Kate Williams Read online

  In 1776, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at the age of twenty-five, bought a half share in the theater from its actor-manager, David Garrick. A brilliant playwright, Sheridan was an incompetent manager. Playwrights claimed he never answered their letters, and he forgot to pay his employees. Most of the time, as the actress Kitty Clive wrote, “everyone is raving against Mr. Sheridan.” He appointed his family to the plum positions. His pompous father became artistic director, and he made his father-in-law, Thomas Linley, musical director, putting his motherin-law, Mary Linley, in charge of costumes and props. Infuriated by their autocratic and inexperienced new managers, performers defected to Covent Garden and provincial theaters. The servants also left, and so, as Emma found, there were new jobs on offer.

  Mary Linley was forty-three. Four of her twelve children had died in infancy, and her husband, Thomas, set the remaining eight to work singing at public recitals. Crowds admired their eldest daughter, beautiful, talented Eliza, while they mocked her greedy parents. In his hit play of 1771, The Maid of Bath, Samuel Foote poked fun at how Mary had tried to force seventeen-year-old Eliza to marry a widower of sixty, a disaster averted only when Sheridan whisked the teenager to France and later married her. Initially, Mary flourished as her son-in-law’s wardrobe mistress. By the time Emma arrived, she was wilting, mourning Thomas, her eldest son and favorite musician, who had drowned in a boating accident in August. She was also concerned over her daughter. Now retired from singing, Eliza was only twenty-one but weak from bouts of tuberculosis and a series of miscarriages. Her father told her husband that if he touched her, it was a “nail in her coffin,” and Sheridan left her to pine in their house in Great Queen Street. By the time Emma arrived, he was besotted with the beautiful actress Mary Robinson, known as Perdita. Grieving for Thomas and angry to see her daughter humiliated by her husband’s infidelities, Mrs. Linley was embittered and almost impossible to please.

  No needlewoman, Emma was Mary’s errand girl. Since the stock dresses were shabby, there was vicious competition for the good costumes. Even the most talented actress struggled onstage without a gorgeous dress in velvet or silk and jewels for attracting light to the face. As one actress complained, a performer “may as well be dead as not in the fashion.“3 Mary had the difficult job of implementing Sheridan’s wardrobe cutbacks. He wrote in his notebook, “New Performers and old ones on new salaries to provide their own white silk stockings.” Players often tore their stockings on the splintered scenery and had to replace them at the cost of a shilling per pair, as well as buying their own gloves, all out of a salary that could be as low as £1 a week. The performers were livid about Sheridan’s cutbacks and blamed Mary, declaring her so mean that she would cut off the “flowing robe of a tragic performer to gain for herself the covering of a footstool, or the materials for a velvet pincushion.“4 As Mary’s messenger, Emma would have taken the heat of their anger.

  Emma’s contact with the actresses was an education. As one theater biographer gossiped, the stage employed “many Ladies and Gentlemen respectable now, whose previous situations in life would have precluded them the possibility of mixing in virtuous society.“5 Few actresses led perfectly virtuous lives. Many became the mistresses of wealthy men in return for money, clothes, and patronage; the rest tended to have affairs with other actors. Although Mrs. Frances Abington had been a courtesan for the celebrated madam Charlotte Hayes, she was “more indebted to her vivacity than to her beauty,” and so by 1778 she had become the theater’s lead comedienne.6 Thanks to her famed sense of style on and off the stage, she was also employed as a fashion consultant, called in by the social elite for emergency fashion disasters and panics before balls and weddings. Margaret Cuyler, another comedienne, was dubbed one of the “Most Fashionable Votaries of Venus” (i.e., a courtesan) by the Rambler’s Magazine of 1783 but maintained a successful career. The third leading actress, Elizabeth Farren, only three years older than Emma, was acting on provincial stages before the age of ten (she was so poor that the other actresses lent her clothes to wear onstage), and she made her debut at Drury Lane at about the same time as Emma arrived. After a glittering career, she married the Earl of Derby and was even selected to walk in the procession of the Princess Royal at her wedding. Mary Robinson capitalized on her connection to the aristocracy in a different way: she began an affair with the Prince of Wales when he saw her play Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and then extracted a substantial pension from him. Emma learned an important lesson from her new mistresses: a dubious background did not prevent a woman from entering the most eminent society.

