Philobiblon

I just got around to looking up Catherine Andras, and found this short biography and an apparent picture of the Nelson model, said to be still in Westminster Abbey. (A pretty amazing survival if true.)

So it seems women could “go it alone”, or almost. Still from Nelson’s Women:

“… the intelligent, socially aware Cornelia Knight, an admiral’s daughter aged forty-two who had written a novel and was touring the Continent with her mother, who had herself met Dr Johnson and his circle. While staying at a hotel in Naples, both became friends of Sir William and Lady Hamilton, although more sincerely attached to the former than the latter. Miss Knight kept a mordant eye on the eccentric Neapolitan court, describing how the King ‘used to pass out house on his way to the lake where he caught gulls that he sold to the fish-dealers’ and that the Queen was subject to ‘fits of devotion, at which times she stuck short prayers amd pious ejaculations inside of her stays, and occasionally swallowed them’.” (p. 104)

A quick resort to the invaluable abebooks tells me there is a biography, unpromisingly titled “The Prim Romantic”, from 1965 … and her Dinabarbis is available in a joint edition with Johnson’s Rasselas; now how can I justify buying them ….?

P.S. Quoted without comment, Emma Hamilton, as rumours of the Battle of the Nile were circulating: “The newspapers have tormented and almost killed me in regard to the desperate action you have fought with the French fleet. How human faculties can be brought to make others intentionally miserable I cannot conceive. In my opinion, a newspaper writer, or fabricator for them, is a despicable creature bearing a human shape.” (p. 107)

The last report from the holiday reading is on Nelson’s Women, by Tom Pocock (Andre Deutsch, London, 1999).

It left me musing on – aside from how abominably he treated his wife Fanny – how often professional women pop up in the apparently oddest places and times, yet somehow this is never acknowledged.

The Admiral’s last sitting for a portait was joint one, for the miniaturist Robert Bowyer and Catherine Andras, who modelled in wax. (p. 215.) After Trafalgar, she produced a full-size figure of Nelson that stood in Westminster Abbey, dressed in one of his uniforms.(p. 225.)

Also, how so many women had the most dramatic lives, but left so little record. In 1803 Nelson spoke for Edward Despard at his trial for treason over a plot to kill the King and take over the government the year before.

“All Nelson was able to do for his old friend was to have his sentence of death commuted from one of hanging, drawing and quartering to hanging and decapitation after death. But he was able to recommend some financial help for Despard’s black wife, who had accompanied him from the Caribbean. After Nelson spoke of the case to Lord Minto, the latter noted, ‘Mrs Despard, he says, was violently in love with her husband. Lord Nelson solicited a pension, or some provision for her, and the Government was well disposed to grant it.'” (p. 196-7)
What a life that must have been.

I had an interesting morning yesterday the Institute of Historical Research’s “The Great Plague of London: experiences and explanations”. Yes, I know I have odd ideas of entertainment.

Lots of good stuff, but I was particularly taken with a paper from Dr Patrick Wallis of the LSE on “doctoring the plague”, which explored attitudes to what physicians should do when the dreaded disease struck. What they actually mostly did was ran away, and, he indicated most people thought this was perfectly reasonable, particularly since this was what almost all of their patients, those who were wealthy enough to pay them, did.

e.g., he presented James Balmford, vicar of St Olave’s Southwark: “As for Phisitions, I onely propound this question: Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty to shift for themselves, & (as they thinke) for their lives, in regard they are no publicke persons and live (not by common stipend, but) by what they can get.” The vicar came down on the second side.
This from A Short Dialogue Concerning the Plagues Infection (London 1603)

Although Dr Wallis pointed out that the good vicar himself was under something of a cloud in the subject. He stayed in town, but refused to visit dying plague victims.

… was something I knew disgracefully little about, so also on my holiday reading list – the culturally relevant bit – was Christopher Hibbert’s The French Revolution. It is striking how many women appear in prominent roles, good and bad.

On what is called “The day of the market-women”:

On the morning of 5 October huge crowds of women gathered in the central markets and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine shouting for bread … They were mostly poissardes, fishwives, working women, prostitutes and market stall holders, but among them were several quite smartly dressed bourgeoises who appeared as angry as the rest. Together they marches towards the Place de Greve … stormed up the steps of the Hotel de Ville. The guards were disarmed and their weapons handed to men who had now joined the demonstration … Persuaded that their best hope was to petition the King, they then set off for Versailles under the not entirely willing leadership of that self-proclaimed hero of the taking of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, who evidently considered it undignified to command such motley female troops. (p. 97)

There is of course also the horrific parts of the story. Don’t read the following if sensitive to such things!
During the September massacres that preceded the execution of the King …

“One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.” (p. 174)

A reminder that there’s nothing particularly unique about, say, the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda.

(References from the Penguin edition of 1982)

A couple more snippets from Sentimental Murder:

“The readers of Ann Sheldon’s Memoirs must have felt that in London procurers were everywhere. Sheldon met her first bawd when a Mrs Horsham, a very respectable-looking woman, engaged her in polite conversation on a bench in St James’s Park. She als became friendly with the fruit-seller who worked in the lobby of the House of Commons, and took fees from MPs in return for girls’ names and addresses. …. In later years she turned bawd herself. … She worked for Lord Grosvenor … but was shocked by his taste for low life. She brought him poor girls from Westminster Bridge covered in vermin and was astonished at the medley of mistresses that filled his house: ‘the garret was inhabited by pea-pickers – the first floor by a woman of elegance, – the parlour by women servants, – and the kitchen by a negro wench.'” (p.98)

The St James’s Chronicle’s view of Martha Ray, the “kept woman”.

Her person was very fine, her face agreeable, and she had every Accomplishment that could adorn a woman, particularly those of Singing, and Playing most exquisitely on the Harpsichord. She was also highly respected by all those who knew her, especially att the Servants, and her death is most sincerely regretted in the Family. p. 52.

(Interesting that the servants’ view was regarded as important.)