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Ways to Possess a Singer in 1830s London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2018

Eleanor Cloutier
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Abstract

Italian singer Giulia Grisi was imagined and ‘possessed’ in various ways by members of diverse social groups in London during the 1830s. Audience members could bring different versions of the diva home: through reports (or experiences with her) as a guest or entertainer at parties, through gossip about her personal life reported in newspapers and through pieces arranged ‘as sung by’ her. The fluid and constantly negotiated relationship between the diva and her audience offered a locus for expressing social relations in London during a period of changing class and national definitions. It is neither possible nor desirable to recover a singular idea of Grisi as a celebrity or as a woman; instead, the multiple images of Grisi must be read as negotiations of identity on the part of the consumers as they participated in the nascent celebrity culture of the 1830s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , July 2017 , pp. 189 - 214
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Eleanor Cloutier, University of Notre Dame, USA; ecloutie@nd.edu.

References

1 And this is the story that I in turn have sewn together from reading accounts of Dupuget’s escapade in various newspapers and memoirs: ‘Paris Intelligence – the Court, News, and Fashions’, The Lady’s Magazine and Museum (March 1836), 190; ‘Accidents and Offences’, Examiner (6 March 1836); La Moda (14 March 1836); L’Abeille musicale (June 1836); Le Mercure de France (12 February–12 March 1836), 13; ‘Chronique Des Salons’, Petit courrier des dames (5 March 1836); Joseph Méry, Les Nuits parisiennes (Paris, 1860), 213–16.

2 ‘Paris Intelligence – the Court, News, and Fashions’, 190.

3 ‘Chronique Des Salons’, Petit Courrier des dames (5 March 1836); ‘Paris Intelligence – the Court, News, and Fashions’, 190.

4 ‘Accidents and Offences’; ‘Paris Intelligence – the Court, News, and Fashions’, 190.

5 The pair of loaded pistols might imply a planned tragic and melodramatic murder-suicide rather than an abduction or seduction. ‘Paris Intelligence – the Court, News, and Fashions’, 190.

6 The Parisian context, though fascinating, is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, the singers at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique were, like Grisi, subject to professional, moral and matrimonial expectations, and their characters and portrayals in the press and in biographies both shaped and reflected their social importance. See Kimberly White, ‘The Cantatrice and the Professsion of Singing at the Paris Opéra and Opéra Comique, 1830–1848’, PhD diss., McGill University (2012).

7 Berta Joncus elaborates on the establishment of Kitty Clive’s celebrity by using music written for her and reviews of performances to argue that her celebrity persona informed the music composed for her and vice versa: Joncus, , ‘Handel at Drury Lane: Ballad Opera and the Production of Kitty Clive’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131 (2006), 179–226 Google Scholar. Joncus and Jonathan Rhodes Lee also deal with the pamphlet war over Clive and Susanna Cibber’s ‘ownership’ of the role of Polly in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: Joncus, , ‘In Wit Superior, as in Fighting: Kitty Clive and the Conquest of a Rival Queen’, Huntington Library Quarterly 74 (2011), 23–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, , ‘From Amelia to Calista and Beyond: Sentimental Heroines, Fallen Women and Handel’s Oratorio Revisions for Susanna Cibber’, Cambridge Opera Journal 27 (2015), 1–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Memoirs of Mrs Billington from her Birth was published in 1792; see Levin, Susan, ‘Vice, Ugly Vice: Memoirs of Mrs Billington from Her Birth ’, in Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. Eugene Stelzig (Burlington, VT, 2013), 49–62 Google Scholar. Singers’ own publications also provided insight into their personal lives. Eighteenth-century audiences, for example, could get to know one of their favourite singers, Elizabeth Linley (1754–92), through verses she published after her public singing career was finished, through plays (Samuel Foote’s The Maid of Bath and The Rivals, by Linley’s husband, Richard Brinsley Sheridan), and through published letters by Sheridan. During her performing career, however, her image was formed through exclusive access at private concerts and a carefully selected repertoire. Suzanne Aspden discusses the cultivation of her image primarily through use of concert programmes and letters and diaries published later in the century or after Linley’s death. Aspden, , ‘“Sancta Cæilia Rediviva” Elizabeth Linley: Repertoire, Reputation, and the English Voice’, Cambridge Opera Journal 27 (2015), 263–287 Google Scholar. See also Nussbaum, Felicity, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (Philadelphia, 2010)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3; and Aspden, Suzanne, The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Tom Kaufman addresses newspaper depictions of Grisi from a slightly later period in his article on her ‘rivalry’ with Pauline Viardot from 1848 to 1852. Much as I have done here, he takes a myth (that Grisi and her husband Mario attempted to sabotage Viardot’s career), and explores its formation in the popular press. Kaufman, Tom, ‘The Grisi-Viardot Controversy, 1848–1852’, Opera Quarterly 14 (1997), 7–22 Google Scholar.

