Kate Williams Read online

  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.

  Prostitutes grabbed at men’s sleeves or elbows and demanded they buy them wine, attempting to encourage them back to the snug at the rear of the tavern, where waitresses served them wine or “purl,” hot beer mixed with gin, through a slit in the wall. A more flash sailor or a tourist afraid of being robbed in the girl’s room might attempt to take her to a bagnio, a type of hotel where rooms were generally hired by the hour. The client first had to pay the man who sat at the bottom of the stairs for the use of the room, and then he was taken upstairs. Sex with prostitutes was often routine. Anal sex was considered to be a shocking crime, and threesomes, group sex, and flagellation were generally confined to the more expensive brothels. Men risked being robbed if they were attended by more than two women. Some customers at the tavern were high on new wages; others simply craved a moment’s release from their dreary lives.

  A client would often want to stay the night, as the room was nearly always more spacious than the overcrowded slum lodging that was his home, and the prostitute would have to hurry him away before rinsing herself, if she wasn’t too drunk or tired, to stave off the pox. Most women had their own special preventative: some used urine, others whatever might be at hand, such as gin, brandy, beer, or punch. Warm water was thought to have greater disinfecting properties, so they warmed it by holding it in their mouths. If a woman had managed to persuade a client to use it, she washed out her condom—a reusable item made from sheep’s gut tied with a ribbon. But condoms cost money. Most people trusted the folk belief that if a woman had been with many men, their sperm was mixed in her womb and so she would not conceive. The greater the number of clients, the safer she believed herself to be from venereal disease and pregnancy.

  A common activity for the tavern prostitute or barmaid was striking lewd postures, performing a striptease while imitating the poses that could be bought in a cheap print from the nearby stalls. In the brothels of Covent Garden, Emma saw and perhaps performed an act she would later electrify the courts of Europe with.

  The tavern customers were men from her own class: laborers, servants, apprentices, builders, and traders. They spent their winter wages on drink and then on girls who, if often no younger and no healthier than their wives, gave for ten minutes the appearance of being happy. The girls were fondest of sailors. With their tanned faces, tattoos, earrings, distinctive and often dandyish clothing, bellowing voices, rolling gait, incomprehensible nautical jargon, and strange stories about monsters, they were like a different species. The girls loved them for their presents of trinkets and because they tended to be kinder than soldiers or laborers. One sailor, Captain Jack Willet Payne, later a friend of the Prince of Wales, claimed to have had an affair with Emma when she was on the streets. A young Horatio Nelson might even have passed her as he wandered through Covent Garden with his fellow sailors. For a man just offshore after a dangerous voyage, flush with cash and lonely after months or even years of all-male company, the alehouse and the prostitute were the first ports of call. Tough, independent Emma would have made an ideal sailor’s mistress. But she was already trying to escape the tavern by becoming an artist’s model.

  Many painters lived and worked in the garrets of Covent Garden, and all—even the most distinguished—scoured the area’s brothels and taverns for potential models. Emma was just the type of girl to catch a painter’s eye. Tall, curvaceous, and creamy-skinned, with glossy chestnut hair and an oval face, she was the English ideal of beauty. She was snatched up by the two greatest portrait painters of the time: bitter rivals George Romney and Joshua Reynolds. Sir Joshua, foremost portrait painter of the age and president of the Royal Academy from 1768 to 1792, was well known for hunting in the brothels of Covent Garden for models, and it seems that he found Emma, perhaps before Romney. His Cupid Unfastening the Girdle of Venus shows a dark-haired, pale-skinned model who looks very much like Emma, her bosom exposed, wearing an almost transparent dress, languish
ing in bed while Cupid unties her blue sash. Prince Potemkin, adviser to Catherine the Great of Russia, requested a copy to adorn the Hermitage, where it still hangs. Another painting that features a model that looks like Emma is Reynolds’s Death of Dido, in which a statuesque dark-haired beauty lies collapsed over a rock, a painting later bought by the Prince of Wales.

