Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

A Publishing History

Sally Dugan BARONESS ORCZY’S THE SCARLEt PIMpERNEL Ashgate Studies in Publishing History

Offering publishing histories of well-known works of literature, this series is intended as a resource for book historians and for other specialists whose scholarship and teaching are enhanced by access to a work’s publication and reception history. Features include but are not limited to sections on the text’s composition, production and marketing, contemporary reception, textual issues, subsequent editions, and archival resources. The series is designed to allow for flexibility in presentation, to accommodate differences in each work’s history. Proposals on works whose publishing histories are particularly significant for what they reveal about a writer, a cultural milieu, or the history of print culture are especially welcome. Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel A Publishing History

SALLY DUGAN Birkbeck, University of London, UK First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dugan, Sally. Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: a publishing history. – (Ashgate studies in publishing history) 1. Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness, 1865–1947 – Characters – Sir Percy Blakeney. 2. Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness, 1865–1947 – Adaptations. 3. Blakeney, Percy, Sir (Fictitious character) I. Title II. Series 823.9’12-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dugan, Sally. Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: a publishing history / by Sally Dugan. p. cm. — (Ashgate studies in publishing history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2717-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness, 1865–1947. Scarlet Pimpernel 2. Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness, 1865–1947—Adaptations. 3. Blakeney, Percy, Sir (Fictitious character) I. Title. PR6029.R25S2834 2012 823’.912—dc23 2012010019

ISBN 9781409427179 (hbk) ISBN 9781315568720 (ebk) To David, for putting up with this elusive third person in our marriage. This page has been left blank intentionally Contents

List of Figures ix Preface xiii Acknowledgements xv List of Abbreviations xvii

Introduction: ‘The Baroness Orczy’, Englishness and the Scarlet Pimpernel 1 1 From Red Carnation to Scarlet Pimpernel 37 2 The Scarlet Pimpernel on Stage 69 3 Champion of Empire or Swashbuckling Hero? Marketing the Myth in Print, 1899–1939 109 4 The Dandy at War: The Scarlet Pimpernel and Print Culture, 1914–1940 147 5 Adaptations, Nostalgia and Wartime Morale 181 6 Re-Inventing the Scarlet Pimpernel, Post 1947 201 Conclusion 231 Appendix A: The Daily Express and ‘The Sign of the Shamrock’ 235 Appendix B:‘The Sign of the Shamrock’ as an Apprentice Piece for The Scarlet Pimpernel 237 Appendix C: Hodder & Stoughton: ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel Series’ (1913) 239 Appendix D: The Scarlet Pimpernel Short Stories 241 Appendix E: Orczy’s Publishing History: The Scarlet Pimpernel in Context 243 Appendix F: Hodder & Stoughton Yellow Jacket Two-Shilling Paper Series: The First Dozen 251 Appendix G: Select List of Manuscripts Relating to Orczy, Listed by Location 253

Bibliography of Works Cited 257 Index 287 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures

I.1 Dust jacket of Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1913]). Princeton University Library. 4

I.2 Cover of sixpenny paper edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton [1913]). By kind permission of Monash University Library Rare Books Collection. 4

I.3 The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Folio Society, 1997). Binding illustration © Lucy Weller. By kind permission of the Folio Society. 6

I.4 The Scarlet Pimpernel (New York: Random House, 2002). Book cover © 2002 by Modern Library. By permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House Inc. 6

I.5 Manuscript page of The Scarlet Pimpernel. By kind permission of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums and A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Sara Orczy Barstow-Brown. 7

I.6 Sketch, 17 June 1908, p. 301. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark LD52NPL. 9

1.1 Orczy, ‘There’s Many a Slip’ (1894) Bookman, 44 (1913) p. 205. Senate House Library, University of London. By permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Sara Orczy Barstow-Brown. 42

1.2 ‘La Rue des Vieilles Écoles’ from Robida’s Vieux Paris, 1900. Paris Exhibition souvenir postcard. By kind permission of Laurent Antoine LeMog. http://lemog.fr. 58

1.3 La Famille Royale amenée au Temple’, Robida, Paris de Siècle en Siècle (Paris: La Librarie Illustrée, 1895), p. 137. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 10173.f.5. 60

2.1 James Gillray, ‘Petit souper at la Parisienne; – or – A Family of Sans-Culottes refreshing, after the fatigues of the day’. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 74 x Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

2.2 Francis Barnard, ‘Carton on the Scaffold’, from Lyceum Theatre, The Only Way: A Tale of Two Cities. Adapted by Freeman Wills from Charles Dickens’ Novel. Produced at the Lyceum Theatre, 16 February 1899 by Martin Harvey. (London: Nassau Press, 1899) [Souvenir of the 100th performance], [n.p.]. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 1874.b.5. 82

2.3 Julia Neilson as Lady Blakeney, Play Pictorial, 5 (1905), p. 137. 86

2.4 Fred Terry as Sir Percy Blakeney, Play Pictorial, 5 (1905), p. 140. 87

2.5 Sir Percy Blakeney in disguise at the opening scene of The Scarlet Pimpernel, New Theatre, London, Play Pictorial, 5 (1905), p. 135. 94

2.6. Horace Hodges as Chauvelin, Play Pictorial, 5 (1905), p. 149. 99

3.1 Dust jacket of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Greening’s Colonial Library (London: Greening, 1907). By kind permission of Monash University Library Rare Books Collection. 112

3.2 Paperback edition of The Elusive Pimpernel (London: Hutchinson, [1920]), with the price altered by hand from one shilling to one shilling and sixpence. By kind permission of Monash University Library Rare Books Collection. 114

3.3 Advertisement for the Popular Edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel in programme for ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, New Theatre, 16 May 1907. © V & A Images, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 117

3.4 Dust jacket of I Will Repay (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913). © Princeton University Library. 122

3.5 Sixpenny paperback edition of I Will Repay (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1920]). By kind permission of Monash University Library Rare Books Collection. 123

3.6 Cover of Grand Magazine, June 1921. © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Shelfmark per.2705 d.174. 130

3.7 Illustration by A.C. Michael for ‘Out of the Jaws of Death’, in Princess Mary’s Gift Book (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), facing p. 108. By kind permission of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums. 134 List of Figures xi

3.8 H.M. Brock, ‘He bowed very low and kissed her hand’, from the illustrated edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Greening, 1905). 135

3.9 Dust jacket of sixpenny edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Greening, 1909). © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Shelfmark 2542 e.830. 137

3.10 Dust jacket of ninepenny Yellow Jacket edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton [n.d.]). Princeton University Library. 139

3.11 Dust jacket of an omnibus edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930). Princeton University Library. 140

3.12 Dust jacket of Yellow Jacket edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel featuring Leslie Howard (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [c.1934]). Mary Evans Picture Library. 141

3.13 Dust jacket of The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Cassell, 1919). © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Shelfmark 2542.e.1424. By kind permission of Orion Books. 144

3.14 Dust jacket of Lord Tony’s Wife (New York: Doran, [1917]). Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 145

4.1 Dust jacket of Mam’zelle Guillotine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940). By kind permission of Leonard Shoup Books. www.leonardshoup.com. 179

6.1 Cover of The Elusive Pimpernel (Hutchinson, [1950]). Reproduced by kind permission of the Random House Group Ltd. 203

6.2 Dust jacket of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950). 205

6.3 Cover of Mam’zelle Guillotine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950). 208

6.4 Cover of Eldorado (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1960]). 215

6.5 Cover of Eldorado (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1952). 216

6.6 Cover of The Scarlet Pimpernel (New York: Pyramid Books, [1960]). 218 This page has been left blank intentionally Preface

This book covers the Scarlet Pimpernel’s manifestations in a wide variety of genres; in order to limit confusion, I have referred to The Scarlet Pimpernel in italics only when discussing the novel, play or film. I have used plain font when referring to the Scarlet Pimpernel as a series of books or films, as a fictional character and as a cultural phenomenon. Following Orczy’s own preferences, I have used the Hungarian version of Christian names, i.e. Emmuska rather than Emma, and Bodog, rather than Felix for her father. Her husband’s name, Montagu, is spelt without an additional e, although it is mis-spelt in many sources. This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements

My work has been made possible through the generosity of Birkbeck, University of London, in providing a research studentship. I would also like formally to acknowledge the assistance of a grant from the University of London Central Research Fund; this enabled me to consult invaluable manuscript sources at the Harry Ransom Center, Texas. I would like to thank Birkbeck, University of London, for providing such a stimulating environment and supportive research community. Michael Slater’s inspirational teaching on Dickens and the Victorians set in train an interest in nationalism and popular culture. I owe a debt to two supervisors: Adriana Craciun, now of University of California, Riverside, for having faith in the project and for sharing her understanding of gender critical theory and cultural representations of the French Revolution; Laurel Brake, for opening up a variety of new approaches, for meticulously overseeing innumerable drafts and for untiring enthusiasm. Suggestions from Mary Hammond and Charlotte Mitchell prompted fresh avenues of research and helped greatly in revisions of my text. However, if there are any remaining errors in this book, they are my responsibility. Students and staff at Birkbeck, Middlesex and Oxford Brookes Universities – where I have taught while working on this book – and colleagues at conferences where I have tried out some of these ideas have provided inspiration. I have particularly enjoyed exchanging ideas with Kate Macdonald and the growing community of scholars of the marginalised middlebrow. This has confirmed my conviction that the best-seller phenomenon is worthy of study. Ashgate’s anonymous reader provided constructive suggestions for manuscript improvement. Ann Donahue, my commissioning editor, and editor Seth Hibbert have been unfailingly supportive. Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 first appeared in ‘Anarchy and Magic: Film Versions of the Scarlet Pimpernel myth’, Peer English, Issue 5 (2010), and I am grateful to Ben Parsons on behalf of the University of Leicester for permission to reproduce these. Formal acknowledgement for permission to quote from manuscript material is also due to the executors of Orczy’s literary estate, AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Sara Orczy Barstow-Brown; to the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center; The University of Texas at Austin and the Wilson Library; The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Picture acknowledgements are given with the list of illustrations. I am grateful to the staff at Birkbeck, Senate House, Bodleian and Guildhall Libraries; the Sound Archive, Rare Books and Manuscript rooms of the British Library; the Victoria and Albert and University of Bristol Theatre Collections; the Royal Academy Archive and the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham. Patrice Fox at the Harry Ransom Center, Robin Davies Chen in the manuscripts xvi Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel department of UNC Chapel Hill and Richard Overell of the Matheson Library, Monash University all made me very welcome and provided expert professional assistance. Brian Gerrard and Richard Overell at Monash, Stephen Ferguson at Princeton and Eric Carr at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums were particularly helpful by e-mail. If a reminder were needed of the immense benefits of the Internet in humanities research, this was provided by correspondence with them, and with members of the SHARP and VICTORIA subscription lists. Finally, I would like to thank James Lewis for his creative playing-card style cover image, printed from an original linocut. This, for me, perfectly captures the Scarlet Pimpernel’s multi-faced personality and the enigma of his continuing appeal.

