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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Erotik
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Memoirs of Fanny Hill," John Cleland crafts an audacious narrative that explores the life and liberties of an orphaned young woman navigating the complexities of love, desire, and sexual awakening in 18th-century England. Written in a vibrant first-person perspective, the novel is both a social commentary and a celebration of sensuality, reflecting the shifting attitudes toward sexuality during the Enlightenment. With its lush prose and candid depictions of eroticism, Cleland's work challenges the moral constraints of his time while entering the canon of early English erotic literature, marking a significant departure from the prevailing themes of the period. John Cleland, born in 1709, was influenced by his own tumultuous experiences, including financial struggles and imprisonment that inform the novel's existential explorations. His background in literature and commerce, as well as his encounters with moralistic censorship, motivated him to create a work that not only entertains but also provokes thought about personal freedom and societal norms. His unique positioning at the intersection of vice and virtue evokes a narrative rich with pathos and humor. For readers drawn to provocative literature that questions social conventions, "Memoirs of Fanny Hill" stands as an essential text. Cleland's masterful blend of wit and sensuality invites readers to reconsider the boundaries between moral propriety and personal autonomy, making this work a timeless exploration of human desire that remains relevant today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Memoirs of Fanny Hill
Table of Contents
Introduction
In this tale, desire collides with necessity, and pleasure becomes both a refuge and a negotiation. John Cleland’s novel explores how intimacy and appetite intersect with money, manners, and moral judgment in eighteenth-century urban life. Rather than treating erotic experience as mere scandal, it uses a first-person lens to examine the ways a young woman learns to read the world and be read by it. The result is a narrative that entwines body and marketplace, sentiment and strategy, candor and performance. Its enduring fascination lies in how it reframes pleasure as a complex social language, not just a private sensation.
Memoirs of Fanny Hill, more formally published as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, is an epistolary erotic novel by John Cleland, issued in two parts in London between 1748 and 1749. Set chiefly in eighteenth-century London, it situates a personal story within a rapidly commercializing metropolis. The book belongs to the broader family of picaresque and sentimental narratives while also standing as a landmark of English-language erotic literature. Its publication context in the mid-eighteenth century, amid Enlightenment debates about morality, taste, and the expanding print market, shaped how readers first encountered its frankness, polish, and refusal to confine desire to the margins of polite culture.
The premise is deceptively simple: a young, inexperienced woman leaves the country for London, where she recounts her passage through pleasure houses and private rooms in a retrospective confession to a trusted confidante. From the opening pages, the novel presents a voice at once ingenuous and shrewd, tracing an education in urban life that runs through the parlors of luxury as much as the alleys of necessity. The experience for readers is intimate and immersive, built from sustained scenes, sensuous description, and a controlled, reflective tone. Without leaning on overt moralizing, the narrator invites consideration of how survival and desire are negotiated.
Several themes course through the narrative with particular resonance. Agency emerges as an evolving practice rather than a fixed possession, complicated by economic vulnerability and social expectation. The book probes the commodification of bodies, asking what forms of autonomy can be exercised inside a market that trades on beauty and youth. It explores the tension between innocence and experience, sincerity and performance, and the spectacle of pleasure as a public curiosity. Cleland’s work also spotlights the hypocrisy of polite society, where decorum and appetite coexist uneasily. For contemporary readers, these themes open questions about power, desire, and the moral vocabularies used to judge them.
Stylistically, the novel is notable for its elaborate euphemism, florid metaphor, and careful orchestration of scene. Its language often turns transgression into aesthetic display, transforming explicit acts into a choreography of suggestion and rhythm. The epistolary frame cultivates intimacy, granting readers the sense of being addressed directly while maintaining the retrospective wisdom of a narrator who has measured her past. Episodic structure allows tonal variety—comic, tender, reflective—without surrendering narrative momentum. This mixture of polish and candor produces a reading experience that is both artful and unabashed, balancing sensual immediacy with a composed, often witty, self-awareness about the act of telling.
