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  Emma was probably unpaid because she was under sixteen. Budd’s income was perhaps £700 a year, and even if she did receive a salary, it would not have been more than £1 a year. She would have had to work harder than in Hawarden for her keep. Most houses had to be washed twice a week from top to bottom, and staircases and entrances had to be scrubbed daily. The maids shared the jobs of housemaid, scullion, and kitchen maid. They needed an almost continuous supply of water to keep the Budds’ house clean. Although it is possible that there was a piped water supply or the family paid the extortionate fees of a water carrier, it is more likely that Emma or Jane staggered with buckets from one of the pumps by the Thames. Luckily, the river was thought to have the healthiest air in London, and a visit there was a pleasant trip and a chance to socialize by the fountain.

  At five o’clock every morning, Emma would light the kitchen fire, clean the hearth, and prepare the utensils for the cook to make breakfast. She scrubbed, swept, and dusted the breakfast parlor and then, after the family woke, she lit their bedroom fires, emptied their chamber pots, and brought them hot water with which to wash. While the family breakfasted at around eight on bread and meat or porridge, Emma and the other maids made the beds, put back the shutters, swept the rooms, cleaned the grates, dusted, and took the washstand water downstairs. After breakfast, she had to clean the plates and dishes, scour the pans with a mix of sand and soap, and then start scraping the fireplaces. Her hands were perpetually plunged in soapy water, for her job was to scrub: furniture, utensils, stonework, floor, and hearths. The streets were so muddy that clothes often needed to be washed daily. A French visitor decided that an ideal lower servant was a “fat Welsh girl, who was just come out of the country, scarce understood a word of English, was capable of nothing but washing, scowering, and sweeping the rooms, and had no inclination to learn anything more.“3 Emma, however, knew exactly what she was missing.

  Short biographies of Emma’s fellow maid Jane Powell were published after she became an actress, and all claim her work in Chatham Place was harsh. The Budds, like most employers, no doubt expected their servants to work like drones, show meek obedience whenever they encountered a member of the family, and accept punishment submissively. Servants were beaten for laziness, insolence, untidiness, slowness, or carelessness, and often if the master was simply irritated. One girl who became a maid of all work at the age of ten claimed she was regularly hit with sticks. Maids strove to avoid their mistresses, always ready to go to the pump or buy provisions at the market. Although the cook dealt with the tradesmen (a sought-after task, as it gave the opportunity for taking bribes), maids were allowed to buy milk from the milkmaids leading cows through the squares. Emma’s lunch break came at around half past eleven, and then she resumed her laundry, polishing, and sweeping. After her supper at four she would assist with the preparation of the Budds’ meal. A typical supper for middle-class families was pea soup, stewed carp or tripe, rabbit or veal, vegetables, and then ajam or fruit tart, usually taken at about five. Emma had to work longer in summer because of the light, but in winter, unless the Budds entertained at home, she was free by seven, after all the pans had been scrubbed and replaced and the bedrooms prepared for their occupants.

  Mrs. Budd would have given Emma one of the many bestselling servants’ manuals. Rather than assisting the servant to live on a tiny salary and cope with homesickness, a spiteful mistress, the sexual advances of a master, and the petty cruelties of the household’s children, such books dwelt on how servants could be corrupted by dissolute behavior and drink. The authors preached that the “Town proves a school of corruption” and the streets “swarm with these servants of Iniquity, who are continually carrying on a trade of sin” and “subsist by the price of slaughtered souls.“4 Like most servants, Emma and Jane paid no attention to such instructions. In their room upstairs after work, they tried to beautify themselves, then ventured out to the city.

  Neither girl had any desire to stay in domestic service and work her way up to becoming a cook. Emma would have tried to avoid putting her hands in soap whenever possible, if she already suffered from the psoriasis that later plagued her.5 Everywhere she saw women in fine clothes she could not afford. As one of the magazines that she might have read when she was in Chatham Place declared, “luxury was never at so great a height as at present.“6 Indignant with envy, she scrubbed the hearth, cherishing hopes of a better life.