Sally Dugan Oxfordshire, July 2012 List of Abbreviations

BFI British Film Institute BL British Library DNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography EC The English Catalogue of Books LCP Lord Chamberlain’s Plays OED The Oxford English Dictionary Ransom MS – Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin UNC Watt MS – A.P. Watt Archive, General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill TLS Times Literary Supplement

Works by Orczy

Adventures The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel Band Sir Percy Leads the Band BB Beau Brocade Candlesticks The Emperor’s Candlesticks Cavalier The Laughing Cavalier Elusive The Elusive Pimpernel Hits Back Sir Percy Hits Back JTW ‘Jasper Tarkington’s Wife’ ‘Juliette’ ‘Juliette: A Tale of the Terror’ League The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel Links Links in the Chain of Life Lord Tony Lord Tony’s Wife Mam’zelle Mam’zelle Guillotine Repay I Will Repay Rosemary Pimpernel and Rosemary ‘Shamrock’ ‘The Sign of the Shamrock’ SP The Scarlet Pimpernel SPLW The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World. SP Play Orczy-Barstow, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903) SP Prompt Script Revised version of the 1903 play, in Bristol University Theatre Collection Way The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction ‘The Baroness Orczy’, Englishness and the Scarlet Pimpernel

The global success of film and musical versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel have ensured a place for this elusive hero in popular culture. His daring rescues are as much a part of the French Revolution as the howling mob and the toothless tricoteuses knitting at the foot of the guillotine. In many people’s imaginations, he is Zorro crossed with Superman, with a dash of eighteenth-century elegance. As the mild-mannered man who shows one face to the world, but is secretly a man of action, the Scarlet Pimpernel has spawned a race of hidden heroes. Yet to his creator, Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865–1947), ­he was something more: an English gentleman spreading English values among the benighted; an aristocrat rescuing aristocrats. Thus The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) can take its place alongside the many other British fin de siècle narratives that ‘pluck traditional aristocracy from the historical dustbin’.1 The mystery is why Orczy’s patrician imperialist crusader has not only survived the decline of the metanarratives surrounding his birth, but continues to enthral a multinational audience. Solving this mystery suggests ways in which popular historical fiction can be taken seriously, depicting consumers not as gullible victims of marketing but as transgressive ‘readers’ – in the widest possible sense – who can see beyond nationalistic and class bias. It also involves unlocking the story’s complex origins and uncovering the mythic tropes that have enabled the Scarlet Pimpernel to endure through the vicissitudes of publishing imperatives and the nightmare of history. The nationalistic concept of The Scarlet Pimpernel was a league of titled heroes, who hide bravery and devotion to the aristocratic cause in the French Revolution behind a foppish disguise. All are imagined as part of a glamorous set surrounding the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV), led by the dashing young Sir Percy Blakeney. In this book, for the first time, I trace the emergence of The Scarlet Pimpernel from two of Orczy’s short stories featuring plots against the Russian Tsar. The metamorphosis of her hero from Polish anarchist plotter to counter-revolutionary Englishman suggests a myth that transcends politics; it also indicates that a dialogue on questions of nationality forms an integral part of Orczy’s work. I chart this dialogue through the Scarlet Pimpernel’s first appearance on stage in 1903 and as a novel in 1905; through novels and short stories published up until 1940; through film, musical, even children’s ballet – and its reinvention in popular culture. The Scarlet Pimpernel’s ability to cross genres, and the way each sheds light on our understanding of the source text(s), makes Orczy’s creation an ideal study

1 Len Platt, Aristocracies of Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 39. 2 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel in adaptation. Given the remit of the Ashgate Publishing History series, I place particular emphasis on print culture. I demonstrate the vital role of the paratext 2 – especially where it highlights Orczy’s own aristocratic status – in creating the popular image of the Scarlet Pimpernel. I show how magazine packaging of Pimpernel stories, coupled with film versions, initiated a shift in emphasis from gallant English gentleman to pistol-wielding multinational hero. However, the overriding aim is to provide a nuanced picture of the trope of the Scarlet Pimpernel and this is only possible by bridging the boundaries of academic disciplines. Book historians tend to focus on The Scarlet Pimpernel as a publishing phenomenon, citing the volume of copies printed and the global reach of a novel that within two years of its first appearance had been translated into six European languages, and had reached the furthest corners of the British Empire.3 The stage play – which survives only in manuscript – is generally treated as an adjunct to the theatrical careers of its principal actors, Fred Terry and Julia Neilson.4 Few people under the age of 50 have read the original novels, but many will know of at least one TV or film version. The cinematic emphasis on spectacular action and glossy production values has led several critics to dismiss the original story as yet another costume drama. When it is asserted that, between 1900 and 1935, The Scarlet Pimpernel was part of a ‘turn from history as the generator of horror … to history as a lifestyle’, the limitations of genre-based criticism become clear.5 It is true that Orczy’s politicised message has become increasingly diluted on film; that does not make it retrospectively true of earlier versions, nor of The Scarlet Pimpernel’s first formulation on stage and in print. Perhaps partly because they are ideologically less contentious, Orczy’s detective stories have attracted more critical interest than her historical novels, particularly in the United States; in the Dictionary of Literary Biography she appears in the British Mystery Writers volume.6 Yet these stories represent a relatively small proportion of her output (see Appendix E). Reference books carry brief entries on The Scarlet Pimpernel, but rarely mention its 11 sequels.7 The centenary of its first

2 Gérard Genette, ‘Introduction’, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–13. 3 See for example, Kate Macdonald, ‘The Fiction of John Buchan, With Particular Reference to the Richard Hannay Novels’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, University College, 1991), p. 17, and pp. 352–6. 4 Orczy-Barstow, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903). BL Add MS 65665. LCP 1903/23. 5 Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 248. 6 Katherine Staples, ‘Emma, Baroness Orczy’, in British Mystery Writers, 1860– 1919, ed. by Bernard Bernstock and Thomas F. Stacey, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.70 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), pp. 229–34. 7 See for example, ‘Scarlet Pimpernel, The’, in Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter, eds, The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 353–4. This unsigned article mentions ‘several sequels’ (p. 354), but even the two that fall within the Edwardian timeframe do not have individual entries. Introduction 3 appearance as a novel prompted editions with scholarly introductions, but these show no awareness of the story’s earlier incarnation in print.8

Table I.1 Scarlet Pimpernel stories in print: first UK publication

Date Title Publisher 1898 ‘The Red Carnation’ (precursor) Pearson’s Magazine 1903 ‘The Sign of the Shamrock’ (precursor) Daily Express 1905 The Scarlet Pimpernel Greening 1906 I Will Repay Greening 1908 The Elusive Pimpernel Hutchinson 1913 Eldorado Hodder & Stoughton 1917 Lord Tony’s Wife Hodder & Stoughton 1919 The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (short stories) Cassell 1922 The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel Hodder & Stoughton 1927 Sir Percy Hits Back Hodder & Stoughton 1929 The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (short Hutchinson stories) 1933 The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel Hodder & Stoughton 1936 Sir Percy Leads the Band Hodder & Stoughton 1940 Mam’zelle Guillotine Hodder & Stoughton

It might be thought that the vagaries of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s reputation could be charted by a variation of D.F. McKenzie’s teaching trick of getting students to guess the era of a blank book from the quality of the paper.9 Certainly, early British editions of Scarlet Pimpernel novels evoke elitist notions of the manuscript with their high quality paper and frontispiece foldout facsimiles of documents.10 Moreover Hodder & Stoughton’s marketing of all Orczy’s works from 1913 onwards as part of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel Series’ (Figure I.1) recalls the literary heritage of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ novels. However, in parallel with these aspirational volumes aimed at wealthier readers were equally collectible sixpenny paper-covered editions. These were available at stationers and railway bookstalls across the British Empire. Surviving despite the fragility of their cheap paper, examples of those sold in Australia can still be seen in the Rare Books Collection at Monash University (Figure I.2). It is a reminder,

8 Gary Hoppenstand, ‘Introduction’ in Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Signet Classics (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), pp. ix–xviii; Sarah Juliette Sasson, ‘Introduction’ in Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), pp. xiii–xxx. 9 D.F. McKenzie, ‘What’s Past is Prologue: The Bibliographical Society and the History of the Book’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 259–75 (p. 259). 10 Orczy, I Will Repay (London: Greening, 1906), hereafter Repay and Orczy, Eldorado (London: Hodder, 1913). 4 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Fig. I.1 Dust jacket of Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1913]). Princeton University Library.

Fig. I.2 Cover of sixpenny paper edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1913]). By kind permission of Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection. Introduction 5 if one were needed, that hardback ‘Colonial Editions’ were not the only means of the worldwide transmission of imperialist ideas in fictional guise. Close examination of Figures I.1 and I.2 illustrates the way in which Hodder targeted different markets by highlighting the foppish aristocratic persona of the Scarlet Pimpernel for the more expensive hardback, and the shadowy action hero for the popular paperback. The dust jacket of the two-shilling edition emphasises the richness of Sir Percy Blakeney’s golden costume, his immaculate white stockings and lace cuffs, and his aloof aristocratic demeanour. The cover of the paper edition stresses mystery and adventure. The popular and elitist strands came together in the last of the Scarlet Pimpernel series, Mam’zelle Guillotine (Hodder & Stoughton, 1940). The first edition may have been a hardback, but it was printed on war economy paper with a dust jacket almost indistinguishable from pulp fiction. Hodder’s attempt to make Orczy to historical romance what Zane Grey was to the Western ensured that her literary reputation suffered from what David M. Earle has called the ‘prejudice of form’.11 However – like the mass-market paperbacks of the 1950s and 1960s – it also highlights the possibility of a global, cross-class appeal for Orczy’s aristocratic hero. Publishing practices continue to reflect a wide divergence of marketing tactics. Is The Scarlet Pimpernel spy/adventure fiction, thriller, mystery, historical romance or ‘children’s classic’? The Folio Society chose the historical novelist Hilary Mantel to introduce its 1997 ‘classic’ version, covered in vegetable parchment, with knowing post-modern illustrations by Lucy Weller (Figure I.3).12 The Random House Modern Library edition (2000) covers all bases with an introduction by the historical mystery writer Anne Perry; a reader’s group guide; a soft focus cover suggesting historical romance and an endorsement from popular culture scholar Gary Hoppenstand, citing The Scarlet Pimpernel as ‘arguably the best adventure story ever published’ (Figure I.4).13 The sole surviving manuscript page of The Scarlet Pimpernel has a few last- minute changes in Orczy’s handwriting that heighten the discourse of romance; an indecision about whether to describe her heroine’s hair as ‘ardent’ or ‘golden’, and the addition of the colour of her eyes (Figure I.5). Orczy’s choice of this page as a sample for Story-Teller magazine suggests a willingness to be perceived as a romance writer.14 She herself wrote that her focus was on ‘pictures, love-scenes,

11 David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulp Fiction and the Prejudice of Form (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 12 Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, with introduction by Hilary Mantel (London: Folio Society, 1997). 13 Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, with introduction by Anne Perry (New York: Random House, 2002). The quotation on the cover comes from Gary Hoppenstand, ‘Introduction’ in Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Signet Classics (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), pp. ix–xviii (p. ix). 14 Orczy to Newman Flower, 12 January 1909, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums. 6 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Fig. I.3 The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Folio Society, 1997). Binding illustration © Lucy Weller. By kind permission of the Folio Society.