From its first appearance, the book provoked censorship and legal dispute, becoming a touchstone in debates about obscenity and literary merit. Its fortunes have tracked shifting standards across centuries, and it figured prominently in twentieth-century free-expression battles, including a 1966 decision by the United States Supreme Court that addressed its status in obscenity law. Despite waves of suppression, the novel persisted in print and circulation, shaping the lineage of erotic fiction and informing wider conversations about what literature may portray. Its historical reception is inseparable from its meaning: the controversy underscores the work’s challenge to boundaries between art, morality, and the marketplace.
Reading Fanny Hill today offers more than a glimpse of a notorious past; it provides a lens on enduring questions about consent, agency, and the economies that organize intimate life. Approached as both historical artifact and literary performance, it rewards attention to how language mediates power and pleasure, how storytelling reclaims or reframes experience, and how social judgment is constructed. Its narrator’s composure, the elegance of its prose, and its negotiation of sentiment and satire invite sustained engagement. For modern audiences, the novel’s relevance resides in its capacity to unsettle assumptions, provoke reflection, and illuminate the intertwined worlds of desire and exchange.
Synopsis
John Cleland’s Memoirs of Fanny Hill unfolds as a first-person memoir in the form of letters, with Fanny addressing a sympathetic “Madam.” Opening in a rural village, she explains how loss and poverty prompt her move to London in search of honest work. The city’s promise of opportunity quickly appears more complicated, and she frames her account as both explanation and record, aiming for plain candor about the circumstances that shaped her. The narrative establishes its reflective tone early, presenting Fanny as observant, resilient, and determined to trace, step by step, the path from innocence to worldly understanding without asking for pity or judgment.
Upon arriving in London, Fanny is taken in by a well-spoken older woman who offers lodging and guidance. Unaware that she has entered a house dedicated to pleasure, Fanny slowly recognizes its true nature through hints, conversations, and the routines of its inhabitants. She meets women who have learned to live by their wits and charms, each with her own story of necessity and choice. Amid this education in urban realities, Fanny encounters a young man named Charles, whose kindness and warmth stand apart from the calculating atmosphere around her. Their gentle companionship offers a glimpse of affection ungoverned by money.
Fanny and Charles form a tender bond grounded in mutual trust and youthful hope. They dream of a life together beyond the pressures of London, speaking in the private language of shared plans and confidences. Yet practical obstacles and the designs of others intervene. Charles is pressed into a different future, removed from Fanny’s side by circumstances larger than either can control. His departure leaves her isolated and susceptible to influence. The memoir emphasizes the vulnerability of a newcomer with few protections, and it marks this separation as a turning point, after which Fanny must determine how to survive on her own terms.
Left to the city’s devices, Fanny enters a world where companionship is negotiated and appearances matter. She is guided by older, more experienced women who explain the customs, the careful management of reputations, and the importance of prudence. Fanny learns to observe character, to read promises against behavior, and to navigate the expectations of clients and patrons. While the book acknowledges hardship and exploitation, it also depicts solidarity among the women and a measure of control they wrest from a system tilted against them. Fanny’s voice grows more assured as she recognizes the practical skills necessary to maintain independence and safety.
Becoming a kept woman under the patronage of affluent men, Fanny experiences luxury, risk, and constant negotiation. Cleland presents a gallery of suitors and arrangements that reveal the private desires of public figures, as well as the everyday economics that underpin pleasure. There are moments of jealousy, attempts at control, and occasional crises that force quick decisions. Through these episodes, Fanny develops an eye for hypocrisy and a guarded skepticism toward promises. At the same time, she discovers the value of tact, financial foresight, and self-respect, learning when to compromise and when to insist on terms that protect her stability.
