Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

Essay Collection

Editors: Cynthia Roman & Mike Widener

Our modest exhibition could present only a very limited selection of material from the rich special collections at Yale. With a mere thirty plus objects we could only outline the very complex aesthetic, cultural, legal, and political history around the Queen Caroline Affair. Accordingly, to expand our discussion, we organized a conference hosted at the Lillian Goldman Law Library on October 4 , 2019. The conference gathered a distinguished group of scholars to consider, how and why, Queen Caroline’s affairs inundated the media and contemporary discussion.

Papers by most of our speakers are revised and presented here together with additional scholarly contributions.

Essays listed below are used with permission of the authors.

Andrew Bricker, Between Words and Images: Visual Satire, Libel Law and the Queen Caroline Affair

Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen, Caroline of Brunswick, and the Prince of Wales

William Anthony Hay, Robert Cruikshank, A Scene in the New Farce of the Lady and the Devil, June 1820

Richard Kopley, Caroline and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”

Ryan Martins, The Legal Legacy of the Queen's Trial: The Rise and Fall of Caroline's Rule

Kristin Samuelian, Looking at the Case against Her: Intertextuality in Queen Caroline Prints

Mark Schoenfield, Henry Brougham Per(for)ming the Defense

Simon Stern, John Bull, Public Sentiment and the Reasonable Man

Dana Van Kooy, The Queen Caroline Affair as a Theatrical and Dramatic Spectacle

Susannah Walker,* TRIAL IN ABSENTIA? Criminal Proceedings and Public Personae