  Emma appears to have modeled for one of Reynolds’s greatest paintings, Thais, now resplendent in the drawing room of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. Thais, mistress of Alexander the Great, emerges from the darkness, draped in white, hair flowing behind her, holding a torch to encourage Alexander to set fire to the Temple of Persepolis. When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1781, it caused a sensation. The public demanded to know the identity of the model. She was known only as “Miss Emily” and was thought to have worked as a courtesan for the celebrated madam Charlotte Hayes. Journalists described her as a “woman of the town” and called her variously Miss Emily Potts, Warren, Coventry, and Bertie.3 It was also suggested that she had modeled for Romney, and later commentators declared she had been the mistress of Charles Greville.4 Greville acquired the painting for a costly £157 (although letters show he still had not paid by 1786). The novelist Fanny Burney praised the “Thais, for which a Miss Emily, a celebrated courtesan sat, at the desire of the Hon Charles Greville.“5 Emily was neither a common name nor a generic name for a prostitute. Greville referred to the model for Thais as “Miss Emily,” the same name as he called Emma.6 The evidence all indicates that the model was Emma Lyon—by the time the portrait was exhibited, she had worked for Hayes, modeled for Romney, and was mistress to Greville. Most important of all, the woman in the painting looks exactly like Emma.

  Newspaper reports, caricatures, and firsthand accounts suggest Emma also modeled for the Royal Academy of Art in London.7 She must have been either desperate for money or, in contrast to the other Covent Garden girls, interested in the work of artists. Unlike male models, who lined up in designated London streets, competing to be chosen for their rugged physique by flexing their muscles, few women wanted to model. Those who did were usually elderly courtesans from Drury Lane and St. Giles brought by their madams because they were past the age of entrancing clients. James Northcote, artist and assistant to Joshua Reynolds, was horrified by the “battered courtesan” he saw modeling for his master’s painting of Iphigenia.8 Their work was exhausting. Models had to stand on a raised dais in the bright light of the top-floor rooms of the Royal Academy until four in winter and six in summer, with short breaks every two hours, attempting to maintain a pose with the help of a staff or a rope hanging from the ceiling. A furious St. Giles madam once broke in and tried to attack an artist for forcing one of her girls to stand nearly naked for a whole day without giving her even a crust of bread. Few madams allowed their best girls to carry out such poorly paid work, and the prostitutes found it a hateful, shameful, even unnatural way to make money. In an effort to recruit them, the Academy agreed not to record their names.

  Emma perhaps preferred to model outside of the Academy. She certainly seems to have posed for Romney. His paintings of the time show models who have resemblances to Emma. One early biographer claimed Emma worked from the same Covent Garden tavern as a Miss Arabel, who had modeled for George Romney and introduced him to Emma. Both gossip columnists and Emma’s friend, the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, claimed Romney met her in her youth. A letter Emma wrote to him in 1791, begging him not to divulge details about her early life, indicates that she knew him before she became Greville’s mistress. “You was the first dear friend I open’d my heart to…. you have seen and discoursed with me in my poorer days, you have known me in my poverty…. I own through distress my virtue was vanquished.“9 Poverty, distress, and vanquished virtue are extreme words to describe her restrained life as Greville’s “fair tea maker.” Emma surely refers to the period in the 1770s when her “virtue” was actually threatened. Age only fourteen, it seems, Emma was a favorite model for both Reynolds and Romney. As a caricature of her drawn in 1798-99 later implied, she may also have met Henry Fuseli, friend of Reynolds, whose Nightmare shows a dark-haired model who looks like Emma lying in a faint across a bed.

  Emma’s work as a model provided vital experience for her next position. In early 1779, Emma left Covent Garden and her brief flirtation with tavern nightlife for good. London’s most celebrated quack doctor, James Graham, had been searching the taverns of Covent Garden, and he had picked Emma to star in his absurd, exotic Temple of Health.

  CHAPTER 10

  Celestial Goddess

  In 1778, James Graham, entrepreneur, sex therapist, and showman, burst onto London society. He hired a townhouse in the fashionable area of the Adelphi, off the Strand by the Thames in central London, called it a “Temple of Health,” and gave nightly lectures about sexual matters and the power of electricity, as harnessed by him, to cure all ills. Graham was a supreme showman and his lectures were extravaganzas featuring explosions, smoke, fireworks, music, and, to London’s utter delight, a phalanx of glamour girls posing in flimsy white dresses. In an adjoining room was the Electrical Throne, which dispensed electric shocks to clients. Next door lay his prized Celestial Bed, which, he claimed, guaranteed “perfect Babies even to the Barren.” Dubbed the “Emperor of the Quacks,” the handsome thirty-five-year-old with a genius for self-promotion became London’s first celebrity guru, and the girls on the stage were his stars.

