Foote, Fox, and the Mysterious Mrs Grieve: Print Celebrity and Imposture

Scobie, Ruth

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_11

Ruth Scobie³

260 Accesses

Abstract

In 1774, a woman calling herself The Honourable Elizabeth Harriet Grieve was sentenced to transportation for fraud. An experienced hand at posing as a wealthy heiress, she had recently begun to use newspaper advertising to reach a mass readership of ambitious middle-class provincials, promising social and professional influence. This chapter outlines Grieve’s career and brief brush with celebrity. Satirical poetry and theatre comedy about the case, it argues, reflect anxieties about the epistemology of contemporary print culture, the influence of global trade, and the role and dangers of scandal. In particular, representations of Grieve reveal the importance of these concerns to the public personae of the politician and man of fashion Charles James Fox, and the actor and playwright Samuel Foote.

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Notes

1.
London Evening Post, 2 November 1773.
2.
London Evening Post, 2 November 1773.
3.
Horace Walpole to the Countess of Upper Ossory (18 November 1773), in The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee, vol. 8 of 16 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 358–59 (359).
4.
Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 20.
5.
Tom Mole, “Introduction,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–18 (10).
6.
London Evening Post, 2 November 1773.
7.
Clara Tuite, “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity,” in ELH 74, no. 1 (2007): 59–88 (63).
8.
Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, “Understanding Celebrity Culture.” Introduction to Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, ed. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–17 (7).
9.
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 58.
10.
Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); William D. Brewer, Staging Romantic Chameleons and Imposters (New York: Palgrave, 2015).
11.
Brewer, Staging Romantic Chameleons and Imposters, 2–3.
12.
James Perkins, for example, was convicted for fraud in 1693, after claiming “an Authority […] to dispose of certain Places.” Old Bailey Proceedings, 6 December 1693.
13.
Samuel Foote, The Cozeners (London: John Wheble, 1778), 2.
14.
Andrew and McGowan, The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd, 139. For an account of Rudd’s management of print publicity, see 63–68, 189–217.
15.
See Page Life, “Grieve, Elizabeth Harriet (born c.1723, died in or after 1782)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). No academic work I have found gives more detail than this short biography.
16.
See Barbara Benedict, “Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-Century Thing-Poem,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 193–207.
17.
Bob Harris, “Print Culture,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson (London: Blackwell, 2002), 283–93 (293). See also Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (London: Routledge, 1996); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
18.
Alexander Pope, A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr Edmund Curll, Bookseller (1716), in The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 124–28 (126); Morning Chronicle, 26 October 1798.
19.
Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England, vol. 1 of 2 (London: Edward Jeffery, 1789), 61–62.
20.
Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 22.
21.
Morning Chronicle, 30 May 1772.
22.
Manushag N. Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 3.
23.
Archenholz, A Picture of England, 68.
24.
Samuel Johnson, Idler 40 (20 January 1759), 224, 228. Quoted in Briggs, “News from the Little World,” 29–30.
25.
Middlesex Journal, 21 July 1774.
26.
Archenholz, A Picture of England, 69–70.
27.
See Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s account of publicity and celebrity in The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 313–28. For an outline of newspaper advertising conventions, see Peter M. Briggs, “‘News from the Little World’: A Critical Glance at Eighteenth-Century British Advertising,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 29–45.
28.
See Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, 43–72.
29.
For an account of the Morning Post, see Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1772–1792 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Andrew and McGowan, The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd, 58.
30.
Richard Brinsey Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777) in The School for Scandal and Other Plays, ed. Michael Cordner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 203–288, 1.1, l. 4.
31.
Sheridan, School for Scandal, 1.1, ll. 127–28, 1–2. See Robert W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America 1770–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 159–94.
32.
Uriel Heyd, “‘News Craze’: Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Depiction of Newspaper Culture,” The Eighteenth Century 56, no. 1 (2015): 59–84 (76). Key works on the broader cultural influence of the conventions of ephemeral print include the useful introduction to Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance, 1–33; John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
33.
Walter Scott, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott (1837–1838), ed. J. G. Lockhart, vol. 5 of 5 (London: Macmillan, 1900), 197–98.
34.
Life, “Grieve, Elizabeth Harriet”.
35.
General Evening Post, 6 August 1748, 13 August 1748. Suggestively, an earlier Old Bailey case involved as informer a young but articulate girl named Bess Willoughby, apprentice to a market trader and part of a group of child shoplifters. It is possible that this is the same person (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 8 December 1731).
