The prostitute who married a duke

English society expected, even encouraged, men to pay for sex in the 18th century. Prejudice and the law barred women from all but the most menial of jobs so prostitution with all its dangers was a career option worth exploring for some becasue a typical harlot could earn in a month what a tradesman or clerk would earn in a year.

For a few beautiful and savvy women, the gamble of this dangerous occupation paid off. Some became successful matrons of ‘Disorderly Houses’ while the occasional woman came up trumps and married a duke.

The Harlot's Progress,
The death of Moll Hackabout by William Hogarth

Unfortunately, the majority were destined for a life of disease, despair and early death much like William Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout in  The Harlot’s Progress (1731-2).

 

Portrait of Lavinia Fenton, actress

One girl who got her man was Lavinia Fenton. She was born in 1708; the illegitimate daughter of a naval lieutenant named Beswick, her mother’s name is not recorded. When her mother’s lover died at sea she married a Mr Fenton, a man who ran a coffee house near Charring Cross. Mr Fenton it seems was a good sort who sent his adopted daughter to boarding school. Therefore, Lavinia had the advantage of not only her beauty but of education and wit.






By 1725 she had attracted the attentions of a Portuguese nobleman who, having run up debts catering for her desires, ended up in the Fleet Prison. It was after this, in 1726, that another unnamed aristocrat used his influence to launch her career on the London stage.

Hogarth's parody of Gay's The Beggar's Opera
with Lavinia and the Duke of Bolton

Her first appearance was as Monimia in Thomas Otway's The Orphan: or The Unhappy Marriage, in March 1726 .









Shortly after she appeared as Cherry Boniface in The Beaux Stratagem and went onto join the company of players at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields but it was as Polly Peacham in John Gay's Beggar's Opera, she found her greatest success.

The play was a runaway success. Politicians smarted at being portrayed as highwaymen, fences, pickpockets and molls, but the public loved it and bought playing cards, fans and parlour screens imprinted with scenes or lyrics of the dashing MacHeath, or of Polly Peachum's true-love.In her first season as Polly Peacham, Lavinia became the talk of the town and the object of Charles Powlett, 3rd Duke of Bolton’s desire.

Portrait of Anne Vaughan, the abandoned wife
of Charles Duke of Bolton

Like many men of his rank he was locked in a loveless marriage to Lady Anne Vaughan, a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Carbery. Lady Anne, Lady Montague wrote, was "educated in solitude with some choice books, by a saint-like governess: crammed with virtue and good qualities, she thought it impossible not to find gratitude, though she failed to give passion; and upon this she threw away her estate, was despised by her husband and laughed at by the public."





Contemporary accounts describe Bolton as "a handsome, agreeable libertine” and, "absolutely a fool" and a rogue. Memoirs of the Reign of George II records him as  "being as proud as if he had been of any consequence besides what his emploments made him, as vain as if he had some merit, and as necessitous as if he had no estate, so he was troublesome at Court, hated in the country, and scandalous in his regiment. The dirty tricks he played to cheat the Government of men, or his men of half-a-crown, were things unknown to any Colonel but his Grace, no griping Scotsman excepted." So, perhaps he wasn’t that much of a catch after all.

Charles, 3rd Duke of Bolton

Lavinia became Bolton’s mistress during the first season of The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and gave up the stage to become a ‘kept woman’ in 1729. William Hogarth used the scandal in his series pictures of the Beggar’s Opera showing Lavinia looking past Mackheath, to the Duke standing in his box.

Lavinia in stout good health later in life.

The pair eloped to the continent in 1729.  John Gay commented on the event in a letter to Jonathan Swift: "The Duke of Bolton, I hear, has run away with Polly Peachum, having settled £400 a year on her during pleasure, and upon disagreement £200 a year."

Lavinia gave the Duke three illegitimate children. When his wife Anne died in 1751 Lavinia finally got her man and the pair were married in Aachen. By then the Duke had lost most of his income. He died three years later in 1754.



Their sons Charles, Percy, and Horatio had no estate or wealth to inherit. Consequently, Charles went into the church, Percy the navy, and Horratio the army.  Lavinia, now the duchess, died in 1760. She spent her last days at Westcombe House in Greenwich which she and Charles had shared since their marriage, and was buried in the nearly church of St Alfege. Peachum Road, close to the site of Westcombe House, was named in honour of her role as Polly Peachum.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavinia_Fenton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Paulet,_1st_Duke_of_Bolton
Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage, Lisa A. Freeman
http://thepeerage.com/ Cokayne, and others, The Complete Peerage, volume II, page 214.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westcombe_Park
http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=1/29/1728
http://www.smk.dk/en/visit-the-museum/exhibitions/william-hogarth-a-harlots-progress-and-other-stories/

Do the French Write the Best Love Letters?