  CHAPTER 7

  Temptations to Voluptuousness

  After seven o’clock, genteel families such as the Budds drank tea behind thick curtains that shut out the street. Elsewhere, the owners of gin palaces and taverns brushed the straw over the floor and set up tables for gambling as prostitutes began their toilette. The novelist Henry Fielding described the alleys of the City as “a vast wood or forest in which a Thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or Arabia.1 The backstreets of London were no place for a young girl fresh from the country. Emma was lucky to have Jane as her guide.

  Jane Powell was Emma’s first close female friend. She had a crucial influence on her new fellow maid, little Miss Lyon, fresh from the Welsh hills. Jane’s contemporaries described her as restless, fond of pleasure, and ambitious from childhood to perform on the London stage. As she told the new maid at Chatham Place, she was desperate to be an actress. The darlings of the newspapers, actresses wore fabulous clothes, enjoyed the adulation of the public and the adoring advances of famous men, and—if they wanted—could marry into the aristocracy. Acting was essentially the only occupation open to women that paid a reasonable salary. Electrified by Jane’s effusive descriptions, Emma shed her old self, the unsophisticated country girl, and became a sharp city maid, hungry for stardom in the theater.

  We can reconstruct Jane’s life by reading contemporary accounts of the theater, playbills, newspaper gossip, and the collections of biographies of the stars of the Drury Lane, Haymarket, and Covent Garden theaters, Authentic Memoirs of the Green Room and Secret History of the Green Room. The authors of these early gossip magazines were usually struggling playwrights who knew the theater well, and since their sources were the actors, their friends and agents, or even the theater management, the pieces were fairly reliable. The Green Room books were reprinted frequently, and Jane never changed her entry, which suggests that she was reasonably satisfied with the contents.

  According to her biographers, Jane’s father was an army sergeant. After her mother died in childbirth, Jane, her siblings, and the new baby moved from their home in Kent to his London barracks in Blackfriars.2 By the age of eleven or so, she had become the toast of the company, no doubt by acting in camp plays. Her father cut short her fun by sending her to work for Dr. Budd at Chatham Place, probably, like Emma, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Of “a romantic turn,” Jane detested her work. As the writer puts it:

  We find her in a menial capacity with a family in the vicinity of Chatham-square, an enthusiastic Spouter, and unable to attend her business, from a desire of seeing Plays, and studying Speeches. The confinement and slavery of her place did not agree with her temper.

  Emma surely joined her in rehearsing tragic parts while they scrubbed the floor, spouting Ophelia when the cook was out of earshot. It seems as if Emma was dismissed first and Jane, perhaps finding the job unbearably dreary without her, “decamped her servitude,” as her biographer put it, and fled the Budds’ with a soldier called Farmer to Coxheath Camp. Private Farmer soon decided to be rid of her. Vainly pretending to herself that he had loved her, Jane called herself Mrs. Farmer, but she soon fell into “every distress and disgrace that can befall her sex.” She first became the company laundress, and then a serial mistress-cum-prostitute or “conspicuous Character in the Camp.” Finally, “despising a subaltern when she could charm his Commander, she eloped with the Captain to London, where they lived together in a style she had not been used to.” When he deserted her, she was left at the age of fourteen to “forage for herself.” Sh
e could not return to domestic service, for “she was now unfit, as well as from the habits she had lately been used to, as from a want of character [i.e., a reference], so necessary to persons of that description.” No support came from her family, and Jane found herself bereft of “present subsistence, or even of a favourable prospect.” She had no choice but to work as a streetwalker, probably in the Covent Garden area. As her biographer put it, “we need not wonder at or explain the remedy she adopted to relieve her from embarrassment; —a remedy which, when embraced from necessity, deserves forgiveness, but when embraced from inclination deserves the severest reproach.”

  Jane never lost her ambition to act. She raved about plays and the theater so enthusiastically with her clients that she was “distinguished from others of the frail sisterhood by the appellation of the Spouter.” Her fortunes improved when she gained an influential client, presumably a rich aristocrat with theatrical connections. After she left her profession to be his exclusive mistress, he pulled strings, negotiated with the theater management, and paid money for her to appear onstage; as well as buying her costumes.3 Jane, as Mrs. Farmer, made her debut in 1787 at the Haymarket as Alixia, a tragic heroine in Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore. Having worked as a prostitute for eight years, Jane was ready to play mature roles at twenty-two.