36.
General Evening Post, 13 August 1748; London Evening Post, 3 September 1748.
37.
Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 19 October 1768; Home Office Papers, 2.414, p. 566, cited in Life, “Grieve, Elizabeth Harriet (born c. 1723, died in or after 1782)”; also in St James’s Chronicle, 17 January 1769.
38.
Gazetteer, 12 July 1769.
39.
Lloyd’s Evening Post, 8 November 1769.
40.
“Sir Hamborough Bavanning”, dying in a conveniently vague location overseas, seems to have left no other record. The Hon. Thomas Willoughby, member of parliament for Nottinghamshire, was alive and childless in 1769.
41.
Middlesex Journal, 2 November 1773; St James’s Chronicle, 9 November 1773; London Chronicle, 2 November 1773.
42.
Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third from the Year 1771 to 1783, ed. John Doran, vol. 1 of 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 283.
43.
London Evening Post, 2 November 1773.
44.
London Chronicle, 22 October 1782.
45.
It was only with the Mary Anne Clarke affair in 1809, with its twin scandalous elements of sex and the neglect of military veterans, that what Anna Clark calls the “seamy underworld” of post trading was given a serious political dimension. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 148–76 (167).
46.
Daily Advertiser, 20 March 1772.
47.
Daily Advertiser, 1 November 1773.
48.
Daily Advertiser, 5 November 1773.
49.
London Evening Post, 2 November 1773.
50.
Horace Walpole, Journal, 283.
51.
Walpole to the Countess of Upper Ossory (18 November 1773), in Letters, 359.
52.
Middlesex Journal, 21 July 1774.
53.
Morning Chronicle, 1 November 1774.
54.
Walpole to the Countess of Upper Ossory (18 November 1773), in Letters, vol. 8, 359.
55.
London Chronicle, 9 November 1773; Morning Chronicle, 1 November 1774.
56.
Morning Chronicle, 21 December 1773. See also notice in Middlesex Journal, 20 January 1774.
57.
Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1774; Morning Chronicle, 24 June 1774.
58.
Middlesex Journal, 14 July 1774.
59.
Middlesex Journal, 21 July 1774.
60.
See D. T. Johnson, “Charles James Fox: From Government to Opposition, 1771–1774,” in English Historical Review 89, no. 353 (1974): 750–84.
61.
Middlesex Journal, 21 July 1774.
62.
“Heroic and Elegiac Epistle,” l. 19.
63.
Jane Moody, “Stolen Identities: Character, Mimicry and the Invention of Samuel Foote” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain 1660–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 65–89 (65, 75).
64.
Female Artifice; Or Charles F-x Outwitted (London: J. Ridley, 1774), ll. 207–08; Walpole to William Mason (14 February 1774), in Letters, vol. 8, 424.
65.
Female Artifice, preface; Monthly Review, February 1774.
66.
Female Artifice, ll. 40, 175.
67.
“An Heroic and Elegiac Epistle from Mrs. Grieve, in Newgate, to Mr. C— F—,” in Westminster Magazine (March 1774), l. 60.
68.
“Heroic and Elegiac Epistle,” ll. 22, 45, 56, 61–68.
69.
“Heroic and Elegiac Epistle,” ll. 73, 80, 82.
70.
Female Artifice, l. 9; “Heroic and Elegiac Epistle,” ll. 122.
71.
See Bronwen Douglas, “‘Cureous Figures’: European Voyagers and Tatua/Tattoo in Polynesia, 1595–1800,” in Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, and Bronwen Douglas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 33–52.
72.
John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages […] Performed by Commodore Byron, Capt. Wallis, Capt. Carteret and Captain Cook, 3 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1773). For the scandal and circulation of this text, see Gillian Russell, “An ‘Entertainment of Oddities’: Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–70.
73.
Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150. See also Bridget Orr, “Southern Passions Mix with Northern Art: Miscegenation and the Endeavour Voyage,” Eighteenth Century Life 18, no. 3 (November 1994): 212–31.
74.
An Epistle from Mr. Banks, Voyager, Monster-Hunter, and Amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite, 2nd ed. (London: John Swann and Thomas Axtell [December 1773]), frontispiece.
75.
Ben Jonson, Argument to The Alchemist (1610), in The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211–326 (215).
76.
Christina Smylitopoulos, “Rewritten and Reused: Imaging the Nabob Through ‘Upstart Iconography’,” Eighteenth-Century Life 32, no. 2 (2008): 39–59 (41).
77.
Samuel Foote, The Cozeners (London: John Wheble, 1778), 28, 9, 5–6, 20–21, 13–20, 65–68.
78.
Foote, Cozeners, 7.
79.
Foote, Cozeners, 79, 36.
80.
Walpole, Letters, 359; Foote, Cozeners, 32, 36, 62–63.
81.
Foote, Cozeners, 8, 3.
82.
Foote, Cozeners, 79, 7, 36.
83.
Craftsman or Say’s Weekly Journal, 2 July 1774; Middlesex Journal, 14 July 1774.
84.
Craftsman or Say’s Weekly Journal, 2 July 1774; Middlesex Journal, 14 July 1774; General Evening Post, 16 July 1774.
85.
See Matthew J. Kinservik, Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 134–72; Moody, “Stolen Identities”.
86.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 20.
87.
See Moody, “Stolen Identities”.
88.
Foote, Cozeners, 32, 64.
89.
See Matthew J. Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 119–34.
90.
Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1.
91.
Arthur Murphy, “News from Parnassus, a Prelude” (1776), in The Works of Arthur Murphy, Esq., vol. 4 of 7 (London: T. Cadell, 1786), 391–424 (397–98).

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Mansfield College, Oxford, UK
Ruth Scobie

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Department of English, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
Emrys D. Jones
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Victoria Joule

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Scobie, R. (2018). Foote, Fox, and the Mysterious Mrs Grieve: Print Celebrity and Imposture. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_11

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