ABSTRACT
Charlotte Cibber's marriage to the persistently unfaithful and extravagant Mr. Charke also ended in separation after little more than a year, but in her case there was no financial settlement: she was left with her husband's debts, and a daughter to bring up alone. This chapter explains that if the difference between safe' and dangerous' models of female same-sex relationships in the long eighteenth century is crucially one of class, as Susan Lanse has persuasively argued, the social gulf between Scott and Charke reinforces our sense of their polarization: Scott, a respectable woman writer from a gentry family, living on equal and affectionate terms with an Earl's daughter for many years; Charke, the notoriously raffish cross-dressing actress and Jack of all trades, whose closest contact with the aristocracy had been as Gentleman to a certain Peer'. Charlotte's childish pleasure in cross-dressing is described at length and marked in the narrative: Having, even then, a passionate Fondness for a Perriwig'.
