: A struggling writer and "all-round weasel" who runs the Matrimonial Advertiser , a lonely-hearts gazette. He secretly moonlights as a Gothic romance novelist under the pseudonym Dorothea Swann.
The story follows an unlikely partnership between two men from vastly different social strata:
: A dignified, wealthy merchant and former slave from the Caribbean. He is on a mission to stop the daughter of his former masters from eloping with a potentially dangerous suitor she met through Theo's paper.