Fig. I.4 The Scarlet Pimpernel (New York: Random House, 2002). Book cover © 2002 by Modern Library. By permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc. Introduction 7

Fig. I.5 Manuscript page of The Scarlet Pimpernel. By kind permission of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums and A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Sara Orczy Barstow-Brown. 8 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel adventures both comic and tragic, thrilling moments, dramatic scenes, and above all character – always character’.15 Although Orczy’s comments about her own work have to be treated with caution, this contains an important clue to the Scarlet Pimpernel’s longevity. Behind the wigs and Mechlin lace cuffs lies an enduring human story of love, misunderstandings, conflict of loyalties, audacious bravery – and a dramatic double life. The transmogrification of Orczy’s hero from a Polish anarchist to an English aristocrat in the French Revolution underlines this sense of the a-historical quality of her story. It might also appear to complicate the popular equation between the Scarlet Pimpernel and Englishness. However, while Orczy identified Sir Percy Blakeney with upper class Englishness, his subversive roots clearly relate to that strand in the English national psyche identified by Cole Moreton as being ‘under the radar, belonging to the people, bawdy, iconoclastic and dissenting’.16 This element – which cuts across accidents of birth – is another important factor in the Pimpernel’s survival. From the moment Orczy wrote the dramatic opening page of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), with its ‘surging, seething, murmuring crowd’, she was establishing her territory as a popular fiction writer. It was a move that incorporated English nationalistic fictions and the exoticism of her Hungarian origins to create that eminently marketable commodity: ‘The Baroness Orczy: Author of The Scarlet Pimpernel’.17 ‘The Baroness’ carries associations of elitism, whilst minimising the professionalism and shrewd sense of the market that made Orczy one of the most successful novelists of her generation. The early identification between Orczy,The Scarlet Pimpernel and Englishness can clearly be seen in an article in the London society newspaper, the Sketch, in 1908 (Figure I.6).18 The news ‘peg’ is the opening of the London stage version of Beau Brocade, her story about an eighteenth-century Robin Hood-style highwayman. However the headline – ‘Creators of the New Everlasting Flower’ – makes the link to her better-known work. The hand-drawn frame of wheat sheaves signifies Orczy’s literary harvest, invoking the image of the tiny red flower that grows in shadowy spaces at the corner of fields. At the same time, Orczy – in her impractical pale-coloured long lacy dress – is clearly the lady of leisure. Her husband and dramatic collaborator, Montagu Barstow, and their son, John, appear at her side in only one picture, the son’s pose mimicking that of the father. This is the aristocratic and creative Englishwoman, with supporting cast.

15 Orczy, Links in the Chain of Life (London: Hutchinson, 1947), hereafter Links, p. 97. 16 Cole Moreton, ‘England’s Daft and Pleasant Land’, Guardian, 12 February 2010. [accessed 27 June 2012] 17 Orczy took the title of Baroness on the death of her father in 1892, adopting it as part of her professional persona both as an artist and a writer. She is listed as Orczy, E. (Baroness) in the catalogue for the 1892 Royal Academy annual Exhibition. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1892 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1892), p. 75. 18 ‘Creators of the New Everlasting Flower’, Sketch, 17 June 1908, p. 301. Introduction 9

Fig. I.6 Sketch, 17 June 1908, p. 301. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark ND52 NPL. 10 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Thus, despite the Scarlet Pimpernel’s anarchist roots, their creator was marketed as living the comfortable life of an upper class Englishwoman, at home in the country among her flowers and animals. The servants who made this lifestyle possible are nowhere to be seen; but the implicit model is that of The Scarlet Pimpernel, where happily giggling kitchen maids bustle and the Dickensian landlord, Mr Jellyband, pronounces with horror on the revolutionary activities of ‘them Frenchy devils over the Channel’.19 The ‘author of The Scarlet Pimpernel’ tag brought reassurance of a story that would celebrate a largely mythical past of rural stability as opposed to a problematic present of metropolitan uncertainty. It was an insular, Establishment version of ‘Englishness’. The 1980s Englishness ‘industry’, which exploded in reaction to Thatcherite patriotism and the growth of regional nationalism in Britain, has politicised even the mildest statement about national identity.20 However, Colls and Dodd (1986) provided a useful framework by limiting the debate to the period between 1880 and 1920, the authors believing that ‘it is within the shadow of that period, and its meanings that we still live.’21 The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel was born in the middle of this timeframe – and, although the final novel in the series was not published until 1940, its values remained that of the era of its birth. Wars, revolutions and accompanying social change may have spelt the decline of the aristocracy, but Baroness Orczy provided its swansong. By the same token – despite her attempts to respond to shifting national sentiment by using ‘Britisher’ interchangeably with ‘Englishman’ – her hero and his followers remained in the mould of the fin de siècle Englishman. Sir Percy Blakeney’s French mother notwithstanding, Orczy’s emphasis on his height and Anglo-Saxon blue eyes link him to ‘the gene pool of high class Englishness’ and the idea of a caste born to rule.22 Successive adaptations aimed at a multinational audience have highlighted the extent to which The Scarlet Pimpernel is identified with imperialist notions of Englishness. Its rebranding as a ‘classic’ has enabled film and TV producers to historicise its jingoistic elements while eroding divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.23 At the same time, transgressive responses and post-modern appropriations of the myth provide a subversive commentary on its relationship to white masculinity. Diana Wallace suggests that Orczy’s use of an effeminate disguise for her hero indicates an understanding that masculinity itself is a

19 Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Greening, 1905), Ch. 2, p. 17. Hereafter SP. 20 On the 1980s as a key decade for the reassessment of Englishness, see Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), ‘Preface’, pp. ix–xxi. 21 Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, ‘Preface’ in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880– 1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986) [n.p]. 22 Platt, p. 31. 23 See Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 177–8. Introduction 11 masquerade.24 Following the work of Colley and Hobsbawm on the artificial construction of national identity, I would suggest that she is similarly knowing about nationalistic fictions.25 The pages of her fiction abound with examples of the ‘invention of Britishness’.26 As a polyglot Hungarian aristocrat who only came to England when she was 15, and lived much of her adult life in Monte Carlo, Orczy had a complex relationship to nationalism. Lucy Sloan’s comment that Orczy’s ‘frequent reference to the Englishness of certain qualities itself sounds distinctly un-English’ pinpoints this element of the outsider in Orczy’s approach.27 It is another factor in the Scarlet Pimpernel’s adaptability, as Orczy’s nationalistic gloss is unsubtle and thus easily removed.

The Myth of the English Gentleman

Englishness as portrayed in the Scarlet Pimpernel is inextricably bound up with the idea of the English gentleman.28 It is an idea that taps into myth and induces nostalgia by evoking characteristics from a bygone age – yet is also more subversive than it might appear. Crucial to Orczy’s original mythmaking is the imaginative link between chivalry, the aristocracy and the monarchy. With increased social mobility popularising the idea that a gentleman could be made, not born, 29 it may seem perverse for Orczy to create a League whose founder members all belonged to the nobility. However, to criticise her stories for offering a conservative definition of gentlemanliness is to misunderstand them. Their roots lie deep in nationalist legend, from the mystical chivalry of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table to the God-like worship of figures such as Gordon of Khartoum. In Sir Percy Blakeney and his followers, Orczy sought to personify the qualities that she saw as having made Britain great – the characteristics of the English gentleman. In this, she was following Edwardian revivalists of chivalry, including that great patriotic mythmaker Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting

24 Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 41. 25 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14. 26 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1992; repr. London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 1. 27 Lucy Sloan, ‘Orczy, Baroness’, in Dictionary of Women Writers, ed. by Janet Todd ., (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 516–19 (p. 517). 28 As Christine Berberich has pointed out, the terms ‘English’ and ‘gentleman’ have become inextricably linked as ‘a symbol for quintessential Englishness’. Christine Berberich, The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 12. 29 See Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 2–4. 12 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Movement. The English gentleman as portrayed in The Scarlet Pimpernel can be taken to mean any or all of the following: a highly developed sense of duty and consideration for others (especially women and children) ultimately derived from a chivalric code of honour; altruistic heroism and a sense of ‘fair play’; humour, individualism, ingenuity, eccentricity – and a deeply romantic core hidden behind a façade of modest indifference. However, her work outside the Scarlet Pimpernel series suggests a greater awareness of the problematic nature of English gentlemanly values than might at first appear. The imperial adventurer in By the Gods Beloved (1905) and the flamboyant highwayman inBeau Brocade (1908) are subversive gentleman heroes as anarchic as Sir Percy’s original incarnation. These elements combine with chivalric myth to provide a rich, multi-layered conception that helps to explain the Scarlet Pimpernel’s longevity.

By the Gods Beloved (1905) and the Gentleman Adventurer

Orczy’s By the Gods Beloved (1905) was an imperialist ‘lost race’ adventure story in which, as a contemporary New York Times critic put it: ‘[Orczy], with her pen, invaded ancient Egypt with two Englishmen from Hammersmith’.30 Orczy herself described it as ‘A Romance’, but one critic has called it ‘a sadistic Haggardesque fantasy’.31 I would dispute the word ‘sadistic’, since – although there are some extremely sensational scenes – there is no evidence that either the author or her heroes enjoy the gruesome violence that is described. Equally, although Orczy clearly owes much to H. Rider Haggard – the trope of the treasure map, the quest for the survivors of a lost civilisation and a femme fatale reminiscent of Ayesha in She (1886) – her relationship to the imperial romance genre is more complex than this. Nicolas Daly’s argument for fin de siècle romance as ‘a form of narrative theory of social change’ can be borne out by closer examination of By the Gods Beloved.32 The trajectory in Orczy’s novel from scholarly expedition to bid for power and domination might appear to place it firmly in the territory of those adventure tales that were, as Martin Green has put it, ‘the energizing myth of English imperialism.’33 However, there is also an ambivalence about the portrayal of the Englishman abroad that suggests a fin de siècleawareness of the fragility of empire and – in Elleke Boehmer’s words – ‘the fatigues of toting the white man’s

30 ‘Author of Scarlet Pimpernel’, New York Times, 2 August 1908, Resort and Fashion Section, p. X7. 31 Unsigned entry in Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, p. 303. 32 Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5. 33 Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London and Henley: Routledge, 1980), p. 3. Introduction 13 burden’.34 Orczy’s sense of the human cost of the imperial adventure goes against the simple dichotomy, posited by Edward Said, of ‘popular’ versus Conradian modernist.35 Her novel may have elements of triumphalist imperialism, but its plot and narrative voice have a questioning self-consciousness that underline the artificiality of Said’s distinctions and give Orczy a place alongside writers of ‘high’ culture. By Orczy’s own account, her interest in ancient Egypt dates back to a visit to the studio of the painter Edwin Long when she was still an art student (Links, p. 56). Long was working on a picture depicting the trial of the dead, and she was impressed by his opinion that the keynote to a country’s character lay in its mode of administering justice. This theme is prominent in By the Gods Beloved, as in a now forgotten short story, ‘The Revenge Of Ur-Tasen’, which appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in 1900.36 This is a melodramatic tale of sacrifice and revenge, presented as notes found written on papyrus fragments in an ancient Egyptian temple. The writer is a jealous husband who has killed a young priestess in order to bring shame on his family and make his wife an outcast. His punishment is to be buried alive in the temple caves; his reward is the knowledge that, despite his death, his wife will never be able to marry again. Orczy reused the name, Ur-Tasen, for an un-related central character in By the Gods Beloved, and some of the atmosphere of the short story persists in the novel. However, while ‘The Revenge of Ur-Tasen’ is set firmly in the past and has no English characters, By the Gods Beloved introduces twentieth-century English adventurers into an ancient Egyptian setting. This not only stretches credulity, but also adds a problematic dimension in an era when the hegemony of the British Empire was increasingly coming into question. J.A. Hobson’s classic, Imperialism, had been published in 1902, and Orczy herself came across strong Anglophobic and anti-imperialist sentiment in the French reaction to the Boer War (Links, p. 87). This dimension is less obvious in The Scarlet Pimpernel since Sir Percy Blakeney and his followers have the mannerisms and dress of Regency fops, even though in every other respect they behave like Edwardian gentlemen adventurers. Where Sir Percy’s moral authority goes unchallenged – despite occasional episodes of treachery – this is not the case here. The uncertainties of the English gentleman abroad are dramatised in By the Gods Beloved by the use of two voices. One is the dry questioning tone of the narrator, Mark Emmett, a ‘prosy medical practitioner’ whose surname is resonant of an archaic word for ant.37 The other is that of his old school friend, the

