ENDNOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Donald G. Nieman, ed., Black Southerners and the Law, 1865-1900 (Clemson, SC: Clemson University, 1994), 29.

2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), 35–37, 67, 89–90, 389.

3 Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (London: Bodley Head, 2017), 90, 106–110, 122–123; and St. Jerome, “On Marriage and Virginity,” from “Letter XXII to Eustochium” and the treatise “Against Jovinian.”

4 Bernard O’Donoghue, trans, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Penguin, 2013), 75.

5 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 502.

6 Jonathan Rée, Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 185. This conflict also has a geographic dimension. It has become something of a trope to contrast the eighteenth-century tradition of skepticism in British philosophy with the cult of reason that reigned in France. George Orwell was nodding at this national stereotype when he remarked (in “The Lion and the Unicorn”) that “the English will never develop into a nation of philosophers. They will always prefer instinct to logic and character to intelligence.” For a contemporary iteration of the reason vs. passion debate, see the opposition in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow between System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking.

7 Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 33.

8 The White Slave Traffic (London: Published at the Offices of “M.A.P.”, 17 and 18, Henrietta Street, 1910), 11.

9 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970), 45.

CHAPTER ONE

1 Some Authentick Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch— s, Rape-Master-General of Great Britain. By an Impartial Hand (London: 1730). See also pp1–2 for the account of the public reaction to Charteris’s conviction: “When the News was first spread about the Town, Mankind was amaz’d; People stood aghast, looking at one another like Statues … The Demolition of Ch——s, and the Opening of his Maid’s Port and Harbour, and in what Manner he had raz’d the fortifications of her Vertue, was the Subject on which all Conversation turn’d.”

2 Charteris allegedly claimed her escape as one of the greatest losses of his career, lamenting that, “A Woman that had such a large Share of Courage when on her Heels, must have had a vast deal more when between a Pair of Sheets.” Ibid, 25.

3 Philogamus [pseud.], The Present State of Matrimony or the Real Cause of Conjugal Infidelity, (London: 1739), 25.

4 Some cosmic justice was, on occasion, forthcoming. It is recorded that Charteris’s henchman Gourley once identified a particularly attractive and very devout milliner in Westminster. Charteris went to visit her store where he engaged her in a religious discourse and then “inveighed bitterly against the Wickedness of the Age, the licentious Manner in which all Ranks and Conditions of Christians lived; and that the unguarded Actions of the Clergy had been a great Inlet to that Sea of Atheism and Immorality that had poured in upon the Nation.” “After this religious Courtship had been carried on some time,” we are told, he lured her to an apartment in Golden Square where “the Colonel made a Declaration of his real Principles, professing himself a staunch Whoremaster, and that she must even, sans Ceremony, tumble a pillow with him that night.” After some fainting fits and other theatrics the women agreed to do so for money. In the morning she vanished leaving him with a vicious case of the pox and the dawning realization that she had been a prostitute all along. Charteris was obliged to retreat from London for a period to take the painful treatment for such diseases—a hot mercury solution injected into the urethra.

5 Through extensive bribery he had secured a royal pardon for his Scottish rape charge on New Year’s Day, 1722.

6 Georgian slang for £100,000.

7 His testament also provided for his pistols to go to the Duke of Argyll and his stable of horses to go the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

8 Cesar de Saussure, A foreign view of England in the reigns of George I and George II: The letters of Monsieur Cesar de Saussure to his family; trans. and ed. by Madame Van Muyden (London: John Murray, 1902). The original letters were composed 1725–30. De Saussure also provides a more wholesome account of young Londoner’s celebrating St. Valentine’s Day in the 1720s: “The 14th of February, or St. Valentine’s Day, is a festival day for young people. A young man chooses a maiden to be his valentine; she cannot refuse him unless she is already provided with one. Sometimes young men will draw lots for a favourite valentine. What I think most amusing is that a young man may on that day meet a maiden, and though he has never seen her before, he may if he wills it ask her to be his valentine, and she cannot refuse him unless she already has one. This custom is the cause of many marriages.”

9 There were also other benefits to lingering in these quarters: by ancient privileges those residents in houses adjacent to the canal could not be arrested for debt—the nearby Fleet Prison awaited if they strayed—and allowed for marriages to take place “without any licence or publication of banns. Sailors and people of the common sort make great use of this latter privilege, their marriage being blessed in some tavern or pot-house, the priest being paid with half a crown and a bottle of wine.” De Saussure, A Foreign View of England.

10 Five printers registered as operating in the area in 1750, growing to thirty-two by 1790. One of them belonged to John and Paul Knapton, sons of James Knapton, also a printer, and brother of George Knapton, who painted the members of the Medmenham Abbey “Order” of St. Francis — the rakes Wilkes, Dashwood, et. al. James Knapton moved his business to Samuel Richardson’s neighborhood in the mid–1730s so the two men may have been familiar with each other.