10 Dupuget, Amédée wrote Le Démon de Socrate (Paris, 1829)Google Scholar and C’est de Jehanne-la-Pucelle, légende de la fin du XVe siècle (Paris, 1833), a two-volume retelling of the story of Joan of Arc in the style of the fifteenth century.

11 Leo Braudy’s seminal work The Frenzy of Renown traces fame, its mechanisms and its social meaning, starting with Alexander the Great’s widespread reputation and its basis in mythological comparisons and moving on to figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Hitler (New York, 1986). Similarly, Joseph Roach’s It explores charisma in social contexts ranging from Restoration England to modern-day America (Ann Arbor, MI, 2007). Most scholars agree that modern celebrity requires mass media, and that, though celebrity has roots in the fame of earlier centuries, it took off (depending on the author) between 1750 and 1850. The difference in starting point depends on what types of media and consumerism the author deems necessary for the construction of celebrity. On the earlier side, see Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke, 2007)Google Scholar; Mole, , ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Lilti, Antoine, Figures Publiques: l’Invention de la Célébrité, 1750–1850 (Paris, 2014)Google Scholar; Kahan, Jeffrey, Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Bethlehem, PA, 2010)Google Scholar; and Metzner, Paul, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar. Eva Giloi and Edward Berenson place the advent of celebrity in the 1860s, with the development of mass media due to steam-presses and faster communication via telegraph and railway: Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-century Europe (New York, 2013). For work on more modern celebrity, see Marcus, Sharon and Rotella, Carlo, Celebrities and Publics in the Internet Era (Durham, NC, 2015)Google Scholar and Petersen, Anne Helen, Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema (New York, 2014)Google Scholar.

12 On the formation of the British upper classes, see Cannadine, David, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, 1994)Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1996)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 12. On the social composition of opera-goers, see Hall-Witt, Jennifer, ‘Reforming the Aristocracy: Opera and Elite Culture, 1780–1860’, in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge, 2003), 235–236 Google Scholar.

13 Mandler, Peter, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Stewart, Robert, Party and Politics, 1830–1852 (Basingstoke, 1996), 26–27 Google Scholar.

14 On these middling classes, see Wahrman, Dror, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar.

15 Hall-Witt notes that gossip in memoirs and letters shifted to focus on performers, rather than on audience members, because seating arrangements lost their significance. Seats were filled by purchasing tickets from booksellers and outside ticket agents, and new audience members were brought in. Hall-Witt, ‘Reforming the Aristocracy’, 232–3.

16 Hall-Witt describes the opera house as offering ‘a dual attraction for the socially ambitious; an aura of exclusivity combined with opportunities for access to the elite’: ‘Reforming the Aristocracy’, 229. See also Hall-Witt, , Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham, NC, 2007)Google Scholar, and ‘Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London’, in Music and British Culture: 1785–1914, ed. Christina Bashford and Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford, 2006), 121–44.

17 For criticism of aristocratic culture as morally bankrupt and exclusive, see Copeland, Edward, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 2015)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3; and Adburgham, Alison, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life & Literature from 1814–1840 (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Copeland interprets most silver fork novels as vehicles for liberal Whig propaganda, but he also comments on the frequency of dandies as untrustworthy and immoral influences.

