Interview with a Rebellious Ghost
Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke in conversation beyond the grave
It’s Halloween week. I’m in the Internet Archive, the lantern of the twenty-first century, flipping through the digitized first edition of The Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco.
⚜️
The scan flickers; the grain of the paper deepens. Then—there he is.
Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke: Radical MP, reformer, troublemaker, accidental novelist.
His portrait in the archive begins to move.
The Conversation
Rovira: Sir Charles, you startled me. Are all your readers greeted so personally?
Dilke: Only those who publish me properly.
Rovira: What do you like to be called—Sir Charles, Mr. Dilke, or simply Charles?
Dilke: The title will do. The Dilke baronetcy was a modest affair—my grandfather founded The Athenæum and wrote more editorials than sonnets, which in England was considered the greater contribution to civilisation. My father collected facts; I collected controversies. Between us, we made a family tradition of earnestness and trouble.
Rovira: Speaking of trouble—history remembers a scandal.
Dilke: (smiling thinly) Ah yes, the Crawford case. A divorce trial in which everyone was found guilty, save the truth. My enemies said I’d seduced a married woman; my lawyers said I’d done nothing of the sort. The jury believed the newspapers, and the newspapers believed no one. I resigned, of course. The public adores a fallen Radical—it makes repentance so much easier to watch.
Rovira: Let’s turn to your creation. Tell us about Prince Florestan. Who is he? Why that name?
Dilke: Florestan was Beethoven’s defiant prisoner—the man who sings his freedom from the dungeon. I borrowed it for a prince who believes he can sing liberty from a throne. He’s half-German, half-Grimaldi: a Württemberger by birth, a Monegasque by accident, and a republican by education.
Rovira: But there was a real Prince Florestan, wasn’t there? No relation to yours, it seems?
Dilke: None at all, though the coincidence delighted me. Prince Florestan I of Monaco reigned briefly before my time—a well-meaning man swallowed by events. I merely borrowed his name and made him my vessel for folly. My Florestan is an invention with one foot in Cambridge and the other in absurdity.
Rovira: Your Florestan was fond of Rabagas. Tell us philistines of the twenty-first century what Rabagas refers to.
Dilke: Ah, Sardou’s play! A sharp little political farce from 1872. Rabagas was his caricature of the demagogue—modelled on Gambetta, though the French prefer to forget that. When my prince quotes Rabagas, he mistakes performance for politics. He imagines he can govern as cleverly as an actor delivers a line. Most governments do.
Rovira: You wrote The Fall of Prince Florestan to parody monarchy. What do you think of the monarchies that have survived into our century? The Grimaldis still reign in Monaco, and Britain now has its own Charles III.
Dilke: (chuckles softly) Ah, poetic symmetry! Monaco endures because its scandals are more picturesque than its laws, and Britain endures because its scandals are politely forgotten. The Grimaldis have refined the art of ceremonial glamour—they trade in lineage as others trade in luxury goods.
Rovira: Just to clarify for the readers, Sir Charles is marveling at the symmetry of the British throne being occupied by Charles III when, in his own day—the 1880s—Monaco was ruled by Prince Charles III.
Dilke: Precisely! History repeats itself, but with better tailoring. Your new Charles seems a monarch suited to his people: fond of gardens, mildly guilty about empire, and perfectly harmless. In my day we tried to replace kings with ideas; in yours, you have made kings into ideas.
Rovira: You sound almost affectionate.
Dilke: Affectionate? Hardly. But monarchy is no longer dangerous. It has become theatre—a constitutional screensaver, endlessly looping. One cannot rebel against a pageant.
Rovira: You’re aware you’ve been edited. Re-typeset, annotated, given a Preface.
Dilke: Indeed. Heavy Crown Press, is it? A spirited title. Heavy is the head… etcetera.
Rovira: And your opinion of the new edition?
Dilke: Only that the punctuation has been tidied. I left those commas in rebellion. One wonders whether the twenty-first century still possesses grammatical standards at all. Rovira has been meticulous in her footnotes, explaining the most rudimentary aspects of a gentleman’s life—Eton, Trinity, and the proceedings of the Cambridge Union! What next? A glossary for port and cigars?
Rovira: Modern readers like context.
Dilke: Context! In my day we called it education.
Rovira: One final question, Sir Charles. How do you want to be remembered?
Dilke: As a cautionary tale, perhaps—or as proof that reformers and sinners are often the same species. I once hoped to improve the world; now I’d be content to correct its proofs. Tell your readers that monarchy endures, republics wobble, and punctuation is eternal. Festina lente, my dear. And mind your commas.
When the screen stilled, the archive window seemed warmer, as though a page had just come fresh from the press.
The Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco—edited and revised for Heavy Crown Press—is available now on Kindle and will be available soon as a paperback.
Perfect reading for the season when the past insists on speaking—and the ghosts insist on footnotes.
⚜️