ABSTRACT
Few fictional babies-and perhaps few real ones, either-emerge to the kind of fanfare and relief that greet the son of Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser at the end of Can You Forgive Her? That he is a son, of course, and not a mere child, is hardly incidental. “Yes, my bonny boy,—you have made it all right for me;—have you not?” Glencora tells “the small, purple-born one” not long after his birth.2 Though for an alarmingly long time, Glencora had shown no signs of even being able to become pregnant, she well knows that producing a healthy baby is not nearly enough to make things “all right.” Her tiny “mannikin” (vol. 2, p. 415) may not act much different from any other infant, of whatever sex, but that he is the healthy male heir to the future Duke of Omnium means the pressure is off. “I shall dare to assert myself, now” (vol. 2, p. 416), Glencora declares. And indeed she does, or tries to-with enormous vivacity-through the next four books of the Palliser series.3