11 The English Malady (1732), An Essay on Regimen (1740), and The Natural Method of Cureing (1742) — all published by Richardson.

12 Tells Lady Bradshaigh in 1748 “by first wife I had 5 sons and one daughter; some of them living to be delightful prattlers, with all the appearances of sound health, lovely in their features and promising as to their minds, and the death of one of them, I doubt accelerating from grief, that of the otherwise laudable afflicted mother.” “I cherish the memory of my lost wife to this hour.” (Letter to Lady Bradshaigh, Dec. 15, 1748.)

13 Critics have noted the similarity between Mr. B— and Colonel Charteris. See Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 32: “The worst parts of Richardson’s plot, Mr. B—’s clumsy and brutal attacks on the heroine, can be paralleled in the exploits of the infamous Colonel Charteris, who lures his victims to his house in town or country, come upon them through trap-doors or disguised in women’s clothes, and is aided in his schemes by one Moll Clapham, a Mrs. Jewkes in real life.” Much the same point is made in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

14 Such sham marriages existed. Until the 1753 Marriage Act a variety of loopholes and folk traditions made it possible to mislead someone into believing they had been legitimately married. An example survives in the prison memoir of career criminal James Dalton, hung at Tyburn in May, 1730, in which he recounts his use of this method to attain sex from women other than prostitutes: “With this Money I purchased me a Suit of Clothes, and got acquainted with a Person that procured Husbands for unfortunate young Women. He told me that he had one at that Time, that was a Gentleman’s Daughter who lived in very good Repute, and that being big with Child her Friends would not admit her into their Presence without the Sight of a Certificate; and that if I would only take the Trouble to go to Church and marry her, he would give me two Guineas for my Trouble and upon my agreeing with his Desire, he sent for the Gentlewoman, and we went to St. Clement’s Church in the Strand and were there married, my Acquaintance the Procuror performing the Part of the Father : After this we adjourned to the Tavern, where I was very handsomely entertained; and the Wine getting Influence over my Brains, I insisted on lying all Night with my Wife : A great many Arguments were made use of to persuade me to the contrary, but to no purpose upon which a Quarrel ensued, and the Landlord coming to know the Reason of the Disturbance, I related the whole Affair to him he immediately quitted the Room, and sent to the Church to know the Truth, which he was soon inform’d of; wherefore he took my part; and one of his Servants called a Coach, and my Wife and I went to the Bell-Inn in West-Smithfield where we lay together all Night. One Thing made me somewhat uneasy when I awoke the next Morning sober, and that was, I had the Foul Disease, which I knew must in all Likelihood be communicated to her, therefore I arose and left her to pay for our Night’s Lodging.” Quoted in: Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992), 88–89.

15 Erasmus Jones, The Man of Manners: Or, Plebeian Polish’d (1735).

16 An essay on modern gallantry : address’d to men of honour, men of pleasure, and men of sense: with a seasonable admonition to the young ladies of Great Britain (London: Printed for M. Cooper, 1750).

17 Quoted in Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex (Oxford University Press, 2012), 176–177. This sentiment was echoed in Kitty’s verdict on her sister Lydia in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813): “Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson; that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless ruin—that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful,—and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”

18 See his letter to George Cheyne written August 31, 1741: “In my scheme, I have generally taken Human Nature as it is; for it is no purpose to suppose it angelic, or to endeavour to make it so. There is a time of life in which the passions will predominate; and ladies, any more than men, will not be kept in ignorance; and if we properly mingle instruction with entertainment, so as to make the latter seemingly the view, while the former is really the end, I imagine it will be doing a good deal.”

And also his letter to Aaron Hill on February 1, 1741: “I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, cause of religion and virtue. I therefore gave way to enlargement: and so Pamela became as you see her.”

19 By 1742 a pamphlet entitled “Lettre Sur Pamela” was circulating in London. A French response to the book, it attacked its style and noted derisively of its content that if this was a fair representation of English morals then that nation was more debauched than had originally been suspected. It is improbable that Richardson read it as he did not know French; he may well have not known it existed. He was, however, caught up in a minor contretemps over the translation of Pamela into French after allegations were traded over the conversion of his demotic English into highly mannered literary French. This episode gave rise to an unabashedly Little Englander tirade in a letter from Aaron Hill to Richardson in November 1741:

“Manly Decency, and modest Reserves, are the Dress, and Decorums, of Life.—But they who substitute brisk Insignificance, in the Place of a solid Vivacity, let Them still be called French-men—And let us be content to be English John Bulls: the only Pity is, that our Horns are no sharper.”

20 Pamela was published in America in 1755 where Richardson found his work in the hands of a Philadelphia printer by the name of Benjamin Franklin.

21 These were begun but, tragically, never finished and the drafts for them were later lost. In the early 1740s the painter Joseph Highmore did, however, produce a major series of twelve paintings inspired by episodes from the novel. These survive and are split between the Tate Britain, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the National Gallery of Victoria.

