Kate Williams Read online

  As a Goddess on the stage and performing around the bed, Emma was the luminous star of Graham’s light and sound spectacular. As Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun claimed, Emma, as Graham’s Hygeia or Goddess of Health, “attracted the curious and the idle in droves; artists were particularly charmed by her.”1 Emma became a symbol of beauty to the capital’s most fashionable citizens. “Daily he attracted overflowing audiences,” claimed a neighbor, and Henry Angelo described “carriages drawing up next to the door of this modern Paphos, with crowds of gaping sparks on each side, to discover who were the visitors, but the ladies faces were covered, all going incog.” Famous customers included John Wilkes, the rabble-rousing former lord mayor of London, and also tabloid-courting MP Charles James Fox. The Prince of Wales enjoyed its “superior ecstasy” as well, probably with his mistress, the actress Mary Robinson (who never guessed that the Goddess dancing around her bed had recently been one of her dressers at Drury Lane). Following behind Fox and the rebellious prince trailed the fashionable Whig set, the main political opposition who grouped around the heir to the throne. Graham ensured their attention by criticizing the Tory government and the war with America. The Bed, he declared, would create “Beings rational, and far stronger and more beautiful” than the present “puny” race that “crawl and fret, and politely play at cutting one another’s throats for nothing at all.”

  The daily work of a Goddess began with menial domestic tasks: dusting and cleaning the Temple, running errands, and even slopping out the basement (all the houses in the Adelphi flooded when the Thames overflowed). Throughout the day, patients arrived to receive the curing vibrations of the magnetic Celestial Throne, electric shocks in milk baths, or friction rubs and pulses of electric current. By half past four, the patients had returned home and the Goddesses began dressing for the evening’s work in white dresses and pink sashes.

  The heavy doors creaked open at five. For two guineas, London’s socialites secured seats while “harmonious sounds… breathed forth from the altar of the great electrical temple.” At seven, an explosion of fireworks stunned the audience into silence and Graham emerged from a trapdoor in the floor, swathed in satin and encircled by his parading Goddesses, who wore, as one visitor noted, “no more clothing than Venus when she rose from the sea.” He then delivered his “libidinous lecture” on the “celestial brilliancy of that universal resplendent and tremendous fire” in his medicines and bizarre apparatus and their power to cure sexual ills and general debility. Quacks at the humblest fair put on a show, but none had ever fused the theatrical with the “medical” with such verve. Bursting with self-promotion, sexual titillation, and semi-mystic promise, Graham held his audience spellbound. All the while, the Goddesses sang ethereal airs while dancing and posing to show off their radiant health or demonstrate the exercises he recommended. Candles blazed, fireworks exploded, electricity bubbled, and the more louche guests lit pipes—surprisingly, none of the hyped-up doctor’s performances ever sparked a serious fire.

  Graham promised to tell the secrets of “rendering permanent the Joys of the Marriage Bed; of preserving and heightening personal Beauty and Loveliness” and how to maintain the “deep—full—LONG toned juvenile virility” that “ensures female admiration.” Although his argument that pleasurable sexual activity was important to a marriage was revolutionary in an age when men married wives to breed children and maintain their home, and kept mistresses for sex, the lectures revealed more about male ideas of female sexuality than conjugal equality. In a torrent of suggestive rhetoric, verbal pyrotechnics, and explicit description, he trumpeted the “balmy—spirituous—vivifying” properties of the male emission. “Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle,” he claimed, “continually circulating in every part,” no “man or woman can enjoy health.” Graham successfully exploited widespread ignorance about sex, fears of infertility, and fashionable obsessions with electricity, recently discovered and barely understood. Preposterous as his breathless panegyrics were, they were the nearest most had to sex education. At the close of the show, the audience received electric shocks by means of conductors hidden under their cushions. As a finale, a spirit apparently emerged from under the floor and handed the doctor a bottle of Electrical Aether. Then the windows fell dark, the room was suddenly illuminated, and a Goddess appeared. She began to worship the Aether.

  Hail! Wondrous Combination!!!—but chief—THOU FIRE ELECTRIC!

