked between vulgar dandies.⁶⁴ These representations set out to address two sets of anxieties: first, her biography reminded women resistant to patriarchal control that they were fortunate to have been born in “a land of freedom … where civil and moral law is a protection and safeguard to the weak and defenceless.”⁶⁵ Second, Delarom’s confinement in Britain was controversial due to the outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. After the alderman of London led a campaign to liberate her through “a writ of Habeas Corpus,” which she reportedly declined, her fans were lampooned in print.⁶⁶ Reports about her “oppressed” life on returning to Persia vilified the fashionables who, on September 30, 1819, gathered at Gravesend to witness her departure.⁶⁷ Most conspicuous was her “Anglo Cashmire shawl, (from Mr. Everington’s fashionable depót in Ludgate-street), placed over her head, which nearly covered her figure.”⁶⁸

Such accounts convey the impression that metropolitan outfitters profited from the Fair Circassian fiasco, given that Abul Hassan gave expensive cashmere fabrics and shawls to Empress Josephine (Napoleon’s wife and a fashion trendsetter) and the prince regent—a gift-giving ritual crucial to Qajar diplomacy.⁶⁹ To learn how to reproduce these coveted gifts cheaply, “twenty ladies of fashionable distinction” met with Delarom at the ambassador’s home; while some did not consider her “a model of female beauty” as the newspapers had claimed, all praised “the costume of her country,” her quaint “manners,” and slim waistline.⁷⁰ The latter detail is emphasized in La Belle Assemblée and other fashion periodicals, informing readers that Circassian women’s “slender waist” was achieved soon after birth by “a corset, or broad belt of undressed leather, [that] is sowed from below the breasts to the hips, and, among more distinguished persons, it is fixed with silver clasps.”⁷¹ The girdle was a cultural norm for displaying an aesthetic symmetry between the stomach and breasts by tight vesting as shown in Figure 3.3, and was cut by the husband with a dagger on the wedding night.⁷² Conforming to “Circassian, and … Turkish ideas of beauty,” this look, though not “pleasing to the eye of a European,” was marketed for Englishwomen after Mary Ann Bell had invented the “Circassian corset.”⁷³ Unlike European corsets, hardened with whalebone that were painful and unhealthy, her invention after that worn by the envoy’s wife was advertised in La Belle Assemblée and elsewhere as a concealer of “deformities … in females” and an “antidote to Cancer.”⁷⁴ “Conducive to health and comfort,” Circassian corsets for shaping “the bosom to the greatest possible advantage” among “those who are inclined to corpulency” normalizes female ableism insofar as fatness is a disability to be concealed by whiteness—a racialized capacity for pristine European beauty coextensive with Delarom-inspired fashions in Paris.⁷⁵

Satires attributed this latest commodity to dandies. For example, the printmaker and etcher Charles Williams caricatured three corpulent ladies in feathered hats corseting Delarom, the famed beauty (Figure 3.4).⁷⁶ In the image, she screams, “Ah! Ah! me no bear dat; too tight; nasty tiff ting Me no eat no drink no do noting at all in dat.” The nearest lady assures her that “Poh Child You will soon be used to them,” while the one on the left, holding an embroidered collar, quips, “And then she’ll like the nasty tiff ting, as well as we do they keep us in shape! pray what would the Dandys do without them.” Two presumed eunuchs with long beards gaze approvingly, one touching the Circassian’s corset (his hand near her genitalia) and telling his companion: “Very good ting Muley No want us guarde now!” The latter replies, “Ah! den we go drink de brown tout Hamet!” The woman holding a gown behind them exclaims, “Aye and you must drink a rare quantity before it will make men of ye!!” Viewers are to infer that Delarom’s female admirers were against British liberty in being greater enslavers of their own kind than emasculated Persians feigning masculinity were, with dandies held accountable for this national debasement. In this period, tight corsets and stays were most popular among upwardly mobile Englishwomen,⁷⁷ but dandies were also changing their appearance through tight lacing, wearing corsets underneath their costumes.⁷⁸ The satirical cartoon implies that dandyism is what happens between xenophilic women behind closed doors.