34 Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870–1918, ed. by Elleke Boehmer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xv–xxxvi 35 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993; repr. Vintage, 1994), p. 227. 36 Orczy, ‘The Revenge of Ur-Tasen’, Pearson’s Magazine, 9 (June 1900), pp. 668–76. 37 Orczy, By the Gods Beloved (London: Greening, 1905), hereafter Gods, p. 66. 14 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel aristocratically named Hugh Tankerville. Although there is no specific mention of the Tankerville family’s lineage, there is a suggestion of old money in their treasure-filled house, the Chestnuts, set behind iron gates in a London of hansom cabs and fog (Gods, pp. 3–5). Tankerville’s inheritance from his Egyptologist father includes a chivalric-style quest for the remnants of an ancient civilisation – and the confidence to rule over the lost land when he finds it. Emmett is portrayed as a man of limited vision, a Watson to Tankerville’s Sherlock Holmes. However, he is also the voice of common sense. As they travel through the desert disguised as Arabs, they are accosted by a man clad only in a loincloth, and gnawing on a flesh-covered human thighbone. Speaking in ancient Egyptian, he bows down before Tankerville and it immediately becomes apparent that he has mistaken him for a God. Tankerville’s reaction is to say, ‘Be at peace, my son, thou art pardoned’ (Gods, p. 47). Emmett comments, with characteristically humorous understatement: ‘I thought that it was a decidedly bold thing … for a born Londoner to suddenly assume the personality of an Egyptian god, and to distribute mercy and pardon with a free hand on the first comer who happened to ask for it.’ The imperialist trope of the tall English gentleman as God-like dispenser of justice to the natives is invoked by descriptions of the power struggle with the High Priest Ur-Tasen. When a slave woman is condemned to be cast out into the Valley of Death, Hugh Tankerville takes the law into his own hands by killing the woman with his knife: ‘“Her fate is beyond thy ken and thy decree, oh, man” said Hugh, with proud solemnity, as … his tall stature towered above them all, “and she now stands before a throne, where all is mercy and there is no revenge”’ (Gods, p. 125). His dress (he wears a long white burnous), lighting and a transfiguration scene (Gods, pp. 304–5) suggest images of Christ – images that were to become central in Orczy’s portrayal of Sir Percy. However, here they are problematised by Tankerville’s role as dispenser, not only of justice, but also of death. Despite his apparent confidence in his mission, Tankerville suffers from the twin maladies of Englishmen in imperial outposts: malaria and homesickness. Orczy makes it clear that this is a very specific kind of homesickness: for London, imperial capital of the world. Metropolitan life is conjured up in images of Piccadilly; of watching a Beerbohm-Tree production at His Majesty’s Theatre; of sitting at the breakfast table reading the Daily Telegraph (Gods, p. 138). A nationalist and conservative political stance is suggested by the way this is set against the undesirable aspects of ‘busy Europe, with its politics, its squabbles, its socialism, its trades-unions and working-men’s clubs’ (Gods, p. 168). Nevertheless it does introduce an element of doubt into the whole colonial project. This doubt is underlined by the novel’s ending, which is far from the conventional resolution of popular romance as described by Edward Said: ‘Explorers find what they are looking for, adventurers return home safer and wealthier’.38 Orczy’s explorers may return home safe, but their only souvenir is

38 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 227. Introduction 15 apparently a sprig of rosemary in a gold casket. The casket is emblematic of the chivalric nature of their quest: they succeed in changing the system of justice in the lost land, but are greatly aged in the process (Gods, p. 310). The moral seems to be a version of Oscar Wilde’s dictum, that when the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers. Certainly, although initially published in the United States as The Beloved of the Gods (Knickerbocker Press, 1905), the novel was later retitled The Gates Of Kamt.39 This may have been for commercial reasons – but it could also have been a consciousness of irony in the original title. Being beloved of the Gods appears to have been a mixed blessing.

Beau Brocade (1908) and the Gentleman Outlaw

The ambivalence that comes from the setting of By the Gods Beloved in the Edwardian present rather than the distant past is absent in Beau Brocade, written as a play in 1906, with a novel version published two years later.40 However, this in turn has moral uncertainties that transcend history. The action takes place in Derbyshire in June 1746, after the defeat of the Young Pretender at the battle of Culloden Moor. Beau Brocade is an ex-captain in the Royal Dragoons, who turned highwayman after being cashiered for fighting his superior officer in a duel. The idea of a gentleman officer taking drastic action after apparent disgrace had been popularised by Ouida in Under Two Flags (1867). Like Ouida’s character, the Hon. Bertie Cecil, Beau Brocade inspires fierce loyalty. The village blacksmith, who keeps his stock of disguises, comments that he is ‘a gentleman if ever there was one … our village lads would not lay hands on him even if they could’ (BB, p. 25). This gives a new definition to the idea of a gentleman, suggesting that they are not subject to the rule of law. Orczy presents Beau Brocade as a likeable character, who – Robin Hood- style – robs the rich to pay the poor. As one contemporary critic put it, he is ‘all that a highwayman with such a name should be: handsome, chivalrous, brave, faultlessly attired …; the rescuer of distressed damsels and the plague of choleric county magistrates’.41 With French revolutionary officials substituted for county magistrates, this could equally apply to Sir Percy Blakeney. Like Sir Percy, Beau Brocade is flamboyantly daring – demonstrated, for example, when he helps soldiers search for himself. However, Orczy’s dilemma is how to render his outlaw behaviour acceptable to conventional morality. In the end, she has Beau Brocade unmasked, his honour is restored and he is sent to fight for England. In a climactic confrontation, the Duke of Cumberland tells him: ‘Take to the field now, man …

39 Orczy, The Gates of Kamt (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907). 40 Orczy-Barstow, Beau Brocade: A Romantic Drama in Four Acts. BL LCP, 1906/6; Orczy, Beau Brocade (London: Greening, 1908). Quotations in the text are from the novel, hereafter BB. 41 ‘Beau Brocade: A Romance of the Road’, Academy, 14 March 1908, p. 566. 16 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and in the glorious future which I predict for you, England shall forget your past’ (BB, p. 305). A parallel can be found in E.W. Hornung’s stories about Raffles, the gentleman burglar. On his first appearance, in Cassell’s Magazine (1898), Raffles appears to glamorise stealing with only a specious line about social inequality to justify his actions.42 Cassell’s Magazine, mindful of readers’ and reviewers’ sensibilities, published the stories under the heading ‘In the Chains of Crime’, with an illustration showing Raffles’s accomplice, Bunny, in prison chains accompanied by a skeleton. A reviewer for the Spectator described the stories as ‘ a new, ingenious, artistic but most reprehensible application of the crude principles involved in the old-fashioned hero-worship of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin’, noting with satisfaction that ‘this audaciously entertaining volume’ was not issued in a cheap form.43 In other words, it was acceptable for gentlemen to read about such things, but dangerous for the lower classes. Perhaps bowing to such pressure, E.W. Hornung provided a final story that saw Raffles dying a patriotic death while fighting on the South African veldt.44 Like Beau Brocade, he had atoned for his adventures by serving his country. These stories all form an important part of the background to the Scarlet Pimpernel series, as they are essentially about anarchistic behaviour – even if it is gentlemanly anarchism. This highlights the skill with which Orczy rendered outlaw adventures acceptable by the simple expedient of transferring them to revolutionary France under a questionable government. The reception of Raffles, and Orczy’s own experiment with imperialist fantasy, both demonstrate the problems thrown up by a contemporary setting. By retreating to the past, and to France, she could place her anarchic English gentleman at the heart of a triumphalist celebration of nationalism.

The Old Man in the Corner and the Sherlock Holmes Effect

If Sir Percy Blakeney owes a debt to the imperial adventurer and the gentleman highwayman, he also has links with what might be called the Sherlock Holmes effect. Hugh Greene has pinpointed the years between 1890 and 1914 as the heyday of the detective genre, with ‘an eager readership and plenty of outlets’.45 Orczy was thus not alone in wanting to emulate the commercial success of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, but she felt that detective stories were a lesser order of literature (Links, p. 91). Her search for a character of Holmes-

42 E.W. Hornung, ‘The Ides of March’, Cassell’s Magazine, 25 (June 1898), pp. 3–12; repr. in Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 3–22 (p. 21). 43 ‘Novels of the Week’, Spectator, 18 March 1899, p. 385. 44 E.W. Hornung, Ch. 8: ‘The Knees of the Gods’, The Black Mask (London: Grant Richards, 1901), pp. 257–98 45 Hugh Greene, ‘Introduction’, in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories, ed. by Hugh Greene (London: Bodley Head, 1970), p. 9. Introduction 17 like mythical status took her from crime to the historical novel – a trajectory that would have been envied by Doyle, whose literary career was marked by abortive attempts to find success in this genre.46 However, having let the genie out of the bottle – as Edmund Wilson put it of Holmes – Orczy and Doyle shared the same problem.47 The status of their characters as national treasures made it very difficult for them to write about anything else. Doyle himself claimed to have invented the idea of using a single character running through a series of stories that were yet complete in themselves.48 Whether he was indeed the first to think of this as a strategy to attract readers, it undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on the fortunes of Sir George Newnes’s Strand Magazine.49 The first in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series had appeared in July 1891, six months after the magazine’s launch. Its popularity produced countless imitators and secured the Strand’s place in a competitive market.50 One of those who tried to reproduce this winning formula was C.A. Pearson – whose publishing career had started at Newnes’s Tit-Bits office – and whose publications provided Orczy’s main outlet in her early days as a writer (Links, pp. 84–6; pp. 94–5). A study of Orczy’s ‘Old Man in the Corner’, the shabby but quick-witted detective who was Pearson’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, shows how her early detective fiction served as an apprenticeship for The Scarlet Pimpernel. Here, she was exploring the idea of the eccentric English gentleman, and developing the use of key props and signature devices to link separate stories. This, coupled with her experience of seeing The Scarlet Pimpernel on stage, enabled her to consolidate her ideas about the blue-eyed fop with the quizzing glass and the instantly recognisable lazy laugh. The Old Man in the Corner made his debut in the May 1901 issue of Pearson’s Royal Magazine. ‘The Fenchurch Street Mystery’ was billed as ‘the first of a series entitled “London mysteries” by Baroness E.Orczy.’51 Other stories also used very specific locations: ‘The Regent’s Park Murder’ (September 1901); ‘The Mysterious Death in Percy Street’ (October 1901). This gave the impression – as with the Sherlock Holmes stories – that the adventures could be plotted on a London map. A second series, launched in April 1902 as ‘The Mysteries of Great Cities’, was set in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin, as well as key English towns. According to Orczy, this was a device to increase magazine sales outside London (Links, p.