A significant liaison with a wealthy benefactor brings Fanny to a new level of comfort and visibility. This period illustrates both the security and the fragility of dependence, as small changes in fortune or favor can rapidly alter a woman’s situation. Domestic tensions, rivalry, and the shifting moods of patrons challenge Fanny’s position, testing the poise she has cultivated. When reversals come, she responds with resourcefulness, drawing on savings, alliances, and hard-earned experience. The narrative underscores how skill, timing, and discretion allow Fanny to reestablish herself, transforming setbacks into opportunities and sharpening her understanding of London’s social mechanics.
Throughout these changes, Fanny carries the memory of Charles as an ideal of affection not governed by transactions. Occasional news, coincidences, or recollections renew that hope without resolving it. Her reflections weigh comfort against attachment, independence against the risks of devotion. She considers what a stable future might require and whether love can coexist with the realities she has learned to manage. These internal debates deepen the memoir’s portrait of her character, balancing pragmatism with sentiment. Fanny’s restraint in judgment—of herself and others—keeps the tone even, emphasizing observation over moralizing, while preserving a question at the center of the story.
In later chapters, Fanny consolidates both experience and means, adopting a considered approach to her affairs and daily life. With greater control and foresight, she contemplates a quieter existence and turns to writing as a means of ordering events. Addressing her narrative to a confidante, she defends her candor as truth-telling about a world usually spoken of indirectly. The memoir presents its portraits without sensationalism, preferring precise incident and motive to elaborate commentary. Fanny’s voice remains consistent: reflective, practical, and attentive to consequence, intent on showing how choices—hers and others’—intersected with the city’s ever-turning marketplace.
The memoir closes on a note of resolution that aligns feeling with security without dwelling on particulars. Taken as a whole, Memoirs of Fanny Hill offers a clear-eyed view of 18th-century London’s commerce of desire, exposing the distance between public virtue and private conduct. It traces a woman’s passage from vulnerability to agency, showing how wit, caution, and empathy can carve out space within constraining systems. The book’s enduring interest lies in its frank perspective, its sequence of instructive episodes, and its assertion of a female narrative voice. Without insisting on a moral, it conveys a coherent message about survival, choice, and self-knowledge.
Historical Context
Set largely in London during the early Georgian era, the narrative unfolds amid the city’s explosive growth under George II (reigned 1727–1760). By mid-century London approached 700,000–750,000 inhabitants, drawing provincial migrants like Fanny into service, trade, and precarious labor. The urban core—Covent Garden, Drury Lane, St. James’s, and the Strand—mixed theatres, coffeehouses, luxury shops, and bawdy houses with parishes and markets. Maritime wealth flowed up the Thames, while alleyways hosted night-cellars and pleasure quarters policed fitfully. This was a city of conspicuous consumption and fragile morals, where apprenticeship, domestic service, and the Poor Laws intersected with survival strategies that included sex work, which the novel depicts with intimate specificity.
The city’s demography and labor markets underwrote a commercialized sexual economy. The 1723 Workhouse Test Act intensified parish discipline, pushing poor women toward domestic service or casual labor; many, lacking protection or wages, gravitated to Covent Garden’s brothel network and street solicitation. Theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, masquerades at Vauxhall and, from 1742, Ranelagh Gardens, and the clustering of taverns provided venues for assignation. While Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies would appear later (1757), its cataloguing of named courtesans corroborates structures already in place. Fanny Hill mirrors these dynamics through detailed scenes of recruitment, training, and display within houses that functioned as profit-seeking enterprises.
Policing and moral reform sharpened across the 1740s–1750s. The earlier Societies for the Reformation of Manners (founded 1691) pioneered prosecutions of bawdy houses, a legacy revived by magistrates such as Henry Fielding. In 1749, Fielding organized the Bow Street Runners, London’s first semi-professional detectives, to confront robbery and vice. Parliament’s Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 targeted gaming and brothels by enhancing penalties and regulating entertainments. Though prostitution itself was not illegal, keepers of "disorderly houses" faced raids and fines. Fanny Hill’s brothel scenes—negotiations with keepers, fears of intrusion, careful management of clients—reflect an environment of intermittent enforcement that shaped the economics and risks of erotic commerce.