  As the theater record books show, Jane had steady work in minor roles, often in tragedies and Shakespeare’s history plays. She married William Powell, a prompter and minor actor at Drury Lane. Her advantages were her height (it helped her to be seen on the stage) and her expressiveness, but her face was not beautiful. She spent a long time working in secondary roles, striving after the tabloid celebrity so crucial to stardom. In the season of 1789-90, for example, her weekly salary was one of the lowest at £3, considering that Miss Farren earned £17 a week and Dorothy Jordan took home £10 a night. Gradually, however, Jane grew more popular.4 By 1800, in her mid-thirties, she was seen as the second tragedienne after Sarah Siddons, and she was earning a decent salary of £8 a week. She appeared onstage for the last time in 1829 before dying in London five years later.

  Emma and Jane would renew their friendship when they were in their thirties. In 1777, however, stardom was a dream. They were intent only on finding fun. The lamps attached to the Budds’ door cast a light that reached no farther than the middle of the street, and once they left Chatham Place, they were in the dark. In the absence of a police force, with only decrepit watchmen as guards, the local area around Chick Lane and Field Lane to Turnmill Street and Cowcross (around modern-day Farringdon tube stop, just north of the City, about half a mile from St. Paul’s Cathedral), was one of London’s most dangerous places and a playground for criminal gangs.5 Soldiers discharged from the war, laborers, and aristocrats used the cover of darkness to prey on maids. Dressed in makeshift finery and already a little drunk on snatched gin, the girls had to walk quickly toward the center of town. High above them, in rooms poorly lit by tallow candles, younger girls worked late, five to a room, sewing shirts, while children in other garrets counterfeited coins in bowls of green acid.

  Young servants tended to mill around Covent Garden, watching the cockfighting and the magicians, buying hot meat sandwiches from the all-night food shops, and looking for young men, laborers and servants like themselves. James Parry, later a friend of Emma’s, claimed he met her and Jane when they were teenage maids, giggling on the streets.

  Maids loved attending fairs. Henry Fielding thundered, “What greater Temptation can there be to Voluptuousness than a Place where every Sense and Appetite of which it is compounded, are fed and delighted,” and where the lowliest might dress up and pretend to be rich gentlefolk?6 One visitor decided that girls moved to London simply to attend the lord mayor’s procession in early November; others complained that fairs left the young “debauch’d and corrupted.” As each regional group brought different types of fairs to London, Emma had hundreds from which to choose. On May Day, dairymaids hired garlands of white damask decorated with ribbons and flowers and topped with a silver tankard to walk their cows around London. There were bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day and Oak Apple Day, which celebrated Charles IPs escape from the Parliamentarians. She was probably allowed a day or so for Bartholomew Fair, which took place in Smithfield Market, very near to Chatham Place. In the last week of August and the first week of September, the area was overrun with sideshows and stalls selling sweets. The year before Emma arrived, an edict to close the fair after three days caused riots. At Bartholomew Fair, there were wild men captured in Scotland, female wrestlers, fortunetellers, singers, early versions of fairground rides, and tents showing short plays of familiar stories from romance or legend. In one year, the most popular attraction was an elephant able to fire a gun. Emma and Jane hoped that they might be discovered. Everybody knew that the libertine Earl of Rochester had found a young Elizabeth Barry declaiming tragedy between food stalls at Bartholomew and transformed her into the most successful actress of her generation.

  Young people grew up fast. Emma’s path through life was so far very typical, and so we might hazard that, like most girls of her age and position, she lost her virginity at twelve (there was no legal age of consent), most likely during the holiday periods of Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, or the Bartholomew fortnight. Fairs were an opportunity for the young to enjoy themselves, and pregnancy was often the consequence. Emma was enjoying herself, but Mrs. Budd was growing increasingly concerned about her behavior. The final straw came when Jane and Emma stayed out all night. Since it appears to have been in early autumn, they had probably been at Bartholomew Fair, enjoying the quacks, laughing at the puppet shows, and flirting with apprentices. When they returned, Mrs. Budd was waiting for them. What she had to say was short: Emma was fired. Something must have made the doctor’s wife very angry, for she didn’t dismiss Jane, and Emma, although not very industrious, was young, strong, and cheap. Mistresses had a perennial dilemma: if they gave notice to one girl, would the next be any better? Emma may have answered back, or perhaps Mrs. Budd suspected a pregnancy. Either way, her mind was made up, and Emma was turned out and sent straight to the streets.

