The last two posts at the blog have told the story of the Worsley scandal. This post explores some of the press reactions to the case and thinks about what sort of emotions it produced it eighteenth century audiences and how such scandals shaped popular opinion. The significance of scandal, and particularly sexual scandal, to shaping public opinion in the eighteenth century has not gone unnoticed. The historian, Anna Clark demonstrates convincingly how the high profile sexual scandals that fascinated eighteenth-century audiences relied not just on a prurient interest in people’s private lives, but on their role in challenging the political consensus and providing an issue around which a political community could form. In this way, sexual scandal became integral to defining the values that the eighteenth-century public held as important, and in the latter part of the century, in creating an anti-aristocratic ‘other’ to define itself in opposition to. In an eighteenth-century context, the public explored these issues through a mushrooming press, including newspapers, pamphlets, prints and other ephemera. Underlying these types of discussion is recognition that these reports were designed to act on the emotions of the reader, rousing the reader to demand political change, to feel moral outrage, and/or stirring sexual desire. Yet, the role emotions played in these processes have been largely ignored or taken for granted.
Worsley v Bissett is a particularly famous case, both in the months and years after the trial in 1782, and today. In some ways, it was a fairly typical Crim Con; an aristocratic couple, running in the same circles as the libertine Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire’s set, found themselves in court after the wife eloped with her lover. Not only was this not the first case of its kind, many of the witnesses at the trial later found themselves witnesses in other Crim Cons and at least one was the subject of a similar lawsuit a few years later. There were two features, however, that particularly captured the public’s imagination. The first was that Lady Worsley gave her previous lovers permission to testify to their relationship. This admission was scandalous because it was made during an era where women’s sexual passivity, as well as the ideology of domesticity, was rising to cultural dominance, but it was an admission made possible because older constructions of women as sexually-aggressive and lustful still existed in the cultural imagination. The second scandal associated with the trial was Sir Richard Worsley’s complicity in his wife’s affairs. Not only had he clearly known about her affairs, but it became clear that he was a voyeur who received pleasure from watching his wife with other men.
The newspaper accounts of the case did not offer a justification for publication, nor did they necessarily use overly emotive or moralising language. However, they did select the most salacious details of the case to discuss, and in reporting either summaries of direct speech or the dialogue itself, they captured the ‘emotion’ of the trial. So for example, the Caledonian Mercury reported the Attorney General’s observations on ‘particularly the ingratitude of the defendant, who debauched the wife of his friend’, in comparison to the plaintiff, who had received the defendant ‘with all the warmth of genuine friendship, but had upon every occasion, shewn him the most disinterested marks of esteem and attention.’ This is, of course, loaded language designed to convey the depth of the wrong committed, by asking the listener/ reader to imagine the hurt the plaintiff felt due to the betrayal of his friend and damage to his marriage. Similarly, through reporting the dialogue of Lord Deerhurst’s testimony and his performed discomfort around answering questions on his sexual relationship with Lady Worsley, where he twice ‘appealed to the judge’ over how to answer a question, the newspaper report captured the awkwardness that the interrogation created. In this way, without overtly telling the reader what to feel, the report creates a sense of discomfort in the reader, at the same time as it conveys what is clearly a salacious, perhaps even titillating tale.
Even without overt moralising, the creation of discomfort in the reader, acts as an emotional warning that something is wrong. And, it is clear that Crim Con cases made people uncomfortable. Three months after the Worsley trial, the Hampshire Chronicle noted whilst reporting on the Newton divorce that ‘There was a river scene much more heightened than Lady Worsley’s bath; and a riding party, that made the oldest Peer in the House tremble with shame.’ Similarly, during Howard v Bingham in 1794, the judge, Lord Kenyon, noted that: ‘I do not wish to push this case any further, by producing more evidence which must distress every man who hears it, and particularly those who are nearly connected with the parties’. Crim Con cases then were anticipated to create a sense of shame and even distress in the moral observer, and the general public was presumed to be a moral observer.
At the same time, there is this seeming contradiction within these accounts of the salacious. The depictions of sex, even if heavily edited to disguise the most explicit sexual acts, have been described as a form of erotica, and certainly, if we look at the many prints of these cases, it is often difficult to distinguish between them and those within popular erotica. These cases rely on both actual acts and descriptions of transgressive sexual behaviour that seem to suggest a moral divide within society. This celebration of sex seems to offer a libertine challenge to the conservative moral logic of the Crim Con trial itself. This is perhaps most evident in the compendiums of trials for adultery, that justify their existence with statements like: ‘the publication may perhaps effect what the law cannot: the transactions of the adulterer and the adultress will, by being thus publickly circulated, preserve others from the like crimes, from the fear of shame, when the fear of punishment may have but little force’, but reduce their cases to the juiciest of witness statements, removing the moralising statements of lawyers and judges in favour of descriptions of sexual deviance.
Now a simple explanation for this seeming contradiction is that the publisher just wants to find a justification for selling erotica in a society where that is unacceptable, but presumably where there are either enough libertines or hypocrites to make it worthwhile. However, I’d like to suggest that we underestimate the significance of voyeurism, and its associated feelings of titillation and desire, to social control. Voyeurism is an absolutely essential feature of both the Crim Con trial (where spying on illicit sex is de rigeur) and, as Sarah Toulalan argues, to early modern erotica. Whilst the eighteenth century is seen as period with a growing emphasis on privacy, court cases consistently belie such attempts, as servants line up to testify to ‘private moments’. Moreover, as the quote above suggests, it is essential for the good of society that private sins are made public. The uncovering of deviance displays the corruption of the elite household; it uncovers hypocrisy; and through rending the illusion of privacy, it encourages virtue. At the same time, the eighteenth-century public understood that voyeurism was sexually titillating. The unseen observer, looking through a window or hiding under a table, was a common feature of erotic prints, while erotic texts were written in such a way that the reader imagined him or herself as a voyeur, rather than active participant. This linkage meant that the titillation and sexual desire created in the reader of the press coverage of Crim Con suits did not necessarily negate its potential to also distress or shame. Indeed, if we move from the social constructionist to the psychological, the idea that such titillation may itself be a shaming mechanism is not without merit in a context where shame is an observed emotional response to such cases.
Katie Barclay is interested in how the press creates emotions in its readership and how such feelings lead people to respond. She is a historian at the University of Adelaide.