The Gin Craze (c. 1720s–1751) altered urban life and policy. High consumption of cheap spirits fueled crime, illness, and public disorder, prompting regulatory waves: the 1736 Gin Act imposed licenses and duties; the 1743 Act relaxed enforcement amid riots; the 1751 Act paired tighter controls with rising beer quality and policing. William Hogarth’s 1751 prints Beer Street and Gin Lane galvanized opinion by contrasting civic order with gin-induced ruin. The novel’s tavern-adjacent settings, lower-class revelry, and precarious female livelihoods echo this milieu of intoxication and vulnerability, situating Fanny’s sexual economy within a broader ecosystem of drink, debt, and disciplined pleasure.
Print culture and censorship formed the book’s immediate legal horizon. With pre-publication licensing lapsed in 1695, the state relied on prosecutions for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene libel. The landmark case R. v. Curll (1727) established that obscenity could be criminally punished. John Cleland composed much of Fanny Hill while confined for debt in the Fleet Prison, publishing the first volume in 1748 and the second in 1749. In late 1749, authorities moved against the work for obscene libel; Cleland disavowed it under pressure, and booksellers withdrew copies. The novel’s elaborate euphemism and moralizing framings thus register an author writing under intensifying legal scrutiny.
War and empire pervaded London’s economy and intimacies. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739) merged into the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), concluding with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). Privateering, naval mobilization, and impressment cycled sailors through the port, swelling demand in pleasure districts and destabilizing relationships. The East India Company’s ascendancy and West Indian sugar wealth—entangled with Atlantic slavery and the South Sea Company’s asiento after 1713—channeled fortunes into metropolitan consumption. In the novel, Charles’s departure to sea and the presence of merchants, officers, and planters as clients map erotic transactions onto imperial circulation, where absence, prize money, and colonial riches shape desire and dependency.
Charity and medical institutions framed the era’s response to sexual commerce and its consequences. The Foundling Hospital, chartered in 1739 and opened from 1741 under Thomas Coram, took in infants exposed by poverty or illegitimacy; William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel supported its public profile. The Lock Hospital (founded 1746) treated venereal disease, acknowledging endemic infection among soldiers, servants, and sex workers. Soon after, the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes (1758) offered reformatory shelter. While Fanny’s fictional body largely escapes disease or destitution, the novel’s world—pregnancy risks, transactional protection, and reputational stakes—mirrors a city where institutions managed, moralized, and medicalized the outcomes of sexual economies.
The book operates as a social critique by anatomizing how class, gender, and property relations commodify intimacy. It exposes the limited economic avenues open to poor women under the Poor Law and service regimes, the selective policing that tolerates elite vice while punishing the vulnerable, and the state’s shifting moral economy under gin regulation and disorderly-house statutes. Its erotic candor reframes prostitution as labor—trained, priced, and negotiated—making visible the market logics of Georgian London. By embedding tenderness and consent within commercial scenes, the narrative implicates respectable wealth, imperial fortunes, and patriarchal authority in sustaining the very inequalities it pretends to abhor.
Memoirs of Fanny Hill
LETTER THE FIRST
Madam,
I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life, out of which I emerged, at length, to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health and fortune to bestow; whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding, naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tossed in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who, looking on all though or reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy.
Hating, as I mortally do, all long unnecessary prefaces, I shall give you good quarter in this, and use no farther apology, than to prepare you for seeing the loose part of my life, written with the same liberty that I led it.
Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word[1q]; and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of the originals, to sniff prudishly and out of character at the pictures of them. The greatest men, those of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent decorations of the staircase, or salon.
This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal history. My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest.
My father, who had received a maim on his limbs, that disabled him from following the more laborious branches of country drudgery, got, by making nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarged by my mother’s keeping a little day-school for the girls in her neighborhood. They had had several children; but none lived to any age except myself, who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy.