46 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924), p. 99. 47 Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (London: W.H. Allen, 1951), p. 268. 48 Doyle, Memories and Adventures, pp. 95–6. 49 See Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 46. 50 Pound, p. 53. 51 Orczy, ‘The Fenchurch Street Mystery’, Royal Magazine, 6 (May 1901), pp. 10–18 (p. 10). 18 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

92). The geographical realism was incidental, as – unlike Holmes, whose forensic intelligence depends on first hand evidence at the scene of a crime – Orczy’s detective hero never leaves his seat at the ABC teashop in Norfolk Street, London. For this reason, she has been acclaimed as the pioneer of the armchair detective.52 The initial marketing for the ‘Old Man in the Corner’ mysteries, with their London location, was clearly aimed at replicating the Sherlock Holmes effect. However, by the second series, Orczy’s development of a distinctive identity for her detective was reflected in the presentation. When he is first introduced, at the head of a list of dramatis personae in May 1901, he is simply ‘THE MAN who tells the story’. By the following month, he is ‘THE MAN with the piece of string who explains the mystery’.53 When he reappears in 1902, his portrait is given prestigious placing on the cover of the Easter issue, with a teasing question: ‘Who is this?’54 The answer is found in the second item in the magazine, ‘The Glasgow Mystery’. At the top is a portrait of the Man in the Corner (the name now dignified with upper rather than lower case letters); its frame is a piece of string.55 The string becomes the Old Man in the Corner’s most distinctive prop – his equivalent of Holmes’s violin – as he ties and unties it in an effort to puzzle out mysteries. Its growing importance is illustrated in the title given to the final collection of stories when they were published in book form: Unravelled Knots (1925).56 The Old Man is depicted in the tradition of the English gentleman as eccentric – a curmudgeonly individual, of wide-ranging intelligence and scarecrow appearance. This contrasts sharply with Holmes’s tall elegance as depicted by Sidney Paget for The Strand. An illustration by H.M. Brock, used as a frontispiece to The Old Man in the Corner (1909), shows a lean-faced man in thick pebble glasses, dressed in bow tie, wing collar and checked suit.57 A sign on the wall behind his head – ‘no gratuities’ – is a reminder of the café setting but it could also apply to the Old Man himself, who appears never to need or to want money. His skill as a gentlemanly amateur – like that of Holmes ­ – is contrasted with the efforts of the paid professionals of Scotland Yard, reinforcing class prejudice. However, unlike Holmes – who, as Rosemary Jann has put it, represents ‘the

52 Unsigned entry in Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, p. 303. 53 Orczy, ‘The Robbery in Phillimore Terrace, Royal Magazine, 6 (June 1901), pp. 108–16 (p. 108). 54 Cover of Royal Magazine, 7 (April 1902). 55 Orczy, ‘The Glasgow Mystery’, Royal Magazine, 7 (April 1902), pp. 505-13 (p. 505). The illustration is by P.B. Hickling. 56 The stories were republished as The Case of Miss Elliott (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905); The Old Man in the Corner (London: Greening, 1909); and Unravelled Knots (London: Hutchinson, 1925). 57 Orczy, The Old Man in the Corner (London: Greening, 1909), frontispiece. Introduction 19 disinterested intellectual in the service of society’ – he does not put his discoveries to any practical use.58 While the Old Man in the Corner and Sherlock Holmes share gentlemanly characteristics – and Holmes numbers titled men among his clients – neither are aristocrats. This is an important distinction, for Orczy was to choose a more traditional definition of gentlemanliness when it came to the Scarlet Pimpernel series. This was due in part to the change in setting from contemporary to historical, but it also reflected nostalgia for a time when social distinctions were more clear-cut. The point is illustrated by her horror at a French stage adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel that introduced what she considered to be bourgeois touches into the portrayal of Sir Percy (Links, p. 110). The social change that had led to a redefinition of the idea of the gentleman is illustrated by the entry for the word in the 1910 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This notes: ‘The Reform Bill of 1832 has done its work; the “middle classes” have come into their own; and the word “gentleman” has come in common use to signify not a distinction of blood, but a distinction of position, education and manners. The test is no longer good birth, or the right to bear arms, but the capacity to mingle on equal terms in good society.’59 This encompassed the idea that a gentleman could be made, not born, and acknowledged the influence of the public schools as a training ground for ‘gentlemanly’ professions. Robin Gilmour has suggested that the common thread linking the mutations of the idea of the gentleman is the idea of disinterestedness, ‘the belief that a man’s ultimate loyalty ought to be to something larger than his own pocket’.60 This may be useful when considering the figure of the gentleman detective, but is less helpful in discussing the Scarlet Pimpernel. For however much Orczy portrays the activities of the League as altruistic, she cannot escape the fact that their rescue efforts are concentrated on fellow-aristocrats. The impulse may be humanitarian, but it also has links with class chauvinism and class struggle.

The English Aristocracy and the ‘Real’ Scarlet Pimpernel

Orczy always insisted that Sir Percy Blakeney was entirely a fictional creation; it is understandable that she would resist suggestions that he had a historical original, as this would undermine the myth’s romance (Links, pp. 97–8). The historian Elizabeth Sparrow has found evidence to indicate that there were indeed British agents who used a red flower as a secret sign, and carried off daring escapes in

58 Rosemary Jann, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 5. 59 [W.A.P.], ‘Gentleman’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1911), pp. 604–6 (p. 605). 60 Gilmour, p. 97 20 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel revolutionary France.61 However, their lively private lives underline the extent to which Orczy sanitised history. This supports the assertion by Mary Lascelles that the heroes of historical novels tend to be ‘in the past but not of it’.62 The Scarlet Pimpernel is as much about the English construct of the French Revolution as the historical event, and Orczy uses this construct to valorise the aristocracy. Sparrow’s first example is Richard Cadman Etches, who masterminded the successful springing of a British naval officer, Sir Sidney Smith, from the Temple Prison in Paris.63 Smith was quartered in the French royal family’s former apartments, a detail that would have appealed to Orczy.64 However, he was not a hereditary aristocrat, and the architect of his rescue was not even English. 65 Etches was Danish by birth, although he spied for the British; he was also possibly a double agent for Catherine the Great of Russia. This is very far from Orczy’s patriotic and aristocratic English gentleman. Moreover, while the escape appears to follow a familiar pattern of bribery and disguise, its final stages involved co- operation with French royalists.66 This would have been anathema to Orczy, who described a French play version of The Scarlet Pimpernel that turned Sir Percy and his band into French émigrés as an ‘outrage’ (Links, p. 166). The notion that only the English are truly to be trusted is illustrated by Orczy’s reluctance to use collaboration with French émigrés as a plot device. In her scheme of things, the French are most frequently portrayed as victims – either of revolutionary delusions, in the case of the mob, or of the excesses of the revolution in the case of the aristocrats. The moral is usually explicitly drawn, either by Orczy herself, or through the mouths of her characters. Typical is the comment of the French M le Comte d’Ercourt to Sir Percy Blakeney, at the end of the short story, ‘The Chief’s Way’: ‘“The English … are the traditional enemies of my country: but you, milor, have shown me today the most perfect type of a gentleman and a sportsman it has ever been my good fortune to meet. I thank you for the lesson as much as for what you have done for me and mine.”’67 If Orczy chose to focus on English heroism, she also ignored the idea that collaboration between British secret agents and the French might extend to the bedroom. Louis Bayard – another of Sparrow’s candidates for the original of the

61 Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792–1815 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999). 62 Mary Lascelles, The Story Teller Retrieves the Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 109. 63 Sparrow, pp. 89–95. 64 See the emotive use of this setting in Eldorado (1913), pp. 58–9, where she paints in lurid colours the ill treatment of the Dauphin at the hands of Simon the cobbler. 65 Smith had an honourary Swedish knighthood awarded for services at sea. 66 Sparrow, p. 136. 67 Orczy, ‘The Chief’s Way’, Hutchinson’s Magazine, 19 (May–July 1928); repr. in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hutchinson, 1929), hereafter Adventures, pp. 217–88 (p. 286). Introduction 21

Scarlet Pimpernel – illustrates this point. Bayard was recruited as an agent at the age of only 19; with the aid of no fewer than 31 aliases, he was able to appear and disappear as elusively as The Scarlet Pimpernel. However, he kept a long- term mistress, Madame Mayer. Orczy’s Marguerite – like Madame Mayer – was both a Parisian actress and a double agent, but there is no evidence that Sir Percy did anything other than worship her from afar until their marriage. Audience and publishers’ expectations led Orczy to present an idealised English gentleman untainted by the corruption of French decadence. Sparrow describes in some detail the secret tokens used by British agents, ‘small triangular pieces of card hand painted with a design intended to be a rose but of such a trailing nature, and with such tiny leaves, that similarity with the Scarlet Pimpernel is obvious’.68 However, in Orczy’s story, the scarlet pimpernel is used as a device on notes written to infuriate the French; in Sparrow’s version, the tokens ensure safe passage to the United Kingdom without a passport. Sparrow’s analysis leaves out of account that Orczy had already used the idea of a secret flower sign in ‘The Red Carnation’ (1898), a story that – although it was a precursor of The Scarlet Pimpernel – had no links with revolutionary France. Equally, I would argue that the search for the ‘original’ of the Scarlet Pimpernel – however interesting for historians ­– is a critical cul de sac. Orczy’s hero is identifiably a product of the age in which she was writing, for all his Regency trappings. This is further illustrated by the publication, only a year before The Scarlet Pimpernel, of The Shadow of a Throne (1904), by F.W. Hayes (1848– 1918). He was an artist – like Orczy – although of an older generation. His novel features an English gentleman, Dr Noel Dorrington, who devotes himself to freeing the Dauphin – heir to Louis XVI – from revolutionary France. His principal disguise is that of a dead French friend, Dr Montmorin, but he also uses other aliases, including that of Marcus Junius Brutus, the bloodthirsty sans-culotte and Jules Vressac, a travelling tinker and locksmith.69 His ability to slip in and out of character, and his daring in penetrating French prisons has led to a comparison with Orczy’s work. Indeed, one critic has suggested that the novel ‘so closely resembles The Scarlet Pimpernel … that it seems incredible that she had not read it.’70 However, while there are undoubted resemblances between the two books, it could simply be that both writers had sources in common, and were in tune with what would entertain their readers. The key shared element is the use of an English gentleman in disguise. Given the tradition of the gentleman adventurer, it is not particularly surprising that both Hayes and Orczy would choose this device as a way into French revolutionary history for their readers. At the same time, closer examination of the two heroes highlights the differences rather than the similarities between them. Sir Percy is an aristocrat, the toast of London society, who works in conjunction with a band of

68 Sparrow, p. 175. 69 F.W. Hayes, The Shadow of a Throne (London: Hutchinson, 1904), pp. 81–3. 70 ‘Hayes, F.W.’, unsigned entry in Kemp, Mitchell and Trotter, p. 178. 22 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel faithful followers. Noel Dorrington is untitled, comes from a landowning family in rural Devon and carries out his plans with a varying cast of Frenchmen. Sir Percy’s aim is to rescue as many French aristocrats as possible; Noel Dorrington’s focus is on the royal family, from the moment when he sends a secret message to Marie Antoinette in a cake: ‘I will save your children. Die in Peace’.71 Perhaps the most important difference is the level of violence. A Shadow of a Throne has bloodthirsty details and swashbuckling action, backed up by Hayes’s own graphic illustrations. By contrast Sir Percy rarely indulges in more than stylised aggression; even when he has his French enemy, Chauvelin, completely in his power he simply trusses him up.72 The emphasis is on psychological warfare fought with laughter, eccentricity, native wit – and ingenuous escape plots. It is worth pausing over the comparison between Hayes and Orczy, not only to refute the charge of plagiarism, but also to highlight what is distinctive about The Scarlet Pimpernel. As with Orczy’s detective fiction, it is the thrill of unravelling a mystery that makes the reader turn the pages as much as the search for sensational action. It is a vital part of Orczy’s original intentions that this thrill should be provided by a chivalric band of English aristocrats, led by a figure who could take his place among the numerous heroes of national myth.

Chivalry, Arthurian Romance and the Supernatural Hero

Set in the context of the fin de siècle erosion of patrician privilege and power, the Scarlet Pimpernel can undoubtedly be read as a fantasy – a way of finding a new (albeit fictional) role for members of an outdated elite. 73 However, the French critic who ridiculed Orczy’s decision to give titles to all Sir Percy’s followers misses a crucial mythical element.74 Members of the League are crusading knights whose roots lie deep in national myth: latter-day Sir Galahads. Chivalry is an important part of Orczy’s portrayal of Englishness, the idea of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel clearly owing a debt to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The League’s exclusivity, its code of honour, oath of allegiance and automatic loyalty to the Chief all parallel the values of what has been called ‘Victorian Arthurianism’.75 At the same time, Orczy mixed the mystical, faery elements of Arthurian romance with Christian evangelical iconography to emphasise her hero’s magic powers.