22 Samuel Richardson, Correspondence with Aaron Hill and the Hill family, ed. Christine Gerrard (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 105; Hill to Richardson in a letter on July 29, 1741.

23 Anonymous, Pamela Censur’d (London: 1741).The author also agreed with Fielding, Haywood, et al. that Pamela seemed far too worldly for an alleged innocent: “Pamela instead of being artless and innocent sets out at first with as much Knowledge of the Arts of the Town, as if she had been born and bred in Covent Garden.”

24 Though not enough for Victorian publishers, who heavily redacted Pamela.

25 While Matthew succeeded in placing Swift’s work in various publications his attempts to ingratiate himself among the literary tastemakers of the capital were less fruitful. Swift engineered a meeting for him with Alexander Pope in his Twickenham retreat. Pope was extremely unimpressed with Matthew, writing to Swift in Ireland that the man he had talked up to him to secure the audience was “a most forward, shallow, conceited fellow” who had bored and disgusted him for three whole days. This damning verdict on his protégé sent Swift into a rage.

26 Romantic marriages were increasingly the norm in England by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Clarissa’s insistence on this practice was linked to her knowledge of the various rights and freedoms she would lose upon wedlock. “Surely, Sir,” she writes to her uncle, “a young creature ought not to be obliged to make all these sacrifices but for such a man as she can love.” For more on romantic marriage see: Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800.

27 Lovelace is well aware that he owes his early success with Clarissa to her family’s pig-headedness. “I knew that the whole stupid family were in a combination to do my business for me.” He crows to Belford, “I told thee that they were all working for me, like so many ground moles; and still more blind than the moles are said to be, unknowing that they did so. I myself, the director of their principal motions; which falling in with the malice of their little hearts, they took to be all their own.” Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 387.

28 This “commonly received notion,” as Richardson had it, was not without its critics in its own day. No less an authority than Lady Mary Wortley Montagu mocked the prevailing expectations of the time as “barbarous manners … well calculated for the establishment of vice and wretchedness.” The Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu London: Printed for M. Cooper, (1763).

29 R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 22.

30 James Forrester, The Polite Philosopher: Or, an Essay on that Art which Makes a Man Happy in Himself, and Agreeable to Others (Edinburgh: Robert Freebairn, 1734). “Books may furnish us with the right ideas, experience may improve our judgement, but it is the acquaintance of the ladies only, which can bestow that easiness of address, whereby the fine gentleman is distinguished from the scholar and the man of business.” Quoted in Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex.

31 See, inter alia, Hume on urbanization as the essential element in civilization advancing and the refinement of social discourse:

“Clubs and societies are everywhere formed. Both sexes meet in and easy and social manner; and the tempers of men, as well as in their behaviour, refine apace. So that beside the improvement which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity from the very habit of conversing together.” David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” quoted in Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 176; See also Samuel Johnson: “man’s chief merit consisted in resisting the impulses of nature,” quoted in Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 157; and Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, 180–83.

32 Locke continued with a metaphor that captured the emergent cliché of the women as the “fairer sex” while slyly recognizing the attractions of seduction: “Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.”

33 We know Richardson was familiar with Locke’s writings as he includes an extensive reflection on Lockean pedagogy in the latter portion of Pamela. Locke was, in any case, one of the most widely read philosophers of the period, running through nine editions between publication and 1760. See Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 67, 70. Whether Richardson had read or knew of Hume’s writing is unknown but unlikely.

34 Richardson, Clarissa, 262–263

35 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1750: “This Richardson is a strange fellow. I heartily despise him, and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner. The first two tomes of Clarissa touched me, as being very resembling to my maiden days; and I find in pictures of Sir Thomas Grandison and his lady, what I have heard of my mother, and seen in my father.” In McKillop, Samuel Richardson, McKillop, 134.

36 Sarah Fielding also recorded her impressions in a letter to Richardson of January 8, 1749: “When I read of her, I am all sensation; my heart glows; I am overwhelmed; my only vent is tears; and unless tears could mark my thoughts as legibly as ink I cannot speak half I feel… . In short, Sir, no pen but your’s can do justice to Clarissa. Often have I reflected on my own vanity in daring but to touch the hem of her garment.” The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, eds. Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993).

37 Henry Fielding to Richardson October 15, 1748. Fielding reporting his thoughts on reading Clarissa, apart from last two volumes, so presumably he had read five of seven volumes at the time of writing. He specifically praised the character of Lovelace: “the Character of Lovelass [sic] is heightened with great Judgement. His former Admirers must lose all Regard for him on his Perseverance, and as this Regard ceases, Compassion for Clarissa rises in the same Proportion. Hence we are admirably prepared for what is to follow—.” He describes in detail his reaction to the climactic rape and praises Richardson’s artistry and power of sentiment. “Let the Overflowings of a Heart which you have filled brimfull speak for me.’ He also joked that the world believes that “We are Rivals for that coy Mrs. Fame” before declaring goes on “I heartily wish you Success. That I sincerely think you in the highest manner deserve it.” The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, eds. Battestin and Probyn), 70–74.