Similarly, the dandy’s corseted body was the butt of the joke in Harlequin and Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper, arranged by Charles Farley and first staged in Covent Garden theater on April 3, 1820. Pantomime’s fashionable décor, Eastern scenery, and Persian costumery (including turbans and shawls) had been major crowd-pleasers since the 1790s.⁷⁹ This “new pantomime” featured painted panels depicting “the Persian Ambassador’s House” and “the Grand Boudoir of the Fair Circassian,” a private space for staging sexual seductions on a par with Oriental harems dominated by female coquettes.⁸⁰ The farce was received “with shouts of laughter & applause” and to be “repeated every evening,” as the actors who played the exotic couple “assisted not a little to the amusement of the spectators,” besides the “new scenery, machinery, dresses, and decorations.”⁸¹ Most astonishing to the audience was when a raggedy Cinderella, having been confined to the kitchen by her mother and two sisters, rode to the ballroom in the prince’s palace on a “gourd” with “rats and mice” transformed into horse-drawn “magnificent equipage” by her fairy benefactress’s magic. In the distance appeared London landmarks: the Haymarket Opera House, Regent’s Park, Southwark Bridge, and the home in which Abul Hassan and his wife were residing.⁸² No surprise, then, that the pantomime was advertised in La Belle Assemblée and Bell’s Weekly Messenger to appeal indirectly to the beau monde’s eccentric consumerism.

Fashion displays are central to Harlequin and Cinderella and its antecedent, a pantomime performed at Drury Lane in 1804 and based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale “Cendrillon.”⁸³ An afterpiece to five-act comedies, the first version’s dumbshow, dance, recitative, and song carried over into the 1820 adaptation. Starring in both versions was the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi, who in the remake played Baroness Pomposini (Cinderella’s mother) before morphing into Clown. Accordingly, the first half of the pantomime follows the fairy tale’s familiar storyline, with the second half introducing the harlequinade’s stock characters: Cinderella morphs into Columbine, her lover Prince Celidoze into Harlequin, her father Baron Pomposini into Pantaloon, and the “servant [named Pedro], violently enamoured of Cinderella, … into a Dandy.”⁸⁴ The fairy dooms the lovers to “wandering and persecution” until they find the magic slippers that accompanied Cinderella’s neoclassical dress, which she found floating midair in the kitchen.⁸⁵ The dress is decked “in transparent drapery, dazzling with silk and silver.” Donning it made Cinderella “naked as a woman of fashion should be.”⁸⁶ The fairy’s spell is broken once “Venus’s golden doves bears the long-sought slipper, and drops it on Harlequin’s head.” Cinderella and the prince afterward return to their normal form to be married “in bliss.” The grand finale has the three female actors performing, as if in a fashion show, “their beautiful shawl dance.”⁸⁷ Cinderella pantomimes popularized and thereby normalized cross-dressing fashions in masquerade ballrooms.⁸⁸ Spectators were cued to see in these unruly performances the same normative ideals of able-bodied femininity inculcated in periodicals for fashionable ladies, with their desires for the opposite sex ultimately sanctioned by marriage—points that Shelby Johnson similarly discusses in the preceding chapter.

Regency-era pantomimes regularly satirized dandyism, as inferable from Grimaldi’s antics in Harlequin and Cinderella. His son, Joseph Samuel William Grimaldi, played Pedro, the “poor enamour’d loon [who] changes to Dandinee.”⁸⁹ The name “Pedro,” a blackface role, conjures France’s West Indies slave plantations.⁹⁰ Joseph had played this role before his son, in the 1804 pantomime after the prince’s valet—named Dandini—in Gioachino Rossini’s 1817 opera La Cenerentola (first performed at Covent Garden in 1820). “Dandinee” was part of the elder Grimaldi’s repertoire as “Dandy Lover,” known as “the foolish, vain, and insipid young man personifying the deservedly spurned suitor.”⁹¹ Modeled after Brummell, this character appeared as an exquisite imitating French fashions. He was Pantaloon’s dim-witted servant or lackey, eager to marry Pantaloon’s daughter, Columbine, yet incapable of charming her or copulating. His corseted body was usually misshaped to inhuman proportions, self-fetishized in its sartorial excesses.⁹² Harlequin and Cinderella not only racially others the Dandy Lover but also uses him as a satiric figure aimed against the gentlemen whom he uncannily resembles. In one scene, “Dandy … is made to exchange cards with the Clown; and in a subsequent meeting, these two well-matched Gentlemen at first run away, and when compelled by their seconds to fire, shoot each his second.”⁹³ The duel between look-alikes, both fatally wounding one another in this spoof against gentlemanly bravado, deflates patriarchal authority for an audience aware that the dandified Pedro was a role invented by the father and now played by the son. What was to be a play promoting novel female fashions turns out to be a comical interrogation of who, if anyone, embodies an authentic genteel masculinity.