  —Celestial Renovator!—Thou Life of all Things—Hail!

  ——In Majesty and Mystery combin’d!

  Enthron’d—unveil’d—in this tremendous—this most genial Temple!

  To the teenage Goddesses, the Temple was a hilarious joke. Behind the glitz was a chaotic mass of hired clutter, and Graham was always trying to seduce young girls (Mary Robinson later gave up acting to write novels and ridiculed him in Walsingham as a lecherous fraud). And yet it was surely hard not to be affected by the pathos of the desires of many of those who gazed upon them: youthful health, happiness in love, and children. When Graham stopped ranting about electricity, his advice to the infertile was genuinely useful. Borrowing his point from Dr. George Cheyne’s influential English Malady that plain living was the cure for society’s debilitating addiction to fashion and luxury, Graham declared that moderate consumption of rich food and alcohol, fresh air, and exercise, along with regular sex, could encourage conception. To cure overindulgence, he recommended a diet of vegetables, plain meat, and barley, a striking precursor to modern wheat-and dairy-free diets. Rather less beneficial was his extreme detoxifying diet, composed of apples and half a roast potato a day.

  The Goddesses had to sell Graham’s “cures.” He wrote hundreds of pamphlets and books claiming that his potions of electrical fire could remedy every possible ill, including “excessive gaiety,” consumption, blindness, and infertility, as well as preserving beauty through “exciting the electrical fire in the body and limbs.” Graham made preposterous claims for his special potions, probably a collation of salts and water, if not arsenic or worse. Electrical Aether rallied the impotent “exhausted by inordinate and excessive sacrifices to Venus and Bacchus,” and Imperial Pills cured venereal disease. Nervous Aetherial Balsam induced an abortion, or as Graham put it, abolished “every menstrual obstruction in the world— however complicated, or however confirmed.”

  Many declared the Temple no better than a brothel.∗ Although Graham declared that the Bed was reserved for married couples, many men followed the example of the Prince of Wales and took their mistresses. It was said that the Goddesses were available for hire on the bed. A rake living nearby joked that one of Graham’s beautiful employees had caught a fatal chill after spending too much time in “the damp sheets of the Celestial Bed.” Lucrative as the Temple appears to have been, Graham soon moved on. By 1781, he had given up on electricity in favor of the restorative qualities of mud bathing in a cheaper house off Pall Mall. He was later arrested for debt and for allowing gambling and immoral activities. After his release, he toured the provinces selling pills but was imprisoned again for debt and in 1794, just short of fifty, he died, in penury and allegedly insane.

  Gossip columnists in Emma’s later years could never resist commenting on her short period of work at the Temple, and caricaturists nearly always depicted her on the Celestial Bed. When she married, the newspapers tittered that her husband fell in love with her after he saw her modeling for him in a show. Twenty years later, they still burbled about how her perfect figure ensured her job at the Temple, and recalled Graham’s description of Goddesses as “veined with alabaster and streaked with celestial hue.” Despite its preposterous side, the Temple taught Emma useful lessons about dance, posture, and performance. Shows she performed later would seem spontaneous when in fact they had been carefully planned, and like Graham, she exploited lighting and music to add to the effect of a pose and build up an atmosphere around her performance.

  Emma soon left the Temple. The wages were poor and
Graham was unreliable. She probably left because she was offered a better job, perhaps after being spotted by one of the silver-tongued ex-soldiers who worked as scouts for the bawdy houses. By late spring, she had a position in Madam Kelly’s, one of the most exclusive brothels in London.

  ∗ One commentator described it as an “abandon’d place” where “modesty must hide her face” in which “Damsels who use unnumber’d names” cruised the audience for customers. Many “cures” were dubious: Graham boasted that he recommended that a lonely middle-aged woman hire a beautiful young female prostitute.