  Nearly a quarter of servants in Emma’s time left their position within a week to three months. Servants could be sacked for the slightest mistake or sign of illness, or simply because the family needed to save money or was leaving town. One magistrate estimated that around the time of Emma’s arrival in the capital, there were more than ten thousand domestic servants without a position. There was no unemployment insurance, and even if she had been a good worker, there was no guarantee of a reference. Without a recommendation or the money to return home, the single female servant had no choice but to head for the areas where the poor lived and try to avoid falling into prostitution or crime.

  Thirteen-year-old Emma already had the energy, beauty, and self-confidence that would carry her far, but such qualities had a darker underside—an addiction to glamour, a hot temper, and a desire to please by winning attention. There was no way that her life of drudgery could continue: she was too pretty and ambitious. On leaving the Budds, equipped only with a few dresses and one or two trinkets from admirers, Emma headed straight for the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden, the most sensational spectacle in London.

  CHAPTER 8

  Powder and Paint

  Emma, as a squire later described her, was “designed by Dame Nature for the Stage.”1 First, however, she had to find somewhere to live. She fled to her mother, who lived in the St. Giles area, near modern-day Oxford Street, right in the middle of the city2 Paying up to threepence a night, London’s new workers slept sometimes twenty to a room and between three to eight to a bed in windowless, rat-infested cellars and garrets. Every drafty crevice was stuffed with paper or rags, and the rooms were pitch dark, even at midday. Going out was as risky as staying in, since ragged, cunning humans awaited in every corner, looking for something to steal, and even a clean dress on a woman would do. Dozens died every week, too poor to do anything
more than buy a few drops of gin and sprinkle them on a rag to suck, while stray dogs and rats picked at the sewage around them. Emma was living in squalor, gathering flea bites on her shins, and she had no plans to hang around. She was soon trying for a job at the oldest and most prestigious theater in London.

  Her chances of becoming an actress were slim. Hundreds of girls queued at the stage door every month, but few were allowed to audition. Many actresses came from theatrical families, and most began on the provincial stage or as dancers. Quick, clear, and sweet speech was more important than beauty, and Emma’s voice was raw and untrained. She had no patron to smooth the way by bribing theater owners or supplying her with contacts and clothes. Most aspiring actresses ended up working as waitresses, barmaids, or prostitutes. Emma did have one advantage over the others: she could read. She also had spirit, vital in the rough and competitive world of the theater, as well as sturdy health, experience in service, freedom from parental control (no concerned mother would allow a thirteen-year-old to serve as an actress’s assistant), and youth (her salary would be very low). Emma was probably removed from the audition line and put to work as maid to Mrs. Linley, the wardrobe mistress.

  Drury Lane, on the site of the modern-day theater, was big business. Only one other theater—Covent Garden—could stage full plays, and since London had only one opera house and no other regular theater for ballet, comedy, musicals, or indeed any type of entertainment, over two thousand eager patrons crammed into Drury Lane every night. In the season of 1778-79, when Emma arrived, her new home employed 46 actors, 32 actresses, 13 dancers, and 6 singers, as well as a full orchestra and about 150 support staff: seamstresses, hairdressers, carpenters, painters, animal handlers, chorus masters, and choreographers, along with temporary painters and workmen when needed. The yearly profits often hit over £6,000, once the costs of around £40,000 had been paid. The architect Robert Adam had renovated the building in the 1770s by adding a graceful classical façade and decorating the walls in sumptuous gold leaf, while improving the stage lighting. Beneath the graceful, gilded ceilings were terrible rivalries and factions. Emma had arrived at a theater in crisis.