More titillating for the spectators would have been the dead Clown’s return as the dandy’s female double, “Dandizetta,” whom the elder Grimaldi performed in other pantomimes to great acclaim.⁹⁴ In that role, he cross-dressed as the Fair Circassian in her boudoir, a bawdy scene that garnered the greatest applause. The blending of Clown, Pedro, Dandy, and Dandizetta into one amorphous body in a harem-like setting received the audience’s implicit approval, in contrast to their unanimous hissing of Grimaldi’s other cross-dressing satire: as the Baroness in a “toilet scene,” he had “exhibited the mysteries of her dress rather plainly [corset or stays],” a bawdiness that “certainly ventured too far.”⁹⁵ Besides concerns for maintaining sexual propriety, what was perhaps so unacceptable about this scene was the unveiling of white feminine embodiment as an ableist performance, a normative whiteness exposed as artifice. Hence, dandyism’s gender-sex-race fluidity—symbolized in the corset—is the mechanism for distinguishing male from female and British from Oriental.

REGENCY ENGLAND’S ISLAMICATE SEXUALITIES

Enmeshed in an anti-dandy mediascape, Harlequin and Cinderella suggests that the question of who counts as a gentleman is for the audience to decide. What appears transgressive about the Persian envoy and his wife helped British spectators heteronormalize themselves: the same type of sociality seen in the “love between men” became the medium for Abul Hassan’s female fans to perform sexual agency in public with and for male non-kin. Heterosocial bonding thereby became acceptable for Regency Britons around the same time that gentlemen’s homosocial bonding was undergoing heightened public scrutiny for its possible effeminacy across various mediums. Furthermore, these mediations recalibrated British gender norms remarkably receptive to the Persian-Islamic masculinity transmitted via Abul Hassan’s mediatized beardedness. From its protean assimilation of eccentricities in fashion and appearance emerged new standards for modernizing Western courtship rituals and heterosexual marital conventions.

Ultimately, extending Islamicate sexualities to Regency England helps connect gender and sexual formations that are usually studied apart within siloed academic disciplines. The upshot to working across imperial archives is to show that the consolidation of a sex-gender binarism in late Qajar Iran was underway earlier in Regency-era newspapers, visual prints, and theatrical performances. Before European gender ideals became a catalyst for Iranian modernization, they had to become normal. This historical reorientation dates to the Regency dandies and dandizettes in love with all things Persian. My goal is to present an interdisciplinary lens for interpreting Anglo-Persian transculturation in the long nineteenth century as a multidirectional exchange. Such an approach allows us to see that the sexual deviant is not the bearded Abul Hassan or the habited Fanny but the beardless suitor who failed to secure Fanny’s hand in matrimony: Mr. Whitbread.⁹⁶ “Fanny’s gentleman in waiting”—the Member of Parliament of Middlesex in 1820—was spurned by her, who would “not run after” Whitbread despite his persistent pursuit of her to go horse riding with him.⁹⁷ Edgeworth described him in terms fit for an impotent Dandy Lover: a “good but too meek looking a youth.”⁹⁸ His marriage prospect might have improved had he been as virile and venerable as the Persian horse rider who stole the spotlight on that memorable day in Hyde Park.

NOTES

1. 1. Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England, 1813–1844, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 202–203.

2. 2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 79.

3. 3. Mary Beth Harris, A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2024); Rory Muir, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen’s England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); and Philip Mason, The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal (New York: William Morrow, 1982). On scholarship linking fear of effeminacy in this period to concurrent imperialist and xenophobic discourses, see Peter McNeil, Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Julia Banister, Masculinity, Militarism, and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 14–43; and Declan Kavanagh, Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017).

4. 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

5. 5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii. On the problematic fetishization of queerness, see Brad Epps, “The Fetish of Fluidity,” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 412–431.

6. 6. On fashion as nationally debasing yet socially enabling in Edgeworth’s 1809–1812 Tales of Fashionable Life, see Andrew McInnes, “Amazonian Fashions: Lady Delacour’s (Re)Dress in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in Picturing Women’s Health, ed. Francesca Scott, Kate Scarth, and Ji Won Chung (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 29–44; and Heidi Thomson, “ ‘The Fashion Not to Be an Absentee’: Fashion and Moral Authority in Edgeworth’s Tales,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 165–191. On the feminization of British nationhood in the eighteenth century, see Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

7. 7. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 48.