18 On Grisi’s jealousy, see Kaufman, ‘The Grisi-Viardot Controversy’, in which he primarily cites evidence from The Musical World and The Times. On divas and charity in general, see Marvin, Roberta Montemorra, ‘Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid-Victorian London’, and Hilary Poriss, ‘Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford, 2012), 21–41, 42–60 Google Scholar. The Westminster Hospital made Grisi an honorary life governor in 1838, and the minutes (as reported in the Athenaeum) ask that ‘the thanks of this Board be communicated to her for her gratuitous and invaluable service’: ‘Westminster Hospital’, The Athenaeum (8 September 1838). On Grisi as a genius, The Spectator claimed that as Elvira in I Puritani ‘even Bellini could not damp the ardour of her genius; but, when she achieved a triumph of expression, it was not by his help, but in spite of him’: ‘Bellini’s New Opera’, The Spectator (23 May 1835). The New Monthly Magazine disagreed on this matter, however, and argued that though Giuditta Pasta was a genius, Grisi was a pale imitation: ‘Giulietta Grisi’, The New Monthly Magazine (September 1835). According to The Musical World, ‘The singing portion was all up hill work to Grisi; but she triumphed over the poverty of the composer’s imaginings, and as actress soared to the utmost pinnacle of tragic fame.’ ‘Theatrical Summary’, The Musical World (7 June 1838). Grace Kehler reads this emphasis on labour disciplining the unruly voice as an appeal to middle-class desires for sincere acting: ‘Performing the British Nation; Foreign Opera and the Prima Donna’, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 8 (2002), 14. This hard-working image contrasted with that of Grisi as capricious and vain: in 1845, The Spectator, which in general supported Grisi and her fellow Italians, reported that the Paris Tribunal of Commerce had fined the singer because she refused to play a secondary role in Il matrimonio segreto. ‘Miscellaneous’, The Spectator (3 May 1845). ‘Lazy’ and ‘capricious’, meanwhile, are terms also related to ‘natural’, which is taken here to mean supposedly authentic behaviour untamed by civilisation. Regarding the idea of ‘natural’ and ‘excessive’ acting in the Parisian reception of Malibran, see Manning, Céline Frigau, ‘Playing with Excess: Maria Malibran as Clari at the Théâtre Italien’, in Art, Theatre, and Opera in Paris, 1750–1850: Exchanges and Tensions, ed. Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley (Burlington, VT, 2014)Google Scholar. Published gossip emphasised the diva’s status as a foreigner in English society and on the scandals that arose from Grisi’s activities. The Evening Standard, among other journals, reported on the duel between Lord Castlereagh and Grisi’s husband, Count Gérard de Melcy with almost gleeful disgust: ‘Notes of the Month – July 1838’, The Monthly Chronicle (July 1838), 95.

19 Richard Salmon uses the term ‘parasocial relations’ to describe the celebrity of literary stars in the 1830s: ‘Lionism … may be conceived as a model of face-to-face intimacy informed and reshaped by parasocial dimensions: neither a fully interpersonal oral encounter nor a relationship of physical separation, it stands somewhere between these two communicational strategies.’ Salmon, Richard, ‘The Physiognomy of the Lion: Encountering Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge, 2009), 68 Google Scholar.

20 Willis did not name names, so although the society hostess and her faux pas might have been gossiped knowledge during the 1830s, the modern historian cannot identify the culprit. Nathaniel Parker Willis, ‘London’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (8 July and 5 August 1837).

21 Carolina Naldi married the Count de Sparre in 1823, Henrietta Sontag married Count Rossi in 1828, and Giulia Grisi married the Count de Melcy in 1836. In general, however, singers were much more likely to marry other theatrical professionals. For more details on the marriages of opera singers in France during the July Monarchy, see White, Kimberly, ‘Female Singers and the Maladie Morale in Parisian Lyric Theaters, 1830–1850’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 16 (2012), 57–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though White focuses on the Parisian moral context, many of the singers that White discusses appeared in London as well.

