In late 1815, Jane Austen was nursing her brother Henry through a fever in his London house. Henry was also being attended by a royal physician who knew that the anonymous author of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park was his patient’s sister. The physician delightedly informed Austen that the Prince Regent was a lover of her books and he had taken the liberty of telling him that Miss Austen was in London – and the Prince had asked his librarian, Mr Clarke, to ‘wait upon’ the author and ‘pay her every possible attention’. Mr Clarke accordingly invited Miss Austen to visit the Prince’s library at Carlton House.
As it happened, Miss Austen’s views on the Regent were clear: she did not like him. and wondered at his wife Caroline ‘calling herself "attached & affectionate" to a Man whom she must detest” The library was a different matter, however.
During the tour Clarke mentioned that if Miss Austen had another novel being published,. she ‘was at liberty’ to dedicate it to the prince. At that moment, Emma was about to be published, and after she got home, Austen wrote asking Clarke if it was now ‘incumbent’ on her to inscribe the work to the prince: ‘I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful’. Clarke wrote back that it was certainly not ‘incumbent’ but he was happy to confirm permission: ‘And I also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in some future work the habits of life, and character, and enthusiasm of a clergyman, who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, who should be something like Beattie’s Minstrel – ‘Silent when glad . . .demurely sad’. Clarke seems not to have noticed that most clergymen in Jane Austen’s novels are suspect. Austen wrote back: ‘I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not.’
An unperturbed Clarke replied with yet another suggestion: ‘an historical romance illustrative of the august House of Cobourg would just now be very interesting,’ Austen responded: ‘I could not. . .write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life. . .I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other’.
What Happened Next
As the novelist Reginald Hill has pointed out, Emma is one of the great English detective stories, and this extends even to the dedication. Austen dedicated Emma to the Prince Regent, but in such a manner that many readers must have got the joke: her repeated use of the words ‘His Royal Highness’, as has been pointed out, may well have been designed to remind readers of Caroline’s use of the same words to address her husband. When the Regent was eventually crowned George IV in 1821, England’s best boxers were employed to keep Caroline at bay (see 1810: Tom Molineaux fights Tom Cribb) and the public sang: ‘Most gracious queen, we thee implore/ To go away and sin no more; /Or if that effort be too great, /To go away at any rate’.