My education, till past fourteen, was no better than very vulgar: reading, or rather spelling, an illegible scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work, composed the whole system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity general to our sex, in the tender age of life, when objects alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.
My poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she had spared very little to my instruction, having, from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of guarding me against any.
I was now entering on my fifteenth year[2q], when the worst of ills befell me in the loss of my fond, tender parents, who were both carried off by the small-pox[1], within a few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby by hastening the death of my mother: so that I was now left an unhappy friendless orphan[3q] (for my father’s coming to settle there, was accidental, he being originally a Kentisrman). That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms, that I was presently out of danger, and what then I did not know the value of, was entirely unmarked I skip over here an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt on this melancholy occasion. A little time, and the giddiness of that age, dissipated too soon my reflections on that irreparable loss; but nothing contributed more to reconcile me to it, than the notions that were immediately put into my head, of going to London, and looking out for a service, in which I was promised all assistance and advice from one Esther Davis, a young woman that had beer down to see her friends, and who, after the stay of a few days, was returned to her place.
As I had now nobody left alive in the village, who had concern enough about what should become of me, to start any objections to this scheme, and the woman who took care of me after my parents’ death, rather encouraged me to pursue it, I soon came to a resolution of making this launch into the wide world, by repairing to London, in order to seek my fortune, a phrase which, by the bye, has ruined more adventurers of both sexes, from the country, than ever it made or advanced.
Nor did Esther Davis a little comfort and inspirit me to venture with her, by piquing my childish curiosity with the fine sights that were to be seen in London: the Tombs, the Lions, the King, the Royal Family, the fine Plays and Operas, and, in short, all the diversions which fell within her sphere of life to come at; the detail of all which perfectly turned the little head of me.
Nor can I remember, without laughing, the innocent admiration, not without a spice of envy, with which we poor girls, whose church-going clothes did not rise above dowlas shifts and stuff gowns, beplaced with silver: all which we imagined grew in London, and entered for a great deal into my determination of trying to come in for my share of them.
The idea however of having the company of a towns-woman with her, was the trivial, and all the motives that engaged Esther to take charge of me during my journey to town, where she told me, after the manner and style, “as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kind for ever: that by preserving their virtue, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, may-hap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not I, as well as another?”; with other almanacs to this purpose, which set me a tip-toe to begin this promising journey, and to leave a place which, though my native one, contained no relations that I had reason to regret, and was grown insupportable to me, from the change of the tenderest usage into a cold air of charity, with which I was entertained, even at the only friend’s house that I had the least expectation of care and protection from. She was, however, so just to me, as to manage the turning into money the little matters that remained to me after the debts and burial charges were allowed for, and, at my departure, put my whole fortune into my hands; which consisted of a very slender wardrobe, packed up in a very portable box, and eight guineas[3], with seventeen shillings in silver, stowed in a spring-pouch[4], which was a greater treasure than I ever had seen together, and which I could not conceive there was a possibility of running out; and indeed, I was so entirely taken up with the joy of seeing myself mistress of such an immence sum, that I gave very little attention to a world of good advice which was given me with it.
Places, then, being taken for Esther and me in the Chester waggon[2], I pass over a very immaterial scene of leave-taking, at which I droped a few tears betwixt grief and joy; and, for the same reasons of insignificance, skip over all that happened to me on the road, such as the waggoner’s looking liquorish on me, the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers, which were defeated by the valiance of my guardian Esther; who, to do her justice, took a motherly care of me, at the same time that she taxed me for the protection by making me bear all travelling charges, which I defrayed with the unmost cheerfulness, and thought myself much obliged to her into the bargain.
She took indeed great care that we were not overrated, or imposed on, as well as of managing as frugally as possible; expensiveness was not her vice.
It was pretty late in a summer evening when we reached the town, in our slow conveyance, though drawn by six at length. As we passed through the greatest streets that led to our inn, the noise, of the coaches, the hurry, the crowds of foot passengers, in short, the new scenery of the shops and houses, at once pleased and amazed me.