22 Willis, ‘London’, The Mirror (5 August 1837), 94.

23 Willis, ‘London’, 95.

24 Willis, ‘London’, 94.

25 Willis, ‘London’, 96.

26 See, for example, The Athenaeum (22 February 1840); The Court and Lady’s Magazine (February 1840), 154 and The Musical World (4 September 1845).

27 For more regarding attitudes towards foreign singers in nineteenth-century Britain, see Marvin, Roberta Montemorra, ‘Verdian Opera in the Victorian Parlor’, in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, ed. Marvin and Hilary Poriss (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar; Marvin, ‘Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid-Victorian London’; Davies, J.Q., ‘“Veluti in Speculum”: The Twilight of the Castrato’, Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2005), 271–301 Google Scholar; Kehler, , ‘Performing the British Nation’, 1–22 Google Scholar.

28 ‘Drama’, The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (27 May 1837).

29 ‘Management of the Italian Opera’, The Monthly Chronicle (June 1838), 180.

30 ‘Notes of the Month – July 1838’, The Monthly Chronicle (July 1838), 95.

31 ‘Notes of the Month – July 1838’, 95.

32 For the Standard’s reputation, see The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, ed. Dennis Griffiths (Basingstoke, 1993), 560. Regarding the liberal reputation of The Monthly Chronicle, its editors, and its contributors, see Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (London, 2009), 290, 347–8, 444.

33 Mandler, , Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, 67–74 Google Scholar.

34 Stewart, , Party and Politics, 6–7 Google Scholar.

35 Isabella, Maurizio, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford, 2009), 113–14, 123–4, 128, 210 Google Scholar; Sutcliffe, Marcella Pellegrino, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats: A Long Connection (London, 2014), 31–57 Google Scholar.

36 As Maura O’Connor has put it, ‘Some sympathizers were motivated by humanitarian concerns, and still others were moved by liberal foreign-policy ideals and the perceived role of England leading other Europeans to self-determination’: O’Connor, , The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York, 1998), 60 Google Scholar.

37 For the eighteenth-century roots of such ideas, see Aspden, Suzanne, ‘“An Infinity of Factions”: Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Undoing of Society’, Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (1997), 1–19 Google Scholar.

38 A typical description of a gathering can be found in ‘The Fete at Devonshire House’, Morning Post (4 June 1832). A modern embellishment of soirées during the 1830s can be found in Loretta Chase’s ‘Dressmakers’ series in which she uses excerpts from gossip papers as chapter headings. Chase, Loretta, Silk is for Seduction (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

39 Though gossip frequently deals with ephemeral and seemingly unimportant subjects, Spacks argues that this attention to specific detail ‘implicitly acknowledges that conventional triviality may allow the articulation of intense human feeling’. Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Gossip (New York, 2012), 14 Google Scholar.

40 Puckett, Kent, Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008), 6, 10 Google Scholar.

41 Susan Rutherford uses the diaries and letters of individuals to great effect in her presentation of the diversity of ways in which women (both characters and audience members) engaged with social and political issues in Verdi’s Italy: Verdi, Opera, Women (Cambridge, 2013).

42 All the journals are available to readers located in the United Kingdom at www.queenvictoriasjournals.org.

43 Roland Barthes addresses this phenomenon when discussing Stendhal: ‘on this erotic promotion of what is commonly taken for an insignificant detail, we recognise a constitutive element of transference (or of passion): partiality’. Obsessive attention to insignificant observations, and repetition of these observations, all help convey the underlying emotion that the writer or speaker has for the object or experience. Barthes, Roland, ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1989), 297 Google Scholar.

44 Entry of 22 May 1835 (emphases all Victoria’s own).

45 Her untimely death in the fall of 1836 only added to this reputation; see Davies, James Q., Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley, 2014), 89 Google Scholar.

46 For an analysis of Queen Victoria’s diaries in the context of representational practices, see Steinitz, Rebecca, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Homans, Margaret, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar.