38 T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 183.

39 The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, eds. Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993). She continues with a hilarious description of Cibber’s hyperbole: “I am not quite sure, whether Mr. Cibber is not so strongly enamoured with her perfections, and touched with her distresses, that, were they exhibited on the stage, he would not, like Don Quixote, rise up in wrath and rescue the lady from the hands of her violater [sic].” Before concluding with an imprecation of her own: “Spare her virgin purity, dear Sir, spare it!”

40 In The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson Volumes 5—7, xv and in a letter from Richardson to Bradshaigh of February 1751.

41 He further alleged that having conferred with “two very delicate Minds of the Sex” he was certain that Clarissa’s actions were true to life. Richardson to Hill, October 29, 1746 and Hill to Richardson January 23, 1747; in Correspondence, Volume 1.

42 She finished with a threat: “If you disappoint me, attend to my curse:—May the hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous, for ever be your portion! and may your eyes never behold any thing but age and deformity! may you meet with applause only from envious old maids, surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! may you be doomed to the company of such! and, after death, may their ugly souls haunt you! Now make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare.” Bradshaigh to Richardson, October 10, 1748, Correspondence, Volume 5, 3–5.

43 Correspondence, Volume 5, xxxvii. Barbauld on the first meeting of Bradshaigh and Richardson at Birdcage Walk: “No lover ever expected his mistress with greater ardour than the grave Richardson seems to have felt for his incognita, when he paced so fruitlessly up and down the Mall, gazing with expectation at every lady he met.”

44 Richardson to Bradshaigh, October 26, 1748, Correspondence, Volume 5, 7–11.

45 Bradshaigh to Richardson, 1748, Correspondence, Volume 5, 20–21.

46 Bradshaigh to Richardson, November 1749, and his response shortly afterward; Correspondence, Volume 5, 73–77. Bradshaigh’s letter contained a catty remark about Richardson’s propensity for pious old women. “You know so many good old maids, Sir,” she wrote, “that, perhaps, you may accidentally hear of some one, who would not be having the dirty impudent baggage sent to Bridewell.” Her allusion to Bridewell seems intended to echo some of the more callous language of Richardson’s great villains, Mr. B—, Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, and Lovelace, though such sentiments were widespread. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stated flatly that any girl “that runs away with a young fellow without intending to marry him should be carry’d to Bridewell or Bedlam the next day.”

Quoted in Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton University Press, 1982), 108.

47 Richardson affirmed this connection in another letter to Bradshaigh in which, apropos of Clarissa, he described his heroine as “a second Magdalen in her penitence, and yet not so bad as a Magdalen in her faults.”

48 See Correspondence, Volume 5: Bradshaigh to Richardson, October 29, 1749; Richardson to Bradshaigh, late November 1749; and Bradshaigh to Richardson December 1749.

49 Catherine Talbot to Richardson, March 1750: “They much wish also, that he may have Leisure, Spirits and Inclination to comply with the repeated Requests of his Agreeable Incognita, and shew the World such a Man as would neither have been unworthy of a Clarissa, nor unagreeable to a Miss Howe.” Correspondence, Volume 10, 7; See also Christian Bernhard Kaiser [translator in Hannover] to Richardson July 10, 1753: “When is Your Sir Charles Grandison to appear? Every body here wishes, soon to see him.” Correspondence, Volume 10, 97. And Richardson’s letters on the new work to Jean Baptiste de Freval in January 1750, and to Alexis Claude Clairaut in July 1753.

50 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 302.

51 Allen Michie, Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 39–41.

52 Donald Thomas, Henry Fielding (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), 393.

53 Richardson adhered rigorously to his own moral-literary precepts. Hence the critical argument, advanced by Roger Moore, that Richardson was the exemplary female writer of his time, and possibly of all English literature until Austen, who was explicit in her debt to him. “Richardson may be called, in all seriousness, one of our great women.” Robert Etheridge Moore, “Dr. Johnson on Fielding and Richardson,” PMLA 66, No. 2 (March, 1951).

54 Richardson to Sarah Chapone, December 6, 1750; Richardson to Sarah Chapone, January 11, 1751; Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 172–173.

55 Richardson’s pusillanimity need hardly be commented on; what is too easily forgotten is how his attitude toward women and literature was to predominate for the next century and a half. English society produced (against its own wishes, in many cases) many great female writers but they were for the most part writers of the private world. There were very few Laetitia Pilkington’s in the Victorian era. As Virginia Woolf noted in the late 1920s, the belief that women ought “to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags” meant they suffered “from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer” in the same conditions. The miracle of women’s writing was that it had achieved so much while constrained to tightly: She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to, buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Virginia Woolf, “A Room Of One’s Own,” (Richmond, UK: Hogarth Press, 1929).