But guess at my mortification and surprise when we came to the inn, and our things were landed and delivered to us, when my fellow traveller and protectress, Esther Davis, who had used me with the utmost tenderness during the journey, and prepared me by no preceedings signs for the stunning blow I was to receive, when I say, my only dependence and friend, in this strange place, all of a sudden assumed a strange and cool air towards me, as if she dreaded my becoming a burden to her.
Instead, then, of proffering me the continuance of her assistance and good offices, which I relied upon, and never more wanted, she thought herself, it seems, abundantly acquitted of her engagements to me, by having brought me safe to my journey’s end, and seeing nothing in her procedure towards me but what natural and in order, began to embrace me by the way of taking leave, whilst I was so confounded, so struck, that I had not spirit or sense enough so much as to mention my hopes or expectations from her experience, and knowledge of the place she had brought me to.
Whilst I stood thus stupid and mute, which she doubtless attributed to nothing more than a concern at parting, this idea procured me perhaps a slight alleviation of it, in the following harangue: “That now we were got safe to London, and that she was obliged to go to her place, she advised me by all means to get into one as soon as possible; that I need not fear getting one; there were more places than parish-churches[4q]; that she advised me to go to an intelligence office[5]; that if she heard of any thing stirring, she would find me out and let me know; that in the meantime, I should take a private lodging, and acquaint her where to send to me; that she wished me good luck, and hoped I should always have the grace to keep myself honest, and not bringing a disgrace on my parentage.” With this; she took her leave of me, and left me, as it were, on my own hands, full as lightly as I had been put into hers.
Left thus alone, absolutely destitute and friendless I began then to feel most bitterly the severity of this separation, the scene of which had passed in a little room in the inn; and no sooner was her back turned, but the affliction I felt at my helpless strange circumstances, burst out into a flood of tears, which infinitely relieved the oppression of my heart; though I still remained stupified, and most perfectly perplexed how to dispose of myself.
One of the drawers coming in, added yet more to my uncertainty, by asking me, in a short way, if I called for anything? to which I replied innocently: “No.” But I wished him to tell me where I might get a lodging for that night. He said he would go and speak to his mistress, who accordingly came, and told me drily, without entering in the least into the distress she saw me in, that I might have a bed for a shilling, and that, as she supposed I had some friends in town (there I fetched a deep sigh in vain!), I might provide for myself in the morning.
It is incredible what trifling consolations the human mind will seize in its greatest afflictions. The assurance of nothing more than a bed to lie on that night, calmed my agonies; and being ashamed to acquaint the mistress of the inn that I had no friends to apply to in town, I proposed to myself to proceed, the very next morning, to an intelligence office, to which I was furnished with written directions on the back of a ballad, Esther had given me. There I counted on getting information of any place that such a country girl as I might be fit for, and where I could get into any sort of being, before my little stock should be consumed; and as to a character, Esther had often repeated to me, that I might depend on her managing me one; nor, however affected I was at her leaving me thus, did I entirely cease to rely on her, as I began to think, good-naturedly, that her procedure was all in course, and that is was only my ignorance of life that had made me take it in the light I at first did.
Accordingly, the next morning I dressed myself as clean and as neat as my rustic wardrobe would permit me; and having left my box, with special recommendation, with the landlady, I ventured out by myself, and without any more difficulty than can be supposed of a young country girl, barely fifteen, and to whom every sign or shop was a gazing trap, I got to the wished for intelligence office.
It was kept by an elderly woman, who sat at the receipt of custom, with a book before her in great form and order, and several scrolls made out, of directions for places.
I made up then to this important personage, without lifting up my eyes or observing any of the people round me, who were attending there on the same errand as myself, and dropping her curtsies nine deep, just made a shift to stammer out my business to her.
Madam heard me out, with all the gravity and brow of a petty minister of State[7][5q], and seeing at one glance over my figure what I was, made me no answer, but to ask me the preliminary shilling, on receipt of which she told me places for women too slight built for hard work: but that she would look over her book, and see what was to be done for me, desiring me to stay a little, till she had dispatched some other customers.