  As Emma watched from the wings, she realized that acting was more difficult than she had thought. Players had to work hard, accept low pay, and battle against other actors trying to undermine them or seize their position. Only the stars were paid if absent because of illness or if the theater closed (after the death of a royal, they were shut for two weeks). New plays were rehearsed in only a fortnight, and casts had to rehearse several plays at the same time. One actress might have up to forty different parts in a season of 150 nights, and many also worked as singers and dancers. They needed excellent memories, for it was difficult to hear the prompter. Forgetting a line was not only ridiculed by the crowd but heavily fined by the management. The competitive environment bred venomous jealousy, and some even attacked or, like Peg Woffington, stabbed their rivals onstage. They all wanted to outdo each other with fine clothes—and they besieged maids such as Emma with demands and threats.

  In the morning, the theater’s maids were kept busy running errands or helping the other servants with cleaning or watering the trees in front of the stage. Rehearsals of up to four pieces began on the main stage at ten, while the musicians and dancers also practiced. Wearing coats and boots because the theater was unheated, the actors read their lines by the dim light from the upper windows. At two, stagehands began preparing the stage for the performance. The actors devoted the afternoon to fitting costumes, learning lines, drinking, gossiping, and complaining about their wages before dining at four. Throughout it all, Emma and the other maids sorted costumes and parried the actors’ teasing and the actresses’ commands to fetch, carry, or help with an alteration.

  The backstage area that maids had to negotiate was much larger than the area devoted to the front of the house. Behind the maze of ladders, stairs, dingy corridors, and ramps used by animals and carriages, there were offices, areas for sewing and painting scenery, and, because playbills always advertised new scenes and dresses, two dozen or so storage rooms overflowing with backdrops and props. The hundreds of wax candles for the chandeliers were stuffed into the cellar. There were twenty dressing rooms, and those who could afford it had their own personal dresser and maid. The rest used and bullied girls such as Emma.

  The actresses’ dressing rooms were chaotic. Chalk lines divided the women from each other, and each woman had a candle and a small mirror. In air thick with carmine, powder, stain removers, gin, and perfume, women undressed while others rehearsed their lines. Aristocrats came backstage to meet the stars, and actors wandered in to practice. Linley and his minions arrived to explain last-minute changes to the set or casting. Some women petted lapdogs or nursed their babies, and the newest actors were sick from nerves. Amid all the confusion, maids repaired torn bodices or unraveled hems and shooed away unwanted admirers or playwrights.

  No fine lady could dress herself, and much of Emma’s job was to assist the dresser by pulling corset laces tight and buttoning hooks. Actresses piled their tresses high to be in the fashion and to be better seen by the crowd. Their foot-high confections of powdered and decorated hair required daily maintenance, and Emma would have tied up stray strands, re-powdered sections, refreshed flowers, and picked out the dirt. Her own hair was unpowdered, luxuriant chestnut but unfashionably naked. After a frantic round of dressing in the airless heat, the actresses sauntered to the green room. The maids remained, trying to tidy the tangle of dresses before they returned.

  A diff
erent play was acted every night of the week except Sundays, when the theaters were closed. There was dancing and singing in between acts, and the evening would usually finish with a vaudeville performance or a knockabout farce. When Emma arrived, the theater had been open since September 17, and a big hit was the bubbly musical The Camp, about a young woman who disguised herself in male dress to follow her soldier lover to war. Since the most sexually enticing part of a woman’s body was considered to be her lower leg, dramas in which an actress wore male breeches and stockings were inordinately popular, and the crowd-pleasing The Camp treated the audience to the vision of Robinson, Farren, and Cuyler onstage together in breeches. Emma would have seen or at least heard Sheridan’s hit, The School for Scandal, as well as William Congreve’s The Way of the World, in which Abington took the role of the sparkling heroine, Millamant; Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest; and The Beggar’s Opera and Jane Shore.

  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.7 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

  Covent 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.