56 And also: “Love, eternal Love, is the subject, the burthen of all your writings; it is the poignant sauce, which so richly seasons Pamela, Clarissa and Grandison, and makes their flimzy nonsense pass so glibly down.” Anonymous, Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754), with an introduction by Alan Dugald McKillop (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1950.

57 This was not a new complaint nor one limited to men. See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu “I am very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which is as much ridicul’d by our Young Ladys as it us’d to be by young fellows; in short, both Sexes have found the Inconveniencys of it, and the Apellation of Rake is as genteel in a Woman as a Man of Quality.” Letter of October 1723, quoted in Flynn, Samuel Richardson, 56–57.

58 Anon., Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela.

59 Mark Hildesley to Richardson, December 20, 1753, Correspondence, Volume 10, 168.

60 Flynn, Samuel Richardson, 3.

61 One such cynic was Richardson’s client Daniel Defoe who opposed an early campaign to establish the Foundling Hospital for exactly this reason. Such an institution, he believed, would “set up a nursery for lewdness, and encourage fornication … Who would be afraid of sinning, if they can so easily get rid of their bastards? We shall soon be over-run with foundlings when there is such an encouragement given to whoredom.”Quoted in Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, 243.

62 Samuel Johnson, “Properantia’s hopes of a year of confusion. The misery of prostitutes.” The Rambler, No. 107. March 26, 1751. The piece offers a fascinating insight into the world of the gadding literary men about town and their conflicted consciences:

“How frequently have the gay and thoughtless, in their evening frolicks, seen a band of those miserable females, covered with rags, shivering with cold, and pining with hunger; and, without either pitying their calamities, or reflecting upon the cruelty of those who, perhaps, first seduced them by caresses of fondness, or magnificence of promises, go on to reduce others to the same wretchedness by the same means!”

63 The Gentleman’s Magazine, March, 1751. This belief that seduced women and prostitutes were equivalent would linger in discussion of the Magdalen for some time. An 1810 account of the institution discuss the important function it served for “young women who have been seduced from their friends under promise of marriage and have been deserted by their seducers. They have never been in public prostitution, but fly to the Magdalen to avoid it.” John Feltham, The Picture of London for 1810, 225–228.

See also Reverend William Dodd, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Magdalen Charity, (1761), 3–4:

“Poor, young, thoughtless Females, plunged into ruin by those temptations, to which their very youth and personal advantages expose them, no less than those passions implanted in our nature for wise and good ends … Surrounded by snares, the most artfully and industriously laid; snares, laid by those endowed with superior faculties, and all the advantages of education and fortune; what virtue can be proof against such formidable seducers? … And when once seduced, how soon their golden dreams vanish! Abandoned by the seducer, deserted by their friends, contemned by the world, they are left to struggle with want, despair, and scorn… . It is well known, that this is the case with most of the Prostitutes in their several degrees.”

64 For example, Astrea and Minerva Hill to Richardson, December 13, 1748: “How fast, if England has such Sanctuary Retreats as Protestant Nunneries, wou’d a Clarissa’s Fate contribute to the filling of ’em!” Richardson to Bradshaigh, June 5, 1759: “Your Ladyship makes me a great Compliment, in supposing the Institution owes its beginnings to Hints in Sir Charles Grandison.”

65 His reasoning was predicated on the assumptions of the cults of sentiment and sensibility: I have another scheme, my lord, proceeded Sir Charles—An hospital for female penitents; for such unhappy women, as having been once drawn in, and betrayed by the perfidy of men, find themselves, by the cruelty of the world, and principally by that of their own sex, unable to recover the path of virtue, when perhaps (convinced of the wickedness of the men in whose honour they confided) they would willingly make their first departure from it the last.

These, continued he, are the poor creatures who are eminently intitled to our pity, though they seldom meet with it. Good-nature, and credulity the child of good-nature, are generally, as I have the charity to believe, rather than viciousness, the foundation of their crime. Those men who pretend they would not be the first destroyers of a woman’s innocence, look upon these as fair prize. (Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison , Vol 4 (1753), 126.) Elsewhere he makes the connection to the models of Catholic convents: “We want to see established in every county, protestant nunneries” and “though a Protestant, I am not an enemy to such foundations in general. I could wish, under proper regulations, that we had nunneries among us I would not, indeed, have the obligation upon nuns be perpetual: let them have liberty, at the end of every two or three years, to renew their vows, or otherwise, by the consent of friends.” This is close to what happened in the Magdalen House once it was established.

