England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (9 page)

Only the boxes could be booked in advance. The doors into the theater opened at five-fifteen. Servants held seats for the aristocracy while ticket holders scrambled for the best places or employed a man to reserve a seat. Fifteen people were killed in a stampede at the Haymarket Opera House in 1794. An average playgoer might wait an hour in the street, half an hour inside the theater before the doors to the auditorium were opened, and another hour in his seat before the curtain up. To fill the time, he might read the leaflets on sale at the door that detailed which luminaries occupied each box. At ten to seven (six-fifteen in winter), a bell rang to instruct the orchestra to stop, and the performance began. There was no heating and little space between seats, so people wore their coats throughout the performance, which could last up to five hours.

As the play proceeded, Emma hurried around the theater carrying water, props, soap, and drapes. She may even have ventured onto the stage. In his diaries, Sheridan instructed that, in order to save money, servants and assistants should be used on busy nights in processions and crowd scenes. The future Lady Hamilton may have first appeared to the public as a vagrant in
The Beggar's Opera
or as a peasant in one of Shakespeare's crowd scenes. Backstage staff marveled at the stamina of the performers. An actress strove to compel the attention of thousands, who shrieked insults and compliments as well as suggestions on delivery, movement, and even dress. If she was popular, they might clap through her entire performance.
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When the theaters were rebuilt in the 1790s, they appear to have contained water closets, but in Emma's time, those in boxes used chamber pots, while everyone else had to dash outside. Sellers touted fruit in the gallery, and prostitutes cruised for customers. Scene shifters added to the chaos, along with the stream of people arriving at the end of the third act for half price. Many performers resorted to outrageous overacting to keep the attention of the audience. Foreign visitors gaped as English actors feigned death by staggering back and forth across the stage while bellowing loud groans. Any actress who succeeded in conveying believable emotion was truly worth her salary.

After the show was over, Emma took Mary her tea and then began to sort the company's clothes to go to the washerwomen: the richest dresses were brushed and aired, and then the silk dresses and stockings had to be sorted into a separate pile from the cotton shirts and dresses. Only much
later was she allowed to drag herself back to her lodgings, aching from carrying, her head ringing with the sound of the theater. It was a struggle to remain a maid, surrounded by beautiful women paid to behave as they pleased.

In December, tragedy struck. The Linleys' second (now eldest) son, fourteen-year-old Samuel, left his ship and went home with cholera. He was buried on December 6. Eighteen-year-old fencing master and socialite Henry Angelo, a pallbearer at the funeral and a friend of the Linleys, claimed that Emma left Mary's employ because she was so distressed by his death.
⁸
Angelo was making excuses for his friends: no maid would voluntarily leave in December a position that she liked. Emma was probably the victim of a cost-cutting drive. Families always fired maids if money was tight, for it was so easy to find a replacement later. Perhaps Mrs. Lin-ley wished to get rid of Emma before the January slump or suspected her of getting above her station. Mistresses often turned against maids— especially pretty ones—and in the days before employment rights, no one thought to concern themselves as to why. Emma was not given a reference, but one would not have done her much good anyway. Few families wanted a girl who had been employed in a theater.

Emma had managed to keep clear of prostitution for nearly eighteen months. It was not a bad achievement, as many new arrivals to London succumbed within three months or less. A girl sacked without references had little alternative after she had sold the few clothes she owned. Within a few days, Henry Angelo spotted Emma on the streets, hungry, but in a prime position for a man looking for a girl: standing against a post on the corner of New Compton Street in Soho.

CHAPTER 9
The Square of Venus

C
ovent Garden was the biggest and most flamboyant street spectacle in Europe. Rakes and pickpockets swarmed across the piazza, and the streets and alleys nearby teemed with prostitutes. Visitors were pop-eyed with excitement. "Covent Garden is the great Square of Venus," reported one, "and its purlieus are crowded with the practitioners of this Goddess." There were, he decided, "lewd Women in sufficient numbers to people a mighty Colony"
¹
Among the new arrivals was thirteen-year-old Emma Lyon, the latest attraction in a Drury Lane tavern.

Henry Angelo saw Emma in Soho, but she was soon working nearby in the area around Drury Lane.
²
Although it seems likely that she did work in prostitution, she may simply have been a tavern waitress or barmaid. Either way, it was only a temporary job for a few months, common for girls of her class, and it never deserved the stress put on it by her detractors and most Nelson scholars and biographers since. One in eight of all London's adult females worked as prostitutes in the late eighteenth century. Reliable commentators put the number at well upward of 50,000 out of a population of around 850,000. Such estimates didn't count the kept mistresses nor the many maidservants and wives who supplemented their income with casual sex work. Sailors, builders, soldiers, workmen, and students thronged the city, as well as visiting merchants, travelers, and businessmen, most of whom were single or far away from their wives. A contemporary wrote that "there are few men who in some period of their lives have not dealt in mercenary sex." Since well-bred girls waited until marriage, or at least evidence of a long-term commitment, most men chose to pay for sex.

Nearly all of London's prostitutes were, like Emma, single teenage girls without male relations, recent migrants to the city. Around a third had been domestic servants who turned to the streets when they were fired. Most were under eighteen, some hardly older than twelve, and nearly all had lost their virginity, usually about one or two years before beginning work. Many had been pregnant at least once.