47 By 1835, the aria was so popular that two of the guests at dinner with Princess Victoria performed it for her. On 2 May, Victoria heard Grisi in Otello for the first time, and wrote that ‘She personates the meek and ill-treated Desdemona in a most perfect and touching manner. [...] The song which Desdemona sings when she first comes on in the first act, which begins “Stanca di più combattere”, and which Grisi sung most exquisitely!’ A year later (on 14 May 1836) she would call ‘Stanca di più’ her ‘favourite song’. On the use of the aria in Bellini’s opera, see Davies, J.Q., ‘Gautier’s “Diva”: The First French Uses of the Word’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna, ed. Cowgill and Poriss, 123–146 Google Scholar.

48 On Pasta’s use of an aria from La donna del lago in Otello, see Gossett, Philip, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006), 210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of Adelaide Tosi’s choice of numbers by two different composers and the continued life of Nicolini’s ‘Or che son vicino a te’ see Poriss, Hilary, ‘Making Their Way through the World: Italian One-Hit Wonders’, 19th-Century Music 24 (2001), 197–224 Google Scholar.

49 On insertion arias and what they can tell us about singers, see especially Poriss, Hilary, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

50 On the uses of souvenir scores and domesticating opera music in Victorian England, see Montemorra Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera in the Victorian Parlor’.

51 Willis, ‘London’, 95.

52 ‘Stanca di più combattere’ (London: Mori & Lavenu, [c.1830]); Marco Aurelio Marliani, ‘Stanca di più combattere, Aria – Introduced and Sung by Madlle Giulietta Grisi – in the Opera of Otello [by Rossini]’ (London: Lonsdale & Mills, [1834?]).

53 Charles Czerny, ‘Gems à La Grisi et Persiani’, in Impressions de l’Opéra: Trois Fantaisies Brillantes (London, n.d.). The differences in Czerny’s arrangement are probably due to the fact that he composed in a solo piano idiom, whereas the first two were arranged as piano-vocal scores. Robert Nicolas Charles Bochsa, ‘Gems à La Malibran. The Favorite Airs Sung by Made. Malibran ... Arranged for the Harp & Piano Forte, with (Ad Lib.) Accompt for Flute and Violoncello, by N. C. Bochsa. [Parts.]’ (London, [1830]).

54 Bochsa, ‘L’amo Ah L’amo’, in La Loge à l’Opéra Italien (London, n.d.).

55 ‘Advertisements’, The Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c: For the Year 1835 (26 December 1835).

56 The miniature almanac was popular in the 1830s in France and Germany. The Almanac also belongs to a tradition of British gift books or literary annuals, and musical albums, though it is the first British miniature almanac that I am aware of. The British literary annual was first introduced in 1823, and the musical annual in 1829. See Rappoport, Jill, ‘Buyer Beware: The Gift Poetics of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 58 (2004), 441–473 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, James Q., ‘Julia’s Gift: The Social Life of Scores, c.1830’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131 (2006), 287–309 Google Scholar.

57 Francesco Izzo calls this genre of poem ‘verses of permanence’. Though Izzo discusses commemorative and laudatory poetry mainly in the context of the Italian journal Teatri arti e letteratura, his categories and the different approaches to celebrity culture and events that they represent are still valid in an English context. Francesco Izzo, ‘Poetry for Female Singers in Teatri arti e letteratura’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna, ed. Cowgill and Poriss, 3–20.

58 According to poems in various editions of the Almanac, human memories were the most enduring tribute. The poem for Sir Walter Scott claims marble gravestones and laurel trees are unnecessary for remembering him, because his ‘shrine is in our heart!’ Similarly, Mozart’s music is claimed to linger after his death, and though impossible to honour him (and others) enough, we should ‘let fame shed its long sunshine round their name’. Beethoven’s music provides his shrine, while Goethe’s poem claims for him both universality of time and place; all people recognise themselves in his writing and all times will gather to sing his praises. Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, The English Bijou Almanac (London, 1838 and 1839)Google Scholar, n.p.