66 Dubbed “the Macaroni Parson,” Dodd’s was one of the great Georgian lives. A socially ambitious and sensually profligate young clergyman who had married a domestic servant, he served as the Evening Preacher at the Magdalen chapel from 1759 to 1777 and became an integral part of the services’ appeal. He wrote an early history of the Magdalen and a novel, The Sisters, on prostitution. (Ostensibly a sentimental narrative, The Sisters descended at times into proto-Sadean pornography: “At their commands she was obliged to strip naked as she was born, and thus submit to the hellish purposes of either; and after having been thus abused, each presented a red hot poker, near to every part as possible, made her dance, as they called it, for all their amusements.”) Generously compensated by the charity, he developed ruinously expensive tastes including a town house, a country house in Ealing, a carriage, and spendthrift jaunts to the West End that he could ill afford. He teetered on the edge of disgrace until 1777 when, in financial crisis, he tried to cash a fraudulent check under the name of his sometime tutee, the Earl of Chesterfield. Caught in the act, he was hauled before the Old Bailey, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. His case attracted the intense interest of Samuel Johnson who is said to have written Dodd’s final appeal to the Recorder at the Old Bailey and maintained a close correspondence with him as he approached the day of his hanging. Johnson also wrote on his behalf to the King, the Queen, Lord Mansfield, and Lord Chancellor Bathurst. He is even alleged to have written Dodd’s sermon delivered to his fellow convicts at Newgate Prison. (Johnson would later deny to Boswell that he wrote Dodd’s sermon, memorably quipping “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”) The day before his execution he wrote a consoling letter to Dodd, telling him “Be comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man’s principles; it attacked no man’s life. It involves only a temporary and reparable injury.” Despite the best efforts of his friends to try and bribe the judge, the jailers, and the hangman, Dodd was hanged the next day on June 27, 1777. Their strenuous efforts led to persistent rumors that Dodd had escaped his fate at Tyburn and was living pleasantly in Provence. His wife died in seclusion in England in 1784.

S.B.P. Pearce, An Ideal in the Working: The Magdalen Hospital 1758–1958 (London: privately printed, 1958); Gerald Howson, The Macaroni Parson: The Life of the Unfortunate Doctor Dodd (London: Hutchinson, 1973); and James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

67 Bradshaigh to Richardson May 22, 1759, Correspondence, Volume 5, 752–56; see also Richardson to Bradshaigh, June 5, 1759: he praises her going and agrees that “I could not have stood it.”

68 Furthermore, one of the roles of the Magdalen House was to re-induct women into the cult of sensibility. So much of the Magdalen’s work, in the minds of its managers, was to make the women ready for a life of domesticity after a period of perilous misadventure in the streets. The ultimate aim was that the penitents find a new husband, or, at least, a new and Christian home where they could devote themselves to suitably feminine work. Prayer, simple living, and honest work would repair their damaged delicacy and pave the way for marriage. Marriage was considered a self-fulfilling prophecy as childrearing and home keeping would ensure a woman’s loyalty to the code of domesticity. As Richardson put it in the Familiar Letters, “Childbed matronizes the giddiest Spirits.” The governors of the Magdalen claimed a ten to fifteen percent success rate in finding penitents husbands, and that two thirds of all women who passed through their doors left satisfactorily reformed. Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, 249–250; and Feltham, The Picture of London for 1810, 225–228.

69 Horace Walpole, Letters, Volume III, Letter 11 to George Montagu, Esq., January 28, 1760.

70 Early in his courtship Lovelace scandalizes the Harlowes by turning up in their church in order to catch a glimpse of Clarissa. She has been safely stowed at home but she guesses why he came: “Did he come for my sake; and, by behaving in such a manner to those present of my family, imagine he was doing me either service or pleasure?” Richardson, Clarissa, Letter XXX.

71 Dodd was known for his suggestive preaching style. For example, an extract from a sermon he included in his An Account of the Rise, 92: “You, who have known the fatal pleasings of passion, can more easily pity them, whom those pleadings have seduced and destroyed. And you, who are possessed of all the sweetness and delicacies of the tender mind, and happier state, can more easily guess the extreme misery which must arise to a female heart, from the foulness and horror of promiscuous prostitution.”

72 Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, 261–264.

73 Gentleman’s Magazine, LXXVI, 1816 Vol 1, 577–578.

CHAPTER TWO

1 James Boswell, Boswell on the grand tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766, eds. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1955); The notion that climate informed behavior was widespread. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748) was the foundational text for the claim that climate and geography shaped morals but the idea was commonly held in the decades before its publication. See, for example, Daniel Defoe’s “True-Born Englishman” (1701):

Lust chose the torrid zone of Italy

Where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy.

Where swelling veins o’erflow with livid streams,

With heat impregnate from Vesuvian flames:

Whose flowing sulphur forms infernal lakes,

And human body of the soil partakes.

There nature ever burns with hot desires.

In, Maurice Andrieux, Daily Life in Venice at the Time of Casanova (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 126.

2 John Murray was no relation to the line of John Murrays of London that published Byron. However, through marriage, Casanova’s Murray did have a connection to the Byron story: Murray’s wife, Bridget Milbanke, whom he married in 1748, was the only daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke, 4th Baronet of Halnaby Hall in North Yorkshire. Murray may have lived at Halnaby Hall for a time before going to Venice, in which case he inhabited the rooms that housed Byron during his disastrous “Treacle-Moon” with Anna Milbanke (1792–1860), who was the only daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke, 6th Baronet, nephew of John Murray’s wife Bridget. See Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 53.