Girls such as Emma had few options. They needed money to be apprenticed, and they usually lacked the skills to become a seamstress or a milliner. Work in the soap factories or brick kilns meant a twelve-hour day in steaming conditions, risking acid burn and injury. Many women believed prostitution less dangerous than factory work and more bearable than domestic service: there were no early starts, backbreaking scrubbing, lascivious masters who considered their maids fair game, or need to be perpetually servile. A prostitute was her own mistress, and to mistreated servants, weary of obeying, any independence was alluring. We might think nowadays that we would rather steal or beg. Beggars, however, were usually attacked, and crimes against property were so stringently punished that a girl who stole a handkerchief could be executed or deported. While the authorities prosecuted theft with vigor, they let off those they found soliciting for sex—particularly the younger girls—with a caution. Society turned a blind eye to prostitutes, for it was thought that without them, men would resort to sodomy or to assaulting respectable "innocent" girls. It was also thought to have economic benefits: if men paid for sex, they would be less anxious to marry and thus spare employers the burden of paying out the larger wages due to married men.

Young girls took to the streets without understanding the dangers. Most prostitutes were addicted to opium and gin within months of starting work, and nearly all had been viciously beaten (clients were usually acquitted for any crime on a prostitute) or had suffered from botched abortions. Since most men in large cities had syphilis or gonorrhea, nearly all prostitutes were infected within a year of walking the streets. Some caught pneumonia and all lived hand to mouth, pawning their clothes to buy drink. Only those who stole from their clients broke even. Many graduated to petty crime and were, as was common for a young female criminal, deported to Australia for stealing a trinket. Some girls did marry or progress to different employment, but many died within five years from disease, abortion, or assault by a client.

Attractive girls attached themselves to a tavern. Only the old and diseased
women operated solely on the streets, often resorting to dark corners or colonizing one of the many deserted, crumbling houses. The tavern owner charged clients for the use of a room and took a cut of the girl's wages, but he could drum up customers if the night was slow, and his house was a form of protection for her. Taverns were gambling clubs, betting shops, and drinking dens, and because no respectable woman would visit such establishments in the evening, tavern owners depended on prostitutes and barmaids to add a little feminine allure.

More than thirty thousand of London's prostitutes operated in Covent Garden and the streets in the boundaries marked by St. Martin's Lane, Longacre, Drury Lane, and the Strand. "Drury Lane ague" was the slang term for syphilis and "Drury Lane vestal" a prostitute. The area depended on a constant influx of girls such as Emma. Newly built after much of it burned down in 1769, Covent Garden was a playground for the young. Resplendent in silk dresses of garnet, violet, and rouge pink, beribboned and bejeweled, prostitutes mingled with the fashionable crowds around the theater and the poorer Londoners enjoying the sideshows and sword swal-lowers, girls selling oranges or garish hothouse blooms. One Frenchman claimed that the "women of the town" were "more numerous than at Paris, and have more liberty than at Rome." The street echoed with lewd invitations, and in backstreets the women waited almost naked. Male prostitutes, ornate in elaborate costume jewelery, loitered on corners. Procuresses and their bouncers or bullies shadowed girls to ensure they did not run away. Aristocrats came from miles around to watch the show or, like biographer James Boswell commented only a few years before, to seek young actresses and demimondaines. Even if she was only a barmaid, Emma had become a part of London's biggest and most popular tourist spectacle.

Covent Garden even had a guidebook. From 1765,
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
was published every year, the work of a variety of hacks.
Harris's List
detailed the prostitutes' appearances, their lodgings, and their particular talents. Up to eight thousand copies were apparently sold every year by tavern keepers or from the kiosks around the piazza that also sold contraceptives, tobacco, sweets, pornography, and pills for venereal disease. The book often indicated the clients they preferred, such as "Miss G----------N," who was "particularly fond of sailors." All used stage names (even a young lady who dubbed herself Sarah Siddons, after the most famous actress of the day), so we would be unable to identify Emma, even if the
Harris's List
from 1777-78 had not been lost. In 1788, after Emma
had long left the city, an enterprising lady in Queen Street adopted the name of "Miss H-m-lt-n" and claimed to be "very fond of dancing." By 1788, Emma's fame had spread so far that prostitutes were imitating her.

Emma had been turned away from the Linleys'just in time to catch the Christmas trade. London was packed with gentlemen, workmen, and servants. "Every house from Cellar to Garrett is inhabited by Nymphs of different orders, so that Persons of every Rank can be accommodated," declared one commentator. There were girls costing thousands of dollars in today's money, and girls for a few cents. Emma now understood the true profession of the fine ladies who sauntered around Drury Lane. Without warm underwear, she was heated only by gin. Lead-based white paint and beauty spots coated her face, her lips gleamed red with cochineal, and her hair was piled high on her head. Her dress was brightly colored, but the style was two or three seasons out of fashion. Made from fabric woven on looms by children in the sweatshops of Spitalfields and sold to fine ladies by Cheapside drapers, gowns cut for ladies who never walked outside, came to Emma after they had been worn out and passed to maids who sold them to the secondhand clothes markets in Monmouth Street or Rag Fair. She would have owned only two dresses at most, but the small wardrobe was an advantage: it helped men to recognize her.

The room of a tavern barmaid or prostitute bore the traces of the hundreds who had passed through: the dirty floorboards were worn down by boots, and the walls were permeated with the stench of beer from downstairs. Purse under her skirts to hide it from pickpockets, she grabbed some breakfast of a fatty meat pie or a piece of bread from a cookshop. Barmaids began their day of cleaning in the morning, and prostitutes started work in the afternoon, between two and four, earlier if the previous night had been quiet. A few tricks a day was usually enough, and in winter it was hard to find more, for even the drunks would not linger long on the streets. She had to work her patch: finding a man who looked neither diseased nor deranged, being careful not to stray too near other women, who might attack her, evading those she knew were rivals, potential thieves, or simply insane.