  CHAPTER 11

  Santa Carlotta’s Nunnery

  All of London’s powerful men knew the address of Madam Kelly’s glamorous brothel on Arlington Street off Piccadilly, next to the modern-day Ritz hotel. Aspiring actresses competed for a place at Kelly’s, since many stars of the eighteenth-century London stage, including Mrs. Abington and Clara Hayward, had learned posture and dance at Arlington Street. Kelly recruited girls such as Emma, who could sing and dance for the visiting aristocrats and royal princes. One tourist wrote, the “admission into these houses is so exorbitant, that, the mob are entirely excluded: there are only a few people who can aspire to the favours of such venal divinities.” Emma, however, did not plan to stay long. Dancing at Kelly’s was her route to gaining a high-status protector.

  Kelly’s house was so notorious that she advertised the arrival of new staff. The Town and Country Magazine showed a picture of “Miss Lyon,” who looked identical to Emma, and reported that the beautiful Miss L—— had been recently set up in the finest brothel buildings by her “Martial Lover.” The magazine looked forward to seeing “Miss L—— flourish as one of the most celebrated demi-reps of the ton,” or the most fashionable London set.1 Kelly capitalized on Emma’s celebrity as a Goddess of Health by parading her around St. James’s Park. There, Henry Angelo caught a tantalizing glimpse of a girl now too expensive for his purse. After her brief stint as a walking advertisement, fourteen-year-old Emma settled to work in her new home.

  Research by previous historians into Emma’s life has failed to ascertain Madam Kelly’s identity. However, if we follow the trail in letters, periodicals, and newspapers, it becomes clear that she was the celebrated Charlotte Hayes. Born in a London slum around 1725, Hayes became a prostitute at the age often or eleven. In about 1750, she was sent to jail for debt and met Dennis O’Kelly, an Irish con man. After she was released she continued to work, and in 1761 a client lent her the capital to open her own brothel in Berwick Street. By the early 1770s, she was running a string of “Nunneries” around the St. James area of Piccadilly. She married Dennis in 1770 and, like many attempting to seem genteel, called herself only Mrs. Kelly. By 1784, under the names of Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Kelly, she had a monopoly on the sex trade in the St. James area, and newspapers and caricaturists acknowledged her as being at the top of her profession. Famed for gratifying every possible “caprice which Flesh is heir to” for men such as the Due d’Orléans and the Duke of Cumberland, youngest brother of the king, Kelly achieved success by matching her clients’ peculiar desires to the skills of her staff.

  The Town and Country Magazine dubbed Kelly’s brothel “Santa Carlotta’s Nunnery” and advertised how it “administers absolution in the most desperate Cases.” The joke about the link between brothels and nunneries was an old one, but by the 1780s, the name was a skit on the notion that the girls were virgins when they arrived (so their keepers claimed) and then kept virtual prisoners. Kelly’s employees struggled under the strict discipline. It was, as they discovered, impossible to leave until they became old and the madam sold them to a cheaper brothel, unless they were lucky enough to find a client who would buy them out.

  Brothels like Madam Kelly’s were renowned for providing music, dancing, and lots of glamorous girls in states of undress.

  St. James was the center of high-class prostitution and its brothels became known as “Les Bordéis du Roi” (the royal brothels) after the riotous Prince of Wales, who was in the process of moving out of his parents’ home, Buckingham House, and into his own residence, Carlton House, on Pall Mall. Only three years older than Emma, the prince spent wildly in anticipation of an income of around £100,000 per year after his twenty-first birthday, and Mrs. Kelly and the other madams of St. James were the beneficiaries. Within five years of living at Carlton House, he had run up debts of nearly £300,000. The prince’s sprees turned an already fashionable area into a playground for the rich. In the daytime, families roamed the waist-high grass of St. James’s Park, queued up to buy fresh milk from one of the cows, and vied for a sight of the elephant from the royal menagerie on its daily promenade. At night, men looked for cheap prostitutes in the park and expensive girls in the nearby houses. St. James was a man’s world, and no respectable woman, even if she were accompanied by an army of male chaperones, would venture into the streets near the park. By the 1830s, there were more than 900 brothels and 850 similar smaller establishments crammed into the half square mile of St. James. Gold showered through their doors—one declared that the money that dissipated in the brothels in a single night would maintain the whole of the Netherlands for six months. Emma had taken up employment in the most expensive sex resort in the world.