8. 8. See Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, eds., Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially Valerie Traub, “The Past Is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies,” 1–40.

9. 9. Abdul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George, 1809–10: The Journal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans. and ed. Margaret Morris Cloake (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1988), 28.

10. 10. On Abul Hassan’s life, see Denis Wright, The Persians amongst the English: Episodes in Anglo-Persian History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985), 54; Henry McKenzie Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and His Brothers (London: British Academic Press, 1998), 120–122; and H. Javadi, “Abu’l-Ḥasan Khan Īlčī,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/3, 308–10, accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-hasan-khan-ilci-mirza-persian-diplomat-b.

11. 11. Louis Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the Years 1810 and 1811, vol. 1 (London: A. Constable and Company, 1815), 160.

12. 12. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1.

13. 13. Erica Munkwitz, Women, Horse Sports, and Liberation: Equestrianism and Britain from the 18th to the 20th Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2021), 52–53, 105–108.

14. 14. Khan, A Persian, 78.

15. 15. Willem Floor, Games Persians Play: A History of Games and Pastimes in Iran from Hide-and-Seek to Hunting (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2011), 125–130.

16. 16. Mirza Abul Hassan Khan-e Ilchi, Heyratnameh: Safarnameh-ye Mirza Abul Hassan Khan-e Ilchi be London, ed. Hassan Morsalvand (Tehran: Rasa, 1986), 215–216.

17. 17. Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3, 137.

18. 18. Khan, A Persian, 164–165.

19. 19. “Grand Review,” Morning Post (April 17, 1810), 4.

20. 20. Naghmeh Sohrabi, Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40. On Iranian courtesans’ equestrian dress, see Willem Floor, A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2008), 211.

21. 21. On fashionable portraiture as a medium for viewers to adopt new identities in sociable settings, see Elizabeth A. Fay, Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 6–11, 13.

22. 22. Hugh Paton, A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings, by the Late John Kay, vol. 2, part 2 (Edinburgh: Hugh Paton, Carver, and Gilder, 1838), 308.

23. 23. See Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 7–34, especially 10; Jennifer Evans and Alun Withey, “Introduction,” in New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair: Framing the Face, ed. Jennifer Evans and Alun Withey (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 1–11; Susan Walton, “From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 3, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 229–245, especially 229; and Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 73–150.

24. 24. Eleanor Rycroft, “Hair, Beards and the Fashioning of English Manhood in Early Modern Travel Texts,” in New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair, 69–89 (74).

25. 25. Elizabeth Fielding to Harriot Frampton, February 3, 1810. See Mary Frampton, The Journal of Mary Frampton (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), 140.

26. 26. Fielding to Frampton, February 3, 1810, 141.

27. 27. On the European incorporation of the ottoman and its association with Orientalism and libertinism, see Madeleine Dobie, “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the American and European Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 13–36.

28. 28. Fielding to Frampton, February 3, 1810, 141.

29. 29. See Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

30. 30. Mark Albert Johnston, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 43–46, 70–72, and 90–92; Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 102–103, 107–108; and Evans and Withey, “Introduction,” 3.

31. 31. Hilary Davidson, Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 38, 234–235.

32. 32. “Female Fashions,” Morning Post (April 3, 1810), 3.

33. 33. The following newspaper articles on the “Mirza turban” were culled from Rudolph Ackermann, The Repository of Arts, Literatures, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics, vol. 3 (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1810), 262. See also “Mouse of Commons,” Chester Chronicle (March 30, 1810), 2; “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday’s Posts,” Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or, Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser (March 29, 1810), 1; “Fashions for April,” Jackson’s Oxford Journal (April 7, 1810), 4; and “Fashions for Ladies and Gentlemen, for April,” Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser (March 31, 1810), 4.

34. 34. “Fashionable Costume for July,” The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (July 1817), 281.

35. 35. “Cashemire Shawls,” La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine (June 1819), 233.

36. 36. Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 7; Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 100–105; and Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women & Cosmetic Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 208.

37. 37. Geczy, Fashion, 104.

38. 38. Rauser, The Age, 9, 18, 22.

39. 39. Fay, Fashioning Faces, 95.

40. 40. On magazine fashion images as normalizing eccentric attitudes and regulating sexual identities for viewers, see Davidson, Dress in the Age of Austen, 48–51; and Diana Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 713–737.

41. 41. Humberto Garcia, “Queering Fashion in Hajji Baba: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 1–31.