71 Hayes, p. 6. 72 Orczy, The Elusive Pimpernel (London: Hutchinson, 1908), p. 346. Hereafter Elusive. 73 See Platt, pp. 4–6. 74 Marie-Françoise Golinsky, ‘Le Mouron Rouge’, in Le Légende de la Révolution au XXe Siècle, ed. by Jean-Claude Bonnet et Philippe Roger ([Paris]: Flammarion, 1988), p. 73. 75 Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 136. Introduction 23

The story of the Victorian appropriation of Arthur as an English hero – ignoring his Celtic roots – of the rediscovery of Malory linked to the rise of English Studies, and of the widespread popularity of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King has been well told by Stephanie L. Barczewski.76 Her study of the emergence of King Arthur and Robin Hood as national heroes for those at opposite ends of the social spectrum emphasises the complex roles these wildly differing characters have to perform. Orczy’s awareness of both is illustrated, not only by Beau Brocade (1908), her Robin Hood-style highwayman, but also by a comment on clothing for Pearson’s Magazine. This recommended that ‘for rougher wear’, people should return to a leather jerkin such as that worn by Robin Hood.77 Equally, she demonstrated that the language of Arthurian legend was part of her common currency in an article for Strand Magazine in 1918. A woman, she wrote, ‘will give herself just as whole- heartedly to a degraded wretch or to a criminal if she loved him, as she would to a Galahad.’78 Sir Galahad, the mystical knight of the Holy Grail, carries associations of purity and single-mindedness – both attributes that Orczy sought to attach to Sir Percy. The most visible presence of Arthurian legend at the fin de siècle was in art – especially that of the Pre-Raphaelites – and stage productions such as J. Comyns Carr’s King Arthur at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897. This play – its blank verse evoking Shakespeare and the English cultural heritage – was produced by Henry Irving. It ran for more than 100 performances, and it would be surprising if Orczy had not seen it.79 King Arthur had music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and scenery and costumes by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who is said to have balked at ‘jingo bits about the sea and England’. 80 The prologue emphasised not only Arthur’s a-historical Englishness, but also his mystical origins as the one chosen to wield the magical sword.81 In the same vein, the contemporary critic Clement Scott stressed Arthur’s God-like character: ‘He is a warrior, but still he is a demi-god. A halo of light should be about his head. His face should be one of transcendent majesty.’82 More recently, Peter Ackroyd echoes this theme of

76 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 77 Norman Fraser, ‘How to Make Man Picturesque’, Pearson’s Magazine, 24 (October 1907), pp. 357–64 (p. 361). 78 Orczy, ‘All About Love,’ Strand Magazine, 56 (September 1918), p. 194. 79 Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1900 (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 204. 80 Barczewski, p. 159. 81 ‘Prologue: Excalibur’, in J. Comyns Carr, King Arthur (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 1–7 (p. 6). 82 Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’: A Critical Record of the First- Night Productions at the Lyceum Theatre from 1871 to 1895 (1897), pp. 372­–84, quoted in Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1900 (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 205. 24 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel divinity; for him, King Arthur ‘represents sanctified leadership, uniting England and the Holy Grail’.83 Inga Bryden, in Reinventing King Arthur, suggests that by the fin-de-siècle, Arthurianism had been abandoned as a mode of discussing national identity.84 However, I would argue that the influence of the legends does not disappear; it just becomes more oblique. There is, for instance, no Excalibur moment in The Scarlet Pimpernel, no magic sword or mysterious supernatural anointing. Yet there is a mystery surrounding the origins of the League, and of Sir Percy’s role as leader. He is frequently described in God-like terms, he has an enigmatic charisma and his characterising elusiveness gives him the quality of a mythical character. The link to Arthurian mysticism is further underlined by the use of archaic language at key moments. An example comes in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), when Marguerite is plotting escape from Calais to the safety of England. She lays her plans, while Sir Andrew Ffoulkes shakes his head and tells her she has forgotten an important factor. ‘What factor do you mean?’ asks Marguerite, impatiently. Sir Andrew replies, ‘It stands six foot odd high … and hath name Percy Blakeney’ (SP, Ch. 23, p. 222). Sir Percy’s height, coupled with the use of the impersonal ‘it’ and the biblical ‘hath’, conveys the idea of a supernatural phenomenon. This may have its origins in English nationalist myth, but it looks forward to generations of heroes who offer readers the vicarious pleasure of a life touched by magic.

Orczy, Baden-Powell and Myths of Englishness

It would be perverse to discuss heroic myths of Englishness without reference to a man who embodied the chivalric ideals Orczy admired, and whose work she supported: Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking. Perhaps the best summary of the moral code Orczy sought to promote lies in Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908).85 This handbook for what was to become a new movement – the archetypal ‘invented tradition’ of the Edwardian age – was issued in six fortnightly parts throughout 1908.86 However, it had been in the making from 1904, so was planned contemporaneously with The Scarlet Pimpernel.87 Orczy helped to found one of the earliest scout troops in Kent, giving a copy

83 Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Chatto & Windus, 2002), p. 117. 84 Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 3. 85 Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, ed. by Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 86 Hobsbawm suggests that ‘invented traditions’ are most clearly exemplified when they are ‘deliberately invented and constructed by a single initiator, as for the Boy Scouts by Baden-Powell’ (Hobsbawm, p. 4). 87 Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, in Baden-Powell, Scouting, pp. xi–xxxix (p. xl). Introduction 25 of The Scarlet Pimpernel to the winner of an annual competition.88 There is a further connection between Orczy and Baden-Powell. They shared not only a promoter (C.A. Pearson, owner of The Daily Express) but also a literary editor (Percy Everett).89 Baden-Powell’s work was printed by a Pearson-owned firm, and expertly publicised by both Pearson and Everett. Everett rapidly moved from text editing to practical involvement in scouting, rising to the role of Deputy Chief Scout.90 The Scarlet Pimpernel could be taken as an extended fictional illustration of the Scout Law, which stresses honour, duty, loyalty to King and country, obedience to authority and courtesy to women and children.91 Scouts were also encouraged to be a friend to all, to do a good turn every day, to be kind to animals and to smile and whistle under all difficulties.92 The Englishman’s empathy with animals, as opposed to the French cruelty, is a trope throughout the Scarlet Pimpernel series. In the short story, ‘Fie, Sir Percy!’, an ambitious gendarme lays a trap for the Scarlet Pimpernel by inserting a flint in a horse’s hoof. Chauvelin does not appear to be concerned about the pain caused to the horse; his only worry is whether the plan will work.93 In ‘Fly by Night’, the Scarlet Pimpernel adventurers give French horses a sleeping draught to aid an escape; however, Orczy is careful to reassure her readers that they will come to no harm (Adventures, p. 143). Equally, Sir Percy Blakeney’s skill in horsemanship plays a crucial role in several stories.94 The scout duty of cheerfulness finds an echo in Sir Percy’s propensity to laugh even at the most inopportune moments. He laughs after a thrashing (SP, Ch. 31, p. 303). He laughs when members of the League turn traitor: St Just in Eldorado (1913); Kulmstead in The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1919); Fanshawe in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1929) and St John Devinne in Sir Percy Leads the Band (1936). He laughs even when apparently facing the guillotine, making jokes about the inexperienced barber who will cut his hair (Elusive, pp. 278–9).

88 The troop flag, bearing the device of the Scarlet Pimpernel, was painted by Montagu Barstow. Roger Vidler, ‘Baroness Orczy in Bearsted’, in Bearsted and Thurnham Remembered, ed. by Kathryn Kersey (Bearsted: K. Kersey, 2005), p. 68. 89 Boehmer in Baden-Powell, Scouting, p. xl; Orczy, Links, p. 84. Greening published The Scarlet Pimpernel, but Pearson had published Orczy’s first full-length novel, The Emperor’s Candlesticks, as well as her stories in Pearson’s Magazine, Royal Magazine, and the Daily Express. 90 See Percy Everett, The First Ten Years [An account of the Boy Scout movement] (Ipswich: East Anglian Daily Times, [1948]). 91 Baden-Powell, Scouting, pp. 44–6. 92 ‘The Whistling Song’, with words and music by Baden-Powell, is reproduced in Everett, p. 47. 93 The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hutchinson, 1929), hereafter Adventures, pp. 30–1. 94 See, for example, The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933), hereafter Way, pp. 271–83. 26 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

The exploits of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel depend on the generosity of its members, a trait which links with the final item in the original Scout Law.95 The bank manager-style commandment to be ‘thrifty’ may at first glance appear to be aimed at the Scout Movement’s predominantly middle class membership.96 However, Baden-Powell’s emphasis on saving is coupled with a reminder of the need to have enough money to give away if the need arises. Members of the League appear to have limitless resources, and the French are presented as eminently easy to bribe. As Sir Percy Blakeney puts it: ‘Gold can do so many things, and my only merit seems to be the possession of plenty of that commodity’ (Repay, p. 321). Orczy’s personal circumstances may have predisposed her to choose aristocrats for her heroes, but there is also the practical point that only those in possession of a large private income could afford Pimpernel-style adventures.97 A key parallel between Orczy and Baden-Powell is the use they make of what Elleke Boehmer has called the ‘heroic myth of Englishness’.98 Baden-Powell’s role in restoring British national confidence after the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War made him the ideal personification of this myth. The historian Thomas Pakenham’s suggestion that Baden-Powell’s success in withstanding the siege was due less to the powerful force of Baden-Powell’s personality, and more to his inequitable distribution of rations among the Africans, does not alter his status at the time. 99 In Pakenham’s words, the story of Mafeking was: ‘a story that the sporting British public could take immediately to their hearts … How one man and some loafers, with little help from the War Office, had fought against fearful odds and had, by English pluck and ingenuity, turned a forlorn hope into a triumph.’100 Pluck and ingenuity are values much celebrated in Scouting for Boys (1908), a book that draws on Baden-Powell’s own early career as a spy and cavalry soldier in the service of Empire. He also makes plentiful use of seafaring yarns, setting the

95 The 10th – a Scout is pure in thought, word and deed – was added in 1915 (Everett, p. 25). 96 Boehmer suggests that, despite Baden-Powell’s declared intention to appeal to all social classes, working class boys were less likely to have the necessary ‘start-up resources’. See Everett, p. 11; Boehmer, p. xxii; Sally Mitchell, e-mail ‘Re: Scouting for Boys and Affordability’, 8 March 2006, ‘Victoria Nineteenth-Century British Culture and Society’, < https://iulist.indiana.edu/sympa> [accessed 2 July 2012] 97 F.W. Hayes solves this problem by the idea of a secret cache of treasure, handed down through the generations in trust to benefit the French Royal Family (Hayes, pp. 87–9). 98 Boehmer in Baden-Powell, Scouting, note 212, p. 372. 99 Using Baden-Powell’s confidential staff diary of the siege, Pakenham claims that the white garrison took part of the rations of the black garrison. ‘Part of the black garrison was accordingly given the choice of starving to death in the town or running the gauntlet of the Boers.’ Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Abacus, 1992), p. 406. The claim is contested in Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 260–71. 100 Pakenham, Boer War, p. 417. Introduction 27 tone with a line drawing after ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, by Sir John Millais.101 Of the early colonisers, he comments: ‘Think of the pluck of those men tackling a voyage like that, with a very limited supply of water and salt food. And, when they got to land with their handful of men, they had to overcome the savages, and in some cases other Europeans, like the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the French’.102 The syntax here links ‘savages’ and Europeans as hostile agents; this is set against the brave English sea dogs who endured heroic deprivation in the service of their country. However – as with Orczy – a prime focus is the heroism of the Englishman on land, preferably with the reins of a horse in his hands. Given Baden-Powell’s background, as Inspector General of Cavalry, this is hardly surprising.103 Elleke Boehmer has pointed out the sleight of hand by which Baden-Powell links his movement to heroic myths of Englishness by using Arthurian legend, as well as claiming St George as its patron saint.104 In Scouting for Boys (1908), he devotes a whole section to ‘Chivalry of the Knights’. Here, he presents scout patrol leaders as latter-day Knights Errant, riding about looking for good deeds to be done.105 This chivalric image was used to boost recruitment during the First World War, paralleling Orczy’s use of the Scarlet Pimpernel for the same purpose. The cover of Baden Powell’s Young Knights of the Empire (1916) shows a helmeted knight in armour with his visor raised, looking at a sleeping dragon behind bars.106 On his shield is the scout badge and motto: ‘Be Prepared’. The patriotism implied in the visual reference to the legend of St George and the dragon is picked up in the Foreword, addressed to ‘Boy-Men’. Baden-Powell exhorts his young readers to be like the knights of old, to make themselves into ‘fine, reliable men, ready to take the place of those who have gone away to fight and who have fallen at the Front’.107 In tune with the ideas of Victorian revivalists of chivalry, the message stresses the link between knighthood and youth.108