3 Laidlaw, British in the Levant, 58.

4 Andrieux, Daily Life in Venice at the Time of Casanova, 164.

5 Carlo Goldoni, Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni, (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 154.

6 Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, Vol 1. 92.

7 Her father was Joseph Imer the impresario behind a touring acting troupe of which Zanetta Farussi was a member. Imer and Farussi had a longstanding and furious relationship that is said to have inspired some of Goldoni’s plays.

8 There is a poignant passage in Volume 6 of Casanova’s memoirs in which he alludes, meta-referentially, to the conditions of his memoir’s composition: “I have been writing memoirs for the last seven years, and though I repent of having begun, I have sworn to go on to the end. However, I write in the hope that my Memoirs may never see the light of day; in the first place the censure would not allow them to be printed, and in the second I hope I shall be strong-minded enough, when my last illness comes, to have all my papers burnt before my eyes. If that be not the case I count on the indulgence of my readers, who should remember that I have only written my story to prevent my going mad in the midst of all the petty insults and disagreeables which I have to bear day by day from the envious rascals who live with me in this castle of Count Waldstein, or Wallenstein, at Dux. I write ten or twelve hours a day, and so keep black melancholy at bay. My readers shall hear more of my sufferings later on, if I do not die before I write them down.”

9 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol 2, 106.

10 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol 2, 101.

11 Sharpe also provides an enchanting account of seeing the ladies of Venice rowed up and down beside the giardini of the Giudecca by their respective cicisbei at dusk “as in former days, our gentry in England frequented the Ring in Hyde-Park.”

12 The count did at one point try to expel Byron and rein in his wayward wife but was met with a scorn that speaks volumes about the entrenched status of cicisbeismo in this period. “It is hard,” Teresa informed her husband, “that I should be the only woman in Romagna who is not to have her Amico.” Society censured jealous husbands more than it did wandering wives; Byron stayed in their lives. Iris Origo, The Last Attachment (London: Jonathan Cape and John Murray, 1949), 205.

13 Byron to Hobhouse, from Bologna, August 23, 1819.

14 Goldoni, Memoirs, 246.

15 See Origo, The Last Attachment, 82: “the essence of Serventismo, as he was to realize later, was that the lady should stay with her husband.”

16 Origo, The Last Attachment, 151.

17 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol 2, 183.

18 See Jan Morris, Venice (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 47. Rialto is home to the Venetian banks and the Casteletto, at one end, the most storied brothel in Europe, sanctioned and monitored by the state. Prostitutes operating there had to display red lights on the prow of their gondolas. At the end of the 16th century there were said to be 2889 patrician ladies, 2508 nuns, and 1936 middle class wives—but 11,654 prostitutes!!

19 Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City (New York: Vintage, 2009), 96.

20 Andrieux, Daily Life in Venice, 136–37.

21 William Alexander, The History of Women (1796), 137.

22 Roberto Bizzocchi, A Lady’s Man: The Cicisbei, Private Morals and National Identity in Italy, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14–21. Compare with David Hume in “The Rise of Arts and Sciences,” 1742: “Gallantry is not less compatible with wisdom and prudence, than with nature and generosity; and when under proper regulations, contributes more than any other invention, to the entertainment and improvement of the youth of both sexes. Among every species of animals, nature has founded on the love between the sexes their sweetest and best enjoyment. But the satisfaction of the bodily appetite is not alone sufficient to gratify the mind; and even among brute-creatures, we find, that their play and dalliance, and other expressions of fondness, form the greatest part of the entertainment. In rational beings, we must certainly admit the mind for a considerable share. Were we to rob the feast of all its garniture of reason, discourse, sympathy, friendship, and gaiety, what remains would scarcely be worth acceptance, in the judgment of the truly elegant and luxurious.”

23 See Bizzocchi, A Lady’s Man, 191–92; Beccaria on adultery in Dei delitti e delle pene: “When the interest or pride of families, or paternal authority, not the inclination of the parties, unite the sexes, gallantry soon breaks the slender ties, in spite of common moralists, who exclaim against the effect, whilst they pardon the cause.”

24 Charles Burney, The present state of music in France and Italy (1771), 150–52.

25 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol 2, VIII, 202.