Here are three examples of love letters written by three of France's greatest literary figures - Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The French have a reputation as great lovers. Do these letters confirm that view or refute it, in your opinion?

From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive. One of them is reproduced below. Flaubert never married and according to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romance. Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art. Does he find 'le mot juste' in this letter dated 1846?

“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge yu [sic] with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports… When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”

Louise had an interesting love life too. In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris. When the couple arrived in Paris, Colet began to submit her work for approval and publication and soon won a two-thousand-franc prize from the Académie française, the first of four prizes won from the Académie. Like many women of note she ran a salon that was frequented by many of the city's litrary crowd including Victor Hugo. In 1840 she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity of the child. Later she became the paramour of Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, and Abel Villemain. After her husband died, she supported herself and her daughter with her writing.


Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) had torrid love life. He fell in love with a woman called Mme. Berny, she was 46 and he was 23. He called her “la Dilecta,” and her creative and intellectual influence on Balzac was profound. When the two split up in 1832, he entered a troubled relationship with the Marquise de Castries on the rebound. The letter below was written to Countess Ewelina Haska, a married Polish noblewoman to whom he came to refer to as “The Foreigner.” They embarked upon an intense correspondence, which quickly escalated into a passionate bond, which lasted seventeen years. The two vowed to marry once Ewelina’s husband died. Though the Count passed away in 1842, Balzac’s poor finances prevented the couple from marrying. In March of 1850, when he was already fatally ill, the two finally married. That was just five months before he died.

"MY BELOVED ANGEL,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be — very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, ‘Come, I am going there!’ Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself ‘She is mine!’ Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!"

This missive from the 24 year old Jean-Paul Sartre to a 21 year old Simone de Beauvoir dates to the spring of 1929, and can be found in Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone De Beauvoir, 1926-1939  at the dawn of their romance, shortly before he proposed marriage, which Simone turned down; instead, the two embarked on their famous lifelong open relationship.

My dear little girl
For a long time I’ve been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love......

I love you with all my heart and soul.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics. Her most famous work, The Second Sex remains to this day one of the foundational texts in philosophy, feminism, and women's studies.The main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman has been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man through her relegation to being man's "Other." In agreement with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as a self. It seems that Jean-Paul remained her 'other' for the rest of her life.

What should a respectable widow wear?

By the late 19th century, mourning behaviour in England had developed into a complex set of rules, particularly among the upper classes. For women, the customs involved wearing heavy, concealing, black clothing, and the use of heavy veils of black crêpe. The entire ensemble was colloquially known as "widow's weeds" (from the Old English waed, meaning "garment").

The growing wealth of the eighteenth century aristocracy set the trend for the flamboyant expression of loss and grief with masses of black bombazine silk, ostrich feathers and bows.

But older and poorer women choose a much simpler, more practical styles and with the growth of the urban middle class, particularly in Britain the demand for dull, black, mourning wools, black and white silk crepe increased as incomes and social expectations rose.

Black however was not the only acceptable colour for grief. In the portrait below we see a woman holding a portrait of her dead husband wearing white with a black lace collar and bonnet. Mauve was also an acceptable colour. 

The wearing of mourning clothes was more of a social necessity for women than men. Whilst men might wear a special suit of sombre clothing for the actual funeral they were rarely expected to wear special clothes or colours unlike women who were expected to show the world their change in status for at least a year and a day.

Of course many women wanted show respect to their dead husbands and continued to wear sombre colours for the rest of their lives. Indeed Charlotte Leadam the heroine of my first novel Sinclair is a young widow and faces this very problem.  As she waits for her husband's creditors to present their accounts, she is, "wearing her new mourning clothes; a respectable but uncomplicated widow's cap and a full length black cloak both in black bombazine silk. The silk was not shiny like taffeta but had a sombre, matte finish that seemed to drain the colour from her face making her look even more wan and tired than she actually was."

"Wearing black crepe was the only acceptable thing to do for a woman in her position and she would have to wear it in public for a minimum period of one year and one day. After that she could choose wear subdued colours such as browns and greys, purples, lilacs, lavenders, and even white."

"But today was the first time that she had appeared in her widow's clothes in public and by this act she was acknowledging that her life had changed forever. It was a sign to the world that she was respecting her husband’s memory but it also told anyone who was interested that she was irreparably damaged, that she was half spent or half dead inside and that she was lonely and vulnerable. To wear anything else would indicate that she was a heartless harlot but she hated the loathsome colour; it reminded her of her loss and it told the world that she was alone.”

In a world where a woman became her husband’s property on marriage and where a middle class widow could not enter the professions to support herself signalling this change in marital status could have its advantages showing men that they were available for marriage again.

Julia Herdman’s debut novel Sinclair will be available later this year.

Julia Herdman’s debut novel Sinclair will be available later this year.