101 Baden-Powell, Scouting, p. 296. 102 Baden-Powell, Scouting, p. 275. 103 Jeal, p. 353. 104 St George is the patron saint of the cavalry, as well as of England. See Baden- Powell, Scouting, pp. 212–14 and note, p. 372. 105 Baden-Powell, Scouting, p. 213. 106 Robert Baden-Powell, Young Knights of the Empire (London: C.A. Pearson, 1916). 107 Baden-Powell, Young Knights of the Empire, p. 13. 108 See, for instance, Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour: Rules for the Gentleman of England (1822), revised with the subtitle The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, and re-issued in ever-expanding editions throughout the Victorian era. The book’s association between chivalry and youth is discussed in Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 62. 28 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Like Baden-Powell’s scouts, the young followers of the Scarlet Pimpernel are bound by an oath with the same power as that of knights pledging allegiance.109 ‘“How many are there in your brave league, Monsieur?”’ asks Suzanne de Tournay of her rescuer and future husband, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes. He replies: ‘“Twenty all told, Mademoiselle … one to command and nineteen to obey. All of us Englishmen, and all pledged to the same cause – to obey our leader and to rescue the innocent”’ (SP, Ch. 4, p. 38). ‘Englishmen’ in this context is used to denote heroic, knightly qualities as much as nationality; the League includes a Frenchman (Armand St Just, Marguerite’s brother) and a Scotsman (Lord Fanshawe), although it is interesting to note that both are involved in episodes of treachery.110 Marguerite – who is English only by marriage – is enrolled as an honorary member in this otherwise essentially masculine preserve, suggesting an unusual take on chivalric tradition. Her firm inclusion in key scenes of action is indicated by her answer to Sir Andrew Ffoulkes’s comment: ‘He cannot compel you, Lady Blakeney. You are not a member of the League.’ Marguerite replies: ‘Oh, yes I am! … and I have sworn obedience, just as all of you have done.’ (Eldorado, p. 218). The reader is never shown anyone swearing the oath; it is only explicitly mentioned on the rare occasions when it is in danger of being broken through treachery or disobedience. Orczy experimented with the twin themes of chivalry and betrayal in an early short story, ‘The Traitor’ (1898).111 The chivalry is that of an Englishman; the betrayal that of a Russian Prince, who sells his country’s secrets. Into this complicated spy story, Orczy introduces an Englishman, Winter Ellaby, ‘a most chivalrous and plucky young man’.112 In a somewhat unbelievable twist of the plot, Ellaby exchanges identities with a Russian friend who has been languishing in Siberia on the orders of the treacherous Prince. The friend sails for freedom in Ellaby’s yacht, and Ellaby is left locked up in a Siberian prison. His father, the English Ambassador, goes to ask for his son’s freedom, commenting that ‘any Englishman who had the chance’ would have acted in the same way.113 The grand altruistic gesture, the exchanging of identities and the use of a yacht for escape all foreshadow storylines used in the Scarlet Pimpernel series. The chivalric code governing the conduct of members of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel comes to the fore at moments of crisis. When Armand St Just dares to suggest he might refuse an order, Sir Percy replies simply: ‘My good fellow … in that admirable lexicon which the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel has compiled for itself there is no such word as “refuse”’(Eldorado, p. 105). The word ‘lexicon’ is here used figuratively; however, the League does have its own

109 Baden-Powell’s first scouts took the Scout Oath, which was later changed to the Scout Promise. Everett, p. 25. 110 St Just in Eldorado (1913) and Fanshawe in ‘The Chief’s Way’, Adventures, pp. 215–88. 111 Orczy, ‘The Traitor’, Pearson’s Magazine, 6 (December 1898), pp. 695–700. 112 Ibid, p. 699. 113 Orczy, ‘The Traitor’, p. 699. Introduction 29 language, unwritten rules and rituals. Even though it is a secret society, its spirit conforms to Hobsbawm’s definition of an ‘invented tradition’: ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’.114 Orczy creates a ‘history’ for the League by references and cross-references within the text, and constant reiteration of key elements of the myth. This process can be seen at work in the almost formulaic pattern of episodes of treachery from inside the League. A League member becomes distracted from the serious business in hand by love or jealousy; the others urge Sir Percy to take care, but he puts blind faith in the power of the vow of obedience. His first reaction to outright rebellion is simple disbelief; his second, to remind the recalcitrant League member of his vows and his honour as a gentleman. As he tells Armand St Just: ‘Honour … is a godlike taskmaster, and we who call ourselves men are all of us his slaves’ (Eldorado, p. 106). The phrase ‘we who call ourselves men’ carries its own threat; for Armand to disobey is to call his manliness into question. This idea resurfaces in the description of Lord St John Devinne, who betrays the Scarlet Pimpernel in Sir Percy Leads the Band (1936). Orczy tell us he ‘could have been called decidedly handsome but for a certain look of obstinacy coupled with weakness, which lurked in his grey eyes and was accentuated by the somewhat effeminate curve of his lips.’115 Betrayal is here linked to weakness, femininity – and possibly ethnicity. It is interesting to note in passing that Fanshaw, the traitor in ‘The Chief’s Way’ (Adventures, 1929), is also described as having grey eyes, as opposed to Sir Percy’s laughing, Anglo Saxon blue ones.116 Breaking the vows of the League means forfeiting the trust of the Chief and the honourable name of a gentleman. That fate is seen as its own punishment; a punishment that is in itself a test of manliness. Wondering whether Marguerite suspects that Sir Percy’s capture was a direct result of his disobedience, Armand St Just muses, ‘it might be so easy just to throw open the carriage door and to take one final jump into eternity. So easy – but so damnably cowardly’ (Eldorado, p. 334). Kulmsted, trussed up in cords by the Scarlet Pimpernel to foil his traitorous plan, moans: ‘As for me, he would have been wiser if he had killed me’.117 St John Devinne, after his rescue by the Chief whom he had betrayed, murmurs: ‘How they will all loathe the sight of me’. Sir Percy replies: ‘Well! England is at war

114 Hobsbawm, p. 1. 115 Orczy, Sir Percy Leads the Band (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), hereafter Band, p. 32. 116 When Fanshawe is introduced, he is described as having ‘shifty grey eyes’ in a passage that explicitly links his story to that of Kulmsted, an example of Orczy using references between texts to construct a history. Orczy, ‘The Chief’s Way’, Hutchinson’s Magazine, 19 (May–July 1928); repr. Adventures, pp. 217–88 (p. 217). 117 Orczy, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Cassell, 1919), hereafter League, p. 206. 30 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel with France, so you will know what to do’ (Band, p. 313). In other words, only by serving his country can he expiate his disloyalty – a message that is made explicit in an Epilogue when Orczy offers us ‘one last peep at St John Devinne, home on leave after the English victory of the French at Valenciennes, and kneeling by the death-bed of his father’ (Band, p. 316). The irony of his father’s dying words – ‘thank God! His honour is intact’ – underlines Sir Percy’s chivalry to an old man in not telling him the truth. However – as with the highwayman Beau Brocade – there is also a sense of the redemptive power of patriotic service. The idea of chivalry as the Scarlet Pimpernel’s trademark is developed by Orczy until it becomes an integral part of Chauvelin’s plots against them. In ‘Fie, Sir Percy!’ (1929), Chauvelin asks his henchman to find a suitable family to arrest with maximum publicity, in order to lure the Scarlet Pimpernel to the rescue. ‘The more sympathy you can evoke for them the better; a pretty girl, an invalid, a cripple, anything like that will rouse the so-called chivalry of those spies’ (Adventures, p. 21). Similarly, the heroine of The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1933) is portrayed as the innocent victim of Chauvelin’s manipulations. As Chauvelin puts it: ‘The girl, Josette Gravier, was … just the sort of pawn that would appeal to the so-called chivalry of those damnable English spies: a decoy – what?’ (Way, p. 208). We will see in Chapter 2 how the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel played on associations between Chauvelin and the devil. The diabolical theme is continued in the novels and short stories, matched by an equation between divinity and Englishness. The idea of Sir Percy as a God is figured initially in his elusiveness and his ability to appear and disappear at will. At the end of ‘The Traitor’, this apparently supernatural trait has ‘knees … shaking that had long ago forgotten how to bend, and hasty prayers … muttered by lips that were far more accustomed to blaspheme.’118 In ‘A Fine Bit of Work’, Sir Percy is referred to throughout simply as ‘the Englishman’, and his Englishness is inextricably associated with his God-like status. The mother of his rescued victim – formerly a footman in the house of Marie Antoinette – kisses the hands ‘of the brave Englishman … as fervently as she kissed the feet of the Madonna when she knelt before her shrine in prayer.’119 Her daughter, Orczy tells us, ‘surreptitiously raised [Sir Percy’s] fine caped coat to her lips’.120 In The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922), which deals with the events leading up to Robespierre’s downfall, a new tone is set with an opening epigraph from Carlyle: ‘The everlasting stars look down, like glistening eyes bright with

118 Orczy, ‘The Traitor’, in Cassell’s Magazine of Fiction and Popular Literature, Number 2 (May 1912), pp. 1–10; repr. The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Cassell, 1919), pp. 187–206 (p. 206). 119 Orczy, ‘A Fine Bit of Work’, New Magazine, 11 (December 1914), pp. 289-98; repr. League, pp. 119–43 (p. 121). 120 It is worth noting, also, that one of Sir Percy’s disguise names is ‘Dieudonné’: one given by God. See ‘The Little Doctor’, Hutchinson’s Magazine, 7 (December 1922), pp. 555–66; repr. Adventures (1929), pp. 193–213. Introduction 31 immortal pity, over the lot of man’.121 In previous stories, the emphasis had been on Sir Percy’s own heroism and that of his English followers; here, he is also seen as providing Christ-like inspiration for the French. It is a small but important shift, and one perhaps influenced by the political climate in the aftermath of the First World War. France and Britain had fought as allies, so the idea of collaboration might have seemed more appropriate than the more jingoistic approach of the heroic band of Englishmen. Orczy’s rewriting of French revolutionary history does not extend to having Sir Percy physically present at the climactic debate that led to Robespierre’s guillotining – an approach she might well have adopted in earlier stories. Instead, Sir Percy shames Tallien, one of Robespierre’s opponents, into taking action on behalf of his compatriots. He is depicted as able to convey ‘the magic of strength and of courage’ simply by the compelling glance of his blue eyes (Triumph, p. 293). When Tallien later rises to speak against Robespierre, he does so in terms that directly echo words Sir Percy has used. The theatrical gesture with which he draws a dagger from his coat and threatens to kill Robespierre if the Convention does not order his arrest is a matter of historical record.122 However, Orczy adds a crucial line of speech: ‘I will plunge this into his heart … if you have not the courage to smite!’ (Triumph, p. 300). The word ‘smite’ – with its chivalric and Biblical connotations – had been used by Sir Percy in an earlier exchange with Tallien’s lover, Theresia Cabarrus (Triumph, p. 250). Its use here indicates not only Sir Percy’s crusading mission, but also a supernatural influence.123 In this sense Robespierre’s gruesome fate – in which he is taken with a shattered jaw on the tumbrils to the guillotine – could be seen as a punishment brought about by Sir Percy acting as an agent of divine power. The idea of Sir Percy’s godlike status continues in Sir Percy Hits Back (1927), when he rescues Chauvelin’s daughter, Fleurette, from the guillotine. Fleurette represents Sir Percy as ‘a direct messenger from heaven … when he speaks his voice is like that of an archangel, and if he looks at you his eyes give you the strength of giants and celestial joy’.124 Due allowance has to be made for the fact that Fleurette is presented as a naïve, country-born girl. However, Orczy’s intentions are made clear at the denouement of the novel, where Sir Percy has Chauvelin completely in his power yet resists the temptation to take revenge.