59 The English Bijou Almanac (London, 1836), n.p. Malibran’s portrait and poem were accompanied by a miniature piece of music, entitled ‘Malibran’s Farewell’, which was a simplified version of the final rondo from Balfe’s Maid of Artois. The portrait proved so popular that it was republished the following year and available separately for sale in the same Lilliputian proportions. I discuss this tribute to Malibran in ‘Malibran in Miniature’, in Opera Outside the Box, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Roger Parker (Routledge, forthcoming). Grisi’s poem was published in 1838 and Pasta’s in 1840, after a change in the authorship of the almanac: The English Bijou Almanac (London, 1838); Lover, S., The English Bijou Almanac (London, 1840)Google Scholar.

60 An early example of this comparison can be found in The New Monthly Magazine, which argued that though Giuditta Pasta was a genius, Grisi ‘was yet but a miniature copy, in which the essential characteristics of great style were, in a considerable degree, lost’: ‘Giulietta Grisi’, The New Monthly Magazine (September 1835) 78–81. This article was republished three years later in Felix Fax, ‘Portfolio Papers’, The Torch (23 June 1838), 125–7.

61 ‘Mme Malibran’, ‘Pasta’ and ‘Giulietta Grisi’ – even their names as given as the titles of poems imply different treatment. Madame Malibran is clearly foreign, while Pasta does not even need a title. Grisi, however, did need the specificity of a first name, as she had a sister and at least one cousin working in theatres across England and Europe. Using the diminutive form of Grisi’s name, ‘Giulietta’, rather than the more typical Giulia or Julia, supports the lighter nature of her poem, just as its use as advertisement for ‘Stanca di più’ supports the image of Grisi as delicate, feminine and easily possessable.

62 ‘Such experiments with the scale of writing as we find in micrographia and the miniature book exaggerate the divergent relation between the abstract and the material nature of the sign’. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, 1984), 43 Google Scholar.

63 Stewart, On Longing, 41.

64 1 shilling 6 pence in 1830 ≈ £4.95 in 2016; 12 shillings in 1830 ≈ £51.58 in 2016. These are very rough estimates. Currency converter from the National Archives: http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/results.asp#mid, and www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/.

65 ‘This ingenious and tasteful miniature; which Sir E. Bulwer happily called the humming-bird of our gay annuals, has, upon that hint, been mounted in a manner extremely beautiful for presentation to the Royal Family, in compliment to the christening of the Prince of Wales. Her Majesty’s copy is deposited on the breast of a white rose of mother-of-pearl, with its tiny glass like a dew-drop in the rainbow by its side. A humming-bird is sipping from between the rose-leaves. The sprig is of silver gilt. Prince Albert’s copy is on another rose, with different foliage –in allusion to Germanic national emblems. That for the Duchess of Kent is another variety. For the Princess Royal, the Bijou is suspended, like a fruit, on a golden pine-tree; the glass, her own portrait (which is one in the publication), and the lines accompanying it, elegantly framed, forming other fruits hanging on each side. The infant Prince’s copy is laid on an exquisitely carved cabinet of ivory, surmounted by the plume of Wales. The whole are executed with extraordinary skill, and stand a few inches high on velvet-covered pedestals enriched with various ciphers and devices, and covered with bellglasses. Of all the pretty things got up for this gratifying occasion – though some may be more gorgeous and costly – there will not be any (we venture to predict) more charming or appropriate than Mr. Schloss’s well-imagined, and loyal, and patriotic tribute.’ ‘Varieties’, The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c (22 January 1842).

66 On cultures of female friendship, see Marcus, Sharon, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar.

67 The Mirror is cited, along with other journals, in the 1839 edition of the Bijou Almanac, i.

68 The English Bijou Almanac, i.

69 For an exploration of the French culture of friendship and gift-giving, see Sarah Esther Horowitz, ‘States of Intimacy: Friendship and the Remaking of French Political Elites, 1815–1848’, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley (2008).