  Emma never discussed her early life, so she never wrote that she modeled in the Temple, but she seems to have told her friends that she did so, and she later sponsored stories in the newspapers that referred to her as a Goddess of Health. Dubious as the Temple was, to be an assistant to Graham was a much less scandalous occupation than being a tavern girl, and it was a job Emma felt she could acknowledge. Her early life as Graham’s model was often central to newspaper reports about her—even thirty years later—and Emma never denied it, although she refuted other assertions. Somehow she managed to make the leap from lowly tavern girl to mistress to the aristocracy, and it is most likely she attained this promotion through dancing at the Temple.

  It seems that Emma began work in early January. Graham combed Covent Garden looking for girls with confidence, natural grace, beauty, and the appearance of good health. He also advertised in the newspapers for a young woman who was “personally agreeable, blooming, healthy and sweet-tempered… She is to live in the Physician’s family, to be daily dressed in white silk robes with a rich rose coloured girdle. If she can sing, play on the harpsichord or speak French, greater wages will be given. Enquire Dr Graham, Adelphi Temple.” His readers knew what kind of a girl he was advertising for under the flowery description—one willing to live with a man in the Strand, like a mistress. Since Emma was still under sixteen, she was, like maids of her age, paid in board and the odd penny of pocket money.

  Fanning the flames of London’s interest in new shows with effusive promotion, Graham declared the Temple an “enchanting Elysian Palace” where love, beauty, and “all that can ravish the senses, will hold their court.” An Aladdin’s cave stuffed with rented glitz, the lecture theater sparkled with gold decorations, silver statues of Venus, and expensive mirrors. Oriental drapes and paintings of medieval knights adorned the walls, and chandeliers and crystals glittered down from the ceiling. Graham had even affixed colored panes to the original sash windows so they resembled stained-glass windows. Huge glass tubes bubbled with gold liquid (Graham claimed it was electricity). On the stage was the “Temple of Apollo,” a cupola on pillars almost eight feet high, topped with flaming lamps.

  The great Celestial Bed occupied the adjoining bedroom. Graham claimed that the Bed was worth the preposterous sum of £100,000. The bed was available for hire at £50 a night. Graham’s goddesses danced around the bed to advertise it to customers and then repeated the performance once the clients were under the sheets. The Bed was a king-size concoction of brass, purple satin, and crystal pillars, raised three
feet off the ground, topped with a dome filled with “Arabian” perfumes in the “style of those in the Seraglio of the Grand Turk,” and a statue of Hymen holding a cage containing two live doves. Like a bed in a high-class brothel, the underside of the canopy was decked with mirrors, the panels were carved with erotic scenes, and the frame could be tipped forward, back, or sideways. While the couple used the bed, music played around them and, according to Graham, “streams of light” whooshed up the pillars. Then the so-called electricity bubbling in the tubes apparently connected with the five hundred magnets inside the bed to create an explosion of, in Graham’s words, “exhilarating force of electrical fire.” The “fire,” Graham promised, caused the users to be “powerfully agitated in the delights of love.” Such “superior ecstasy” would apparently produce a conception and guarantee a child. The divine illusion of the Bed was probably maintained by the Goddesses playing the secret music behind the wall, wafting perfumes around the room, and pulling levers that jolted the bed to give the clients what they believed were “electrical shocks.”

  Graham’s promise of a child was a surefire winner with aristocrats desperate for an heir. Women were soon queuing in their carriages outside the Temple in the hope of being cured of their infertility. Graham’s rhetoric harmonized with the widespread belief that conception occurred only when the woman had an orgasm, which caused her to ovulate spontaneously. It was not until 1845 that scientists discovered that dogs ovulated in regular cycles and began to suggest that the same principle might apply to humans. Although a belief in the need for ovulation encouraged an interest in female sexuality, medical books did not encourage men to try to please their wives. Authors placed the responsibility firmly on the woman to greet her husband’s efforts with “equal ardour.” Infertility was always seen as the fault of the woman: she was weak, undersexed, or simply lazy.