  Kelly was fifty-five and at the top of her profession. She had no mercy for anyone: madams in debt, girls desperate to be set free, and groveling men begging not to be exposed to their colleagues or wives. She charged her guests eye-popping prices for food, drink, and medicaments, and kept her staff hopelessly in her debt. As soon as a new girl arrived, Kelly took her clothes and loaned her expensive jewels, dresses, and a gold watch. A timepiece was the crucial sign of a Georgian courtesan, since genteel ladies never wore watches but courtesans had to time their clients. Kelly rented dresses and watches to her staff so that if one escaped (in her finery, for she had nothing else), she would issue a warrant for the girl’s arrest for theft. Kelly took a large cut of her employees’ earnings and billed them for bed, board, and laundry, as well as obliging them to buy expensive silk underwear, costume jewelery, makeup, and contraceptives. She forbade them to buy from anybody else, tried to increase their indebtedness to her by slyly offering them pastries, sweet wine, hairstyling, and trinkets, and forced them to hand over any gifts from clients. She punished attempts to freelance with clients outside the brothel and imposed fines for infringements of her complicated rules. Rather than renting out rooms for seductions (the authorities vigorously prosecuted any brothel involved in the seduction of an innocent girl), Kelly preferred to increase her profits by hiring out her staff to other brothels, social events, and country parties. She refused to take married women—husbands tended to demand big shares of their wives’ wages, to which, legally, they had a right—but she boarded children for a fee.

  Charlotte’s establishment in Arlington Street had exquisite carriages, servants in livery, and furniture worthy of a palace. The girls received their customers in an opulently decorated parlor. No more than six to eight employees worked there at any one time, most between fourteen and twenty-four. Only the very beautiful or very skilled worked into their late twenties. Unlike the Covent Garden prostitutes, they didn’t wear the same dress, and often changed their look or name, since clients loved novelty. Others sought to please by dressing as famous actresses such as Sarah Siddons and Mrs. Abington or society leaders including Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

  “The ladies of pleasure in London,” wrote one client, “give us an idea of the celebrated Grecian courtesans, who charmed the heroes of Athens.” An Arlington Street training had some notable advantages over the typical education of a genteel fourteen-year-old-girl, who learned needlework and music from her governess and spoke to few men other than her father and servants. Kelly invited tutors to teach her employees music, dancing, and languages, and her girls learned other equally useful skills: to feign interest in men’s complaints about their wives and monologues about hunting, and to please by being chee
rful and willing to flatter.

  A courtesan needed elaborate, high hair, so a new Kelly girl had to pay an early visit to a hairdresser. Hair salons were everywhere in London, and specialist stylists, such as David Ritchie, author of Treatise of the Hair in 1770, had waiting lists that were months long. The construction of such confections of coiffure took over three hours of skilled work with pins, braids, and curling tongs, and further hours to decorate. Pupils paid a shilling to practice on life-size models in the back of the shop, and at the front two hairdressers put pads made of horsehair on the client’s head and then stacked the hair on top in a curving tower of three feet or higher. They looped hair in curls to ornament the style and then added a string of fake pearls, a few long feathers dyed blue or pink or yellow (a style fit only for prostitutes, according to Queen Marie-Antoinette’s mother), or even flowers, fruit, or models of houses or boats. The writer Hester Thrale jibed that two fashionable ladies whom she met had the equivalent of two gardens on their heads, “an acre and a half of shrubbery besides slopes, grass plants, tulip beds… and greenhouses.” Such hairstyles made hats impossible, so the hair was usually wrapped in a length of gauze for outdoor excursions. The style would remain in place for about three months and was then reset; in order not to crush it in the interim, the woman had to sleep on a special head support. As hair could not be washed or brushed after styling, many coiffures were infested with insects and lice, sometimes even mice. The fashion for high hair began around 1765, and by the early 1780s it was at its most excessive (becoming less popular after a tax on powder was introduced in 1786 and virtually dying out after a law was passed in 1795 that hairdressers had to take out an expensive annual license for powdering). Although commentators mocked it, the style added height, slimmed the face, and emphasized a lovely neck.