On this I drew back a little, most heartily mortified at a declaration which carried with it a killing uncertainly, that my circumstances could not well endure.
Presently, assuming more courage, and seeking some diversion from my uneasy thoughts, I ventured to lift up my head a little, and sent my eyes on a course round the room, where they met full tilt with those of a lady (for such my extreme innocence pronounced her) sitting in a corner of the room, dressed in a velvet mantle (in the midst of summer), with her bonnet off; squat, fat, red-faced, and at least fifty.
She looked as if she would devour me with her eyes[6q], staring at me from head to foot, without the least regard to the confusion and blushes her eyeing me so fixedly put me to, and which were to her, no doubt, the strongest recommendation and marks of my being fit for her purpose. After a little time, in which my air, person and whole figure had undergone a strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming, drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanced and spoke to me with the greatest demureness:
“Sweet-heart, do you want a place?
“Yes, and please you,” (with a curtsey down to the ground).
Upon this she acquainted me she was actually come to the office herself, to look out for a servant; that she believed I might do, with a little of her instruction; that she could take my very looks for a sufficient character; that London was a very wicked, vile, place[7q]; that she hoped I would be tractable, and keep out of bad company; in short, she said all to me that an old experienced practitioner in town could think of, and which was much more than was necessary to take in an artless inexperienced country maid, who was even afraid of becoming a wanderer about the streets, and therefore gladly jumped at the first offer of a shelter, especially from so grave and matron-like a lady, for such my flattering fancy assured me this new mistress of mine was, I being actually hired under the nose of the good woman that kept the office, whose shrewed smiles and shrugs I could not help observing, and innocently interpreted them as marks of being pleased at my getting into place so soon: but, as I afterwards came to know, these Beldams[8] understood one another very well, and this was a market where Mrs. Brown, my mistress, frequently attended, on the watch for any fresh goods that might offer there, for the use of her customers, and her own profit.
Madam was, however, so well pleased with her bargain that fearing I presume, lest better advice or some accident might occasion my slipping through her fingers, she would officiously take me in a coach to my inn, where, calling herself for my box, it was, I being present, delivered without the least scruple or explanation as to where I was going.
This being over, she bid the coachman drive to a shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard[6], where she bought a pair of gloves, which she gave me, and thence renewed her directions to the coachman to drive to her house in ——— street, who accordingly landed us at the door, after I had been cheered up and entertained by the way with the most plausible flams, without one syllable from which I could conclude anything but that I was, by the greatest luck, fallen into the hands of kindest mistress, not to say friend, that the vast world could afford; and accordingly I entered her doors with most complete confidence and exultation, promising, myself that, as soon as I could be a little settled, I would acquaint Esther Davis with my rare good fortune.
You may be sure the good opinion of my place was not lessened by the appearance of a very handsome back parlor, into which I was led and which seemed to me magnificently furnished, who had never seen better rooms than the ordinary ones in inns upon the road. There were two gilt pier-glasses, and a buffet, on which a few pieces of plate, set out to the most shew, dazzled, and altogether persuaded me that I must be got into a very reputable family.
Here my mistress first began her part, with telling me that I must have good spirits, and learn to be free with her; that she had not taken me to be a common servant, to do domestic drudgery, but to be a kind of companion to her; and that if I would be a good girl, she would do more than twenty mothers for me; to all which I answered only by the profoundest and the awkwardest curtsies, and a few monosyllables, such as “’yes! no! to be sure!”
Presently my mistress touched the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in. “Here, Martha,” said Mrs. Brown, “I have just hired this young woman to look after my linen; so step up and show her her chamber; and I charge you to use her with as much respect as you would myself, for I have taken a prodigious liking to her, and I do not know what I shall do for her.”