42. 42. See Laura George, “The Emergence of the Dandy,” Literature Compass 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003–2004): 1–13; Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space, and Architecture in Regency London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 49–54; James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); and Elizabeth Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

43. 43. Munkwitz, Women.

44. 44. Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 64–66.

45. 45. James Laver, Dandies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 12.

46. 46. Susan Fillin-Yeh, “Introduction: New Strategies for a Theory of Dandies,” in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, ed. Susan Fillin-Yeh (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 1–34 (5).

47. 47. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210 (177).

48. 48. We might recall Saba Mahmood’s reformulation of gender and agency in relationship to the hijab in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): “If we think of ‘agency’ not simply as a synonym for resistance to social norms but as a modality of action, then this conversation raises some interesting questions about the kind of relationship established between the subject and the norm, between performative behavior and inward disposition” (157).

49. 49. “Court and Fashionables,” The Examiner (May 2, 1819), 280–281. See also “April,” The Edinburgh Annual Register (January 1819), 303; “Epitome of Public Affairs for May, 1819,” The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction (June 1819), 340; and “Mirror of Fashion for June, 1819,” The New British Lady’s Magazine; or Monthly Mirror of Literature and Fashion (June 1819), 274.

50. 50. “Arrival of the Persian Ambassador and the Fair Circassian. Dover, April 25,” The Times (April 27, 1819), 3; and “The Persian Ambassador and the Circassian,” The Times (April 30, 1819), 3.

51. 51. Quoted in Stanley Morison, John Bell, 1745–1831: Bookseller, Printer, Publisher, Typefounder, Journalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 65.

52. 52. Fay, Fashioning Faces, 24; and Neil McKendrick, J. H. Plumb, and John Brewer, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982), 190.

53. 53. “Biographical Sketches of Illustrious and Distinguished Characters. Delarom, the Fair Circassian,” La Belle Assemblée: Being Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (July 1819), 6, 4.

54. 54. On Circassian women celebrated for their heroism and gallantry since biblical times, and their trafficking as concubines in the Ottoman Empire, see Amjad Jaimoukha, The Circassians: A Handbook (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12, 169.

55. 55. Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, “Persian Ambassadors, Their Circassians, and the Politics of Elizabethan and Regency England,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 251–271; Munkwitz, Women, 1; and Bernadette Andrea, The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 29–35.

56. 56. “Biographical Sketches,” 5.

57. 57. “Biographical Sketches,” 5.

58. 58. “Biographical Sketches,” 5.

59. 59. Fay, Fashioning Faces, 43.

60. 60. “Biographical Sketches,” 4. On Circassian concubines’ traditional dress and jewelry, see Jaimoukha, The Circassians, 195–196.

61. 61. On the ideal female face in eighteenth-century portraiture, see Ribeiro, Facing Beauty, 152–56, 170. On female hairstyles in early nineteenth-century Britain, see Phyllis G. Tortora and Keith Eubank, Survey of Historic Costume: A History of Western Dress, 5th ed. (New York: Fairchild, 2010), 317.

62. 62. “Biographical Sketches,” 5.

63. 63. For a discussion of this periodical genre’s consumerist logic, see Fay, Fashioning Faces, 40–43, 70.

64. 64. Eskandari-Qajar, “Persian Ambassadors,” 257.

65. 65. “Biographical Sketches,” 3. The sketch concludes with a poem “giving advice for the treatment of an English wife:” “Be to her faults a little blind, / Be to her virtues very kind, / Let all her ways be unconfin’d, / And clap your padlock on her mind” (6).

66. 66. “Court and Fashionables,” 280. See also “Miscellaneous: Chiefly Domestic,” The Observer (May 5, 1819), 4; “Epitome,” 341; “The Fair Circassion [sic],” Shadgett’s Weekly Review of Cobbett, Wooler, Sherwin and Other Democratic and Infidel Writers (1818–1819), 168; and “The Fair Circassian,” The Observer (May 5, 1819), 2.

67. 67. See, for example, “The Fair Circassian,” The Northern Whig: A Political, Commercial, and Literary Miscellany (1824), 419; and “Execution,” The Observer (May 27, 1822), 4.

68. 68. “The Fair Circassian,” The European Magazine, and London Review (September 1819), 224.

