Haywood’s Tabloid Journalism: Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage and the Cresswell Bigamy Case

Abstract

... this long, tedious, and to all but the concerned, most trifling Tale, which you have forced me to make publick . . .-Cresswell, A Narrative of the Affair (1747)Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage, is a relatively unknown novel by Eliza Haywood, and perhaps deservedly so. Aesthetically, it's not that good. It is too long, its climax is a drawn-out epistolary correspondence between the main characters, and it is frustratingly slow and repetitive. Most Haywood scholars are familiar with its title from Thomas Lockwood's article about Hay- wood's 1748 pamphlet, A Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, Esq., for which Haywood and her publisher, George Woodfall, were taken into custody for printing sedi- tious libel. Five months after the appearance of the Goring pamphlet, Wood- fall commissioned Haywood to write Dalinda (published 1749). Like the pamphlet, Dalinda may be read as a politically motivated work, revealing Hay- wood 's Jacobite sympathies because of its interest in broken vows and oaths, or at the very least it exhibits her anti-Whig sentiments. This essay, however, ex- plores the novel from a different perspective-that of its relation to scandal fiction and the popular press. Just as A Letter from H- G-g, Esq. uses the pamphlet form to imitate the secret, intercepted correspondence of one of the Young Pretender's closest aides, Dalinda, too, derives from a popular scan- dal, purporting to reveal insider information.Kathryn King notes in the Epilogue to her Political Biography of Eliza Hay- wood that Haywood's scandal fiction of the mid-1720s-works like Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724) and The Secret History of Caramania (1727)-takes the classical satiric impulse to expose folly, vice, knavery, [and] corruption and in effect 'tabloidizes' it, serving up age-old human misbehaviour with a mixture of moral outrage, sex, and sensationalism that has much in common with today's tabloid exposure of wrongdoing in the private spaces of public (198). But in Dalinda, Haywood reverses her formula of the 1720s and serves up an already over-publicized story about private people- Thomas Estcourt Cresswell and Elizabeth Scrope-and their bigamous mar- riage. The main people in this media event had already been tabloidized : in letters to The General Evening Post in 1747, in entries in The Gentleman's Maga- zine under the heading Conjugal Treachery detected, and in a pamphlet war between Cresswell and Scrope themselves. When Haywood 's novel fictional- ized the scandalous case under assumed names, the story had already occupied the public's imagination for two years.So why would Haywood be interested in writing a story with which her readers were already so familiar? Her publisher may have been keen to cash in on the public's continuing infatuation with the scandal; but a closer look at Dalinda, and the print sources from which it is drawn, reveals that Haywood is engaging with more than the plot. Kathryn King writes that Conceivably [Haywood] hired by Leicester House [Opposition] to write the Goring pamphlet to help advance the cult of royalism (186). It is equally conceivable that she commissioned to write Dalinda-a story demonstrating the emp- tiness of spoken vows and written words-to advance the opposition's political agenda of focusing a critical eye on governmental corruption. Her novel em- phasizes the Scrope family's Whiggish greed that precipitates the clandestine marriage and bigamy plots. Haywood's narrator makes specific mention that the heroine of her piece, Dalinda, was trained up from her Infancy to love Money above all Things, and had besides, a Tincture of Avarice in her Nature (Dalinda 62). Culturally and politically, the novel can be connected with the debates over what would become, in 1753, Hardwicke's Marriage Act, purport- edly designed to protect women against the consequences of clandestine mar- riage but really designed to protect the propertied elite. …