Martha, who was an arch-jade, and, being used to this decoy, had her cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up with her; and accordingly showed me a neat room, two pair of stairs backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I was to lie with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress, who she was sure would be vastly good to me. Then she ran out into such affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how happy I was to light upon her! and that I could not have bespoke a better; with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton, who was perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said in the very sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and blind to the wires.
In the midst of these false explanations of the nature of my future service, we were rung for down again, and I was reintroduced into the same parlour, where there was a table laid with three covers; and my mistress had now got with her one of her favourite girls, a notable manager of her house, and whose business it was to prepare and break such young fillies as I was to the mounting block; and she was accordingly, in that view, alloted me for a bed-fellow, and, to give her the more authority, she had the title of cousin conferred on her by the venerable president of this college.
Here I underwent a second survey, which ended in the full approbation of Mrs. Phœbe[11] Ayres, the name of my tutoress elect, to whose care and instruction I was affectionately recommended.
Dinner was now set on table, and in pursuance of treating me as a companion, Mrs. Brown, with a tone to cut off all dispute, soon over-ruled my most humble and most confused protestations against sitting down with her Ladyship, which my very short breeding just suggested to me could not be right, or in the order of things.
At table, the conversation was chiefly kept up by the two madams and carried on in double meaning expressions, interrupted every now and then by kind assurances to me, all tending to confirm and fix my satisfaction with my present condition: augment it they could not, so very a novice was I then.
It was here agreed that I should keep myself up and out of sight for a few days, till such clothes could be procured for me as were fit for the character I was to appear in, of my mistress’s companion, observing withal, that on the first impressions of my figure much might depend; and, as they rightly judged, the prospect of exchanging my country clothes for London finery, made the clause of confinement digest perfectly well with me. But the truth was, Mrs. Brown did not care that I should be seen or talked to by any, either of her customers, or her Does[9] (as they called the girls provided for them), till she secured a good market for my maidenhead, which I had at least all the appearances of having brought into her Ladyship’s service.
To slip over minutes of no importance to the main of my story, I pass the interval to bed time, in which I was more and more pleased with the views that opened to me, of an easy service under these good people; and after supper being shewed up to bed, Miss Phœbe, who observed a kind of reluctance in me to strip and go to bed, in my shift, before her, now the maid was withdrawn, came up to me, and beginning with unpinning my handkerchief and gown, soon encouraged me to go on with undressing myself; and, blushing at now seeing myself naked to my shift, I hurried to get under the bed-clothes out of sight.
Phœbe laughed and was not long before she placed herself by my side. She was about five and twenty, by her most suspicious account, in which, according to all appearances, she must have sunk at least ten good years; allowance, too, being made for the havoc which a long course of hackneyship[10] and hot waters must have made of her constitution, and which had already brought on, upon the spur, that stale stage in which those of her profession are reduced to think of showing company, instead of seeing it.
No sooner then was this precious substitute of my mistress laid down, but she, who was never out of her way when any occasion of lewdness presented itself, turned to me, embraced and kissed me with great eagerness. This was new, this was odd; but imputing it to nothing but pure kindness, which, for ought I knew, it might be the London way to express in that manner, I was determined not to be behind-hand with her, and returned her the kiss and embrace, with all the fervour that perfect innocence knew.
Encouraged by this, her hands became extremely free, and wandered over my whole body, with touches, squeezes, pressures, that rather warmed and surprised me with their novelty, than they either shocked or alarmed me.
The flattering praises she intermingled with these invasions, contributed also not a little to bribe my passiveness; and, knowing no ill, I feared none, especially from one who had prevented all doubts of her womanhood, by conducting my hands to a pair of breasts that hung loosely down, in a size and volume that full sufficiently distinguished her sex, to me at least, who had never made any other comparison.
I lay then all tame and passive as she could wish, whilst her freedom raised no other emotion but those of a strange, and, till then, unfelt pleasure. Every part of me was open and exposed to the licentious courses of her hands, which, like a lambent fire, ran over my whole body, and thawed all coldness as they went.