69. 69. Abul Hassan traveled with an extensive collection of cashmere tapestries and shawls as diplomatic gifts for European royals in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris, and London. See Marie-Anne Adélaide Le Normand, Historical and Secret Memoirs of the Empress Josephine, First Wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, vol. 2, trans. Jacob M. Howard (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848), 82; “Oriental Presents and Style,” The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (April 1, 1820), 221; and “Persian Customs,” The Kaleidoscope: or, Literary and Scientific Mirror (May 16, 1819), 134. In 1819, he reportedly gave the Prince of Wales sixteen fine Arabian horses, jewelry, “carpets of Cashmere Shawls,” and “ten magnificent shawls, of various sizes and denominations” (“Persian Customs,” 274). On the projection of Qajar power through diplomatic gifts, including shawls, see Assef Ashraf, “The Politics of Gift Exchange in Early Qajar Iran, 1785–1834,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 2 (April 2016): 550–576, especially 570–575.

70. 70. Paton, A Series, 304; “Epitome,” 341.

71. 71. “The Fair Circassian,” Fitzhenry: The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review (June 5, 1819), 39. Also see “Biographical Sketches,” 4; “The Fair Circassian,” Observator, 221; and “Court and Fashionables,” 315–316.

72. 72. On the tight vests used to slim Circassian girls’ waists, see Jaimoukha, The Circassians, 196.

73. 73. “The Fair Circassian,” Fitzhenry, 39; and “The Fair Circassian,” Observator, 221.

74. 74. See “Mrs. Bell’s ‘Circassian Corsets,’ ” The Morning Chronicle (May 4, 1819), 1; and “Mrs. Bell’s Circassian Corsets,” New Times (May 4, 1819), 1. On European corsets and the contemporary negative commentary on their use, see Rauser, The Age, 10–12; and Ribeiro, Dress, 96, 129, 134–135.

75. 75. Morison, John, 69–70. “Circassian pelisses, without sleeves” and “turbans of Cachemire and pearls, and other Oriental turbans” were marketed for “Parisian ladies” during Delarom’s stay in Paris, as described in “Cabinet of Taste: A Parisian Correspondent,” La Belle Assemblée: Being Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (May 1819), 184–185.

76. 76. For a description of this print, see Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 9, 1811–1819 (London: British Museum Trustees, 1949), 974–975.

77. 77. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2nd ed. (London: Virago, 2003), 97, 99.

78. 78. Ribeiro, Dress, 124.

79. 79. David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 156–161.

80. 80. See “Harlequin and Cinderella,” A Collection of Playbills from Covent Garden Theatre, 1819–1820. MS British Playbills, British Library. Nineteenth Century Collections Online; and Gülen Çevik, “Boudoirs and Harems: The Seductive Power of Sophas,” Journal of Interior Design 43, no. 3 (September 2018): 24–41, especially 27–29.

81. 81. See “Harlequin and Cinderella”; “Covent-Garden,” La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine (May 20, 1820), 184; Bell’s Weekly Messenger (April 9, 1820), 5; and “Covent-Garden,” New Times (April 4, 1820), 3.

82. 82. See “Theatricals,” Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser (April 4, 1820), 3; and “Covent-Garden,” New Times, 3.

83. 83. Jennifer Schacker, Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 64; and Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper, in The Routledge Pantomime Reader: 1800–1900, ed. Jennifer Schacker and Daniel O’Quinn (New York: Routledge, 2022), 37–56.

84. 84. “Covent-Garden Theatre,” Globe (April 4, 1820), 3; “Theatricals,” 3.

85. 85. “Covent-Garden Theatre,” 3.

86. 86. “Covent-Garden,” New Times, 3.

87. 87. “Covent-Garden Theatre,” 3.

88. 88. Schacker, Staging, 43.

89. 89. Harlequin and Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper. A New Pantomime, Theatre Royal Covent Garden (March 22, 1820), LA2144, John Larpent Plays, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Mayer, Harlequin, 176.

90. 90. Cinderella, 38–39.

91. 91. Mayer, Harlequin, 169.

92. 92. Jonathan Buckmaster, Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 193–194.

93. 93. “Covent-Garden Theatre,” Globe, 3.

94. 94. Mayer, Harlequin, 166, 184. On Grimaldi’s cross-dressing performances as sartorial satires, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 217, 224.

95. 95. “Covent-Garden,” New Times, 3.

96. 96. J. M. Walker and W. S. Pike, “Pen Portraits of Presidents: Samuel Charles Whitbread, FRS,” Weather 52, no. 12 (1997): 396–399.

97. 97. Edgeworth, Letters, 203.

98. 98. Edgeworth, Letters, 180.