121 Orczy, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), hereafter Triumph, p. 7. 122 For a historical account of the events of 27 to 28 July 1794, see Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.279–81. 123 OED: ‘Smite: Of the Deity, in or after biblical use: To visit with death, destruction or overthrow to afflict or punish in some signal manner.’ The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn, rev. by C.T. Onions, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), II, p. 2,028. 124 Orczy, Sir Percy Hits Back (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), hereafter Hits Back, p. 86. 32 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

When Chauvelin asks why he doesn’t hit back, he replies: ‘La, man … you are astonishing. Can’t you see this is my way of hitting back?’ (Hits Back, p. 318.) In other words, by following the Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek – instead of consigning his opponent to the guillotine, as expected – he has won a moral victory. Similarly, in the titles of the short story, ‘The Chief’s Way’, and The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1933), there are echoes of Christ’s message in St John’s Gospel: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’. Robert H. MacDonald has written persuasively about the use of evangelical imagery as a way of legitimising the imperial cause. Imperialists, as he puts it, ‘had as their master narrative the story of the disciples, who gave up their worldly goods to go and follow the Christ’.125 Orczy frequently stresses the hardships endured by her band of English aristocrats in their devotion to their charismatic leader, and her portrayal of Sir Percy with his boyish enthusiasm has clear parallels with that of popular national figures such as General Gordon. Just as Gordon’s life was presented as a series of symbolic scenes on the road to martyrdom at Khartoum,126 so the myth of the Scarlet Pimpernel is constructed from key episodes to be referenced and cross-referenced in hagiographical style. Sir Percy’s story may have been set in the French Revolution rather than the height of late Victorian/ Edwardian imperialism, but it has all the mythological apparatus of the English heroes of the later era.

The English Gentleman and the ‘Other’: Adapting the Pimpernel

Throughout the Scarlet Pimpernel series, the English are defined against a French ‘Other’, Orczy making only occasional minor concessions in print to the idea that France was no longer the national enemy.127 The trope of the calm, sanguine English gentleman versus the excitable foreigner – personified in the figures of Sir Percy and his arch-enemy, Chauvelin – is just one of many contrasts. These include a range of qualities: civilised/uncivilised, imaginative/unimaginative, witty/humourless, flexible/inflexible. Such binary oppositions might invite analysis along the lines of Umberto Eco’s seminal study of the James Bond ‘narrating machine’.128 However – as this mechanistic image suggests – the structuralist approach can be reductive, looking for sameness rather than difference and minimising audience response.

125 Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 81. 126 MacDonald, pp. 84–8. 127 For a readable survey of the love-hate relationship between Britain and France, which persists to this day, see Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: the French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London: Heinemann, 2006). 128 Umberto Eco, ‘The Narrative Structure in Fleming’, in The Bond Affair, ed. by Oreste del Buono and Umberto Eco, trans. by R.A. Downie (Milan: Valentino Bompiani, 1965; repr. London: Macdonald, 1966) pp. 35–75 (p. 38). Introduction 33

The continued cultural currency of the Scarlet Pimpernel reflects the empowerment of the diverse audiences who have appropriated the myth. The film Pimpernel Smith (1941) – which substituted the Nazis for French revolutionaries as the ‘Other’ – showed not only how it could be tailored to suit changing political alliances, but also how its appeal could transcend class. By replacing ‘Scarlet’ – which has connotations of British imperial soldiery – with ‘Smith’, the commonest British name, the myth could be annexed by Everyman.129 The move highlights the enduring mythical elements that have enabled the Scarlet Pimpernel to transcend its nationalistic roots and become embedded in popular culture. The Scarlet Pimpernel’s longevity has enabled it to act as a marker of the demands of adaptation through key cultural turning points such as the advent of cinema, radio and television. This media crossover helps to explain the varied marketing tactics highlighted earlier in this introduction. At the same time, it facilitates new readings that de-familiarise the source text and add to our understanding of its pleasures. Take the swords and pistols that have become an integral part of the image of the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was an article of faith for Orczy – in tune with a fashionable emphasis on non-aggressive self-defence and her views on the chivalrous English gentleman – that her hero and his followers were unarmed.130 This armoury could thus be seen as a travesty of her original conception. However, a more complex picture emerges if we follow Thomas Leitch’s advice to look ‘into and through as well as at’ the source text.131 In The Elusive Pimpernel (1908), for example, the shadow of Alexandre Dumas and The Three Musketeers can clearly be seen behind a plot to lure Sir Percy to France to fight a duel. Orczy dwells in detail on the materiality of the swords, supposedly forged for the Italian Cenci family.132 This in turn invokes ideas of poison and foreign perfidy. The swords haunt the ensuing story like Chekhov’s proverbial gun – though they are, in fact, never used to fight. It is possible that Hutchinson – for whom this was their sole full-length Pimpernel novel – encouraged this story line to meet audience expectations. Certainly, Hutchinson magazines carried sensational illustrations full of glittering weapons for Pimpernel short stories in the 1920s. Moreover, adaptations of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche (1921) developed an association between fencing and the French Revolution. So if we use the widest possible interpretation of the paratext, movie

129 Compare George Orwell’s choice of Winston Smith as a name for the hero of his dystopian novel, 1984 (1949). 130 On the ‘Englishness’ of unarmed physical heroism, see Emelyne Godfrey, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 136. 131 Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 17. 132 Orczy, The Elusive Pimpernel (London: Hutchinson, 1908), Ch. 12, pp. 122–3. Hereafter Elusive. 34 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel titles such as The Fighting Pimpernel (Powell and Pressburger, 1950) arguably pay homage to cultural history rather than betraying Orczy’s original conception. Adaptation theorists tend to shy away from the chronological approach, for fear of privileging the source text. However, in the case of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the source texts are many and can only fully be understood in their historical and cultural context. My first chapter uncovers The Scarlet Pimpernel’s precursors in Pearson’s Magazine (1898) and the Daily Express (1903), illustrating the cultural factors that led Orczy to change a French Revolutionary setting for a Russian one, then back again. I discuss Orczy’s Hungarian aristocratic roots and her reinvention of herself from artist to writer and show how a visit to the 1900 Paris Exhibition fostered a sense of nationalism. I also examine the influence of the French historian, Michelet, as well as Carlyle and Dickens on her representation of the Terror. Stage representations of the French Revolution form the focus of Chapter 2, which traces the first formulation ofThe Scarlet Pimpernel as a play in 1903. Seen in the context of the Edwardian theatre, it typifies a tendency to insularity in its isolation from avant-garde developments in European drama and its celebration of Englishness. Le Bon’s work on crowd psychology, as well as post-colonial theory, is used to show how the French are depicted as ‘Other’, drawing a parallel with the portrayal of ‘primitive savages’. At the same time – using original scripts, reviews and programmes – I chart changes made in production. I discuss links with melodrama and opera, and the abandonment of triumphalist music to moderate the play’s nationalism for performances in Dublin and Australia. This prefigures its successful adaptation as a musical for a global audience. The emphasis of Chapter 3 is on the creation, illustration and marketing of the Scarlet Pimpernel brand in print from 1899 to 1939. Using original research in the A.P. Watt Archive at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, I highlight the mechanisms by which Orczy was encouraged to write more Pimpernel stories at the expense of her other work. An illustrated examination of Greening and Hodder & Stoughton’s marketing of Orczy’s novels – from Colonial Editions to Hodder Yellow Jackets – provides a distinctive case study in popular fiction as a means of conveying cultural imperialism. Chapter 4 discusses the use of the Pimpernel legend to promote militarism, including Orczy’s recruiting activities in the First World War. It shows how the Scarlet Pimpernel followed nationalist versions of British history in its depiction of the blue-eyed boy who saw beating foreigners as simply another game. Using figures such as the Duke of Wellington, I argue that the image of the English sportsman enables Orczy to assert her foppish hero’s masculinity in the face of the complexities engendered by the figure of the Edwardian dandy. At the same time, I demonstrate how – despite the cultural pressures caused by the loss of innocence and the wholesale slaughter of a ‘lost generation’ of upper class youth – the presentation of the Scarlet Pimpernel in print remained largely unchanged. The Scarlet Pimpernel on film, TV and radio forms the focus of Chapter 5. This shows how early British film versions – including the 1934 film by Orczy’s fellow- countryman, Korda – kept a nationalistic focus. I examine Orczy’s relationship Introduction 35 with Korda in the light of documents at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, including the manuscript of her autobiography. Passages, excised from the published version, highlight uncertainties about the changing portrayal of her hero. They also emphasise a growing disparity between Orczy’s public persona as a champion of Englishness and her private life. While the Scarlet Pimpernel myth was used as a morale booster in World War Two – notably with Leslie Howard’s propaganda filmPimpernel Smith (1941) – Orczy felt abandoned by the British government. In public, she supported the Allied war effort; in private, she complained bitterly about life as an alien exile in the ‘concentration camp’ she felt occupied Monaco had become.133 My final chapter examines the continuing afterlife of the Scarlet Pimpernel by studying different approaches in print and visual culture, including the ‘classic’, the comic, the transgressive and the subversive. While edgier, classless characters such as James Bond may have increasingly supplanted the Scarlet Pimpernel as the paradigm of the English movie action hero, film and TV versions from the 1950s onwards offer a useful index of national attitudes. On stage, Beverley Cross’s 1985 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel can be seen as an attempt to reclaim Orczy’s celebration of Englishness for ‘high’ culture against a background of national self-questioning. At the same time, attempts to ‘edit’ Orczy’s stories in print may suggest a patronising attitude towards the intelligent reader, but arguably such strategies have helped to ensure their survival. The Scarlet Pimpernel has been cited as an influence on Zorro, The Shadow, Kavalier and Clay and many others, but my discussion is limited to areas where the name is specifically invoked. I explore the 1997 Broadway musical, which offers a cross-class appropriation of Orczy’s cult of aristocratic amateurism and a transgressive reading of her gendered construction of heroism. I also look at the international use of the Pimpernel tag, across the political spectrum, to denote any kind of underground activity. My conclusion examines the role of theatricality and the oral tradition in the survival of the Scarlet Pimpernel, discussing the reasons why transatlantic adaptations seem to flourish. I argue for the importance of mythical and fantastic elements, supernatural traces left from the story’s origins in nationalist legend. Finally, there are appendices covering plot parallels and serialisation details of The Scarlet Pimpernel’s precursors; Hodder & Stoughton’s marketing strategies; Pimpernel short stories; Orczy’s publication history and a select location list of manuscripts. With her snobbery, her easy assumption that the English have a God-given right to rule the world, and her unsavoury moments of anti-Semitism, Orczy is not an easy writer to approach. However, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s survival into the twenty-first century suggests an enduring quality to the myth that transcends its ideological fictions. Whatever the author’s intentions – explicit or implicit – or

133 Harry Ransom Center, Orczy MS, Works: Links in the Chain of Life, hereafter Ransom MS, Links, V: 9. 36 Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel the paratextual elements that guide response, the ultimate control rests with the reader. Here, I would like to cite just one example close to home. My grandfather, a proselytising pacifist who was extremely suspicious of nationalism, read The Scarlet Pimpernel to his children. He would have been horrified if he had known that its author had been active in recruiting soldiers for the First World War, and that the story had been used to promote militarism. For him, it was a page-turning narrative of ingenious escapes and heroic individualism. As the increasing body of reception studies reminds us, the ‘resisting reader’ ultimately may have the last word.