26 This made a problem for Carlo Goldoni when he had to adapt Samuel Richardson’s Pamela for the Italian stage: nobody would believe that an Italian nobleman would ever marry their maid, however virtuous. “For some time the novel of ‘Pamela’ had been the delight of the Italians, and my friends urged me strongly to turn it into a comedy. I was acquainted with the work, and felt no difficulty in seizing the spirit of it, and approximating the objects; but the moral aim of the English author was not reconcileable with the manners and laws of my country. A nobleman in London does not derogate from his nobility in marrying a peasant; but at Venice, a patrician who should marry a plebeian would deprive his children of the patrician nobility, and they would lose their right to the sovereignty. Comedy, which is, or ought to be, a school for propriety, should only expose human weaknesses for the sake of correcting them; and it would be unjustifiable to hazard the sacrifice of an unfortunate posterity under the pretext of recompensing virtue… . I did not, however, begin the work till I had invented a denouement which, instead of being dangerous, might serve as a model to virtuous lovers, and render the catastrophe both more agreeable and more interesting.” Goldoni, Memoirs, 255–56.

27 He would boast in his memoirs that he returned to Venice having “become the superior of several of my equals in respect to experience and to knowledge of the laws of honour and good manners.” Casanova, History of My Life, Vol III, Chapter XIII, 235.

28 “The infamous supper” described in Volume III, 260.

29 Ackroyd, Venice, 343–45

30 Selections from the Letters of De Brosses, trans. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1897), 30, 53.

31 Abraham Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye, The history of the government of Venice wherein the policies, councils, magistrates, and laws of that state are fully related, and the use of the balloting box exactly described: written in the year 1675 (London: Printed by H.C. for John Starkey, 1677).

32 “The nuns take nothing but ready money,” Carlo Goldoni grumbled apropos of the costs entailed with properly educating his niece. Goldoni, Memoirs, 455.

33 Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, An account of the manners and customs of Italy, Vol 2, (1768), 17.

34 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol III, 281.

35 Either the San Giacomo di Galizzia or the Santa Maria Degli Angeli.

36 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol IV, 9–10. She writes that he has become “the puzzle of the entire convent” after five or six such attendances. “The old nuns said that I must have some sorrow from which my only hope of being relieved was the protection of their Holy Virgin, in whom it was clear that I must have perfect trust; and the young ones said that I must be suffering from melancholia, a misanthrope who shunned the great world.”

37 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol IV, 17.

38 “They included all that the wisest philosophers have written against religion and all that the most voluptuous pens have written on the subject which is the sole aim of love. Seductive books, whose incendiary style drives the reader to seek the reality, which alone can quench the fire he feels running through his veins. Besides the books there were folios containing only lascivious engravings.” Casanova, History of My Life, Vol IV, 34.

39 This resulted in the First Treaty of Versailles in 1756 and, indirectly, to the outbreak of the Seven Years War (1756–1763).

40 It was in early 1755 that Casanova began to spend time with John Murray, the English resident in Venice, so for much of 1754 and the first half of 1755 he was indeed consorting with high-ranking foreign diplomats. In the same period he also moved out of the Palazzo Bragadin into private apartments, possibly to protect his sponsors from lethal allegations of fraternizing with diplomats.

41 J. Rives Childs, Casanova: A New Perspective, (London: Constable, 1989), 71–72.

42 Rives Childs, Casanova, 71–72.

43 See Peter Ackroyd on the significance of his imprisonment in the Piombi: “It is perhaps no wonder that his story of the his imprisonment in the dungeons of the ducal palace, and of his subsequent escape, is a central text in Venetian social history; he was in the prison of his unreflecting self. It is in any case rare to find, in Venetian literature, any attempt at analysis or self-criticism. There is just no interest in the subject, the fruit of a culture in which individualism of any kind was discouraged.” Ackroyd, Venice, 272.

44 Casanova’s description of this book is excellent: “I read everything that the extravagance of the heated imagination of an extremely devout Spanish virgin, given to melancholy, shut up in a convent, and guided by ignorant and flattering confessors, could bring forth. All these chimerical and monstrous visions were adorned with the name of revelations.”

45 The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired Voltaire’s famous attack on Catholic doctrine. How was it, Voltaire asked, that pious Lisbon was destroyed while more sinful cities were untouched?

Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,

Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?

Was less debauchery to London known,

Where opulence luxurious holds her throne?

Earth Lisbon swallows; the light sons of France

Protract the feast, or lead the sprightly dance.

Voltaire, “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” (1756).

46 Casanova gives its length both as two feet and as twenty inches long. In any case, a sizeable device for digging through plaster and bashing through rotten wooden paneling.

47 “Nature commanded me to escape, and religion could not forbid me to do it.” Casanova, History of My Life, Vol IV, 293.

48 “Seingalt” is a perfect anagram of “genitals,” not likely a coincidence given Casanova cabala-inspired fascination with hidden meaning, word games, and substitution. The Chevalier’s implicit libidinism was signaled by the richness of his dress. Here is Casanova in 1763: “I wore a suit of grey velvet, trimmed with gold and silver lace; my point lace shirt was worth at least fifty louis; and my diamonds, my watches, my chains, my sword of the finest English steel, my snuff-box set with brilliants, my cross set with diamonds, my buckles set with the same stones, were altogether worth more than fifty thousand crowns.”

49 “But Rousseau, great man though he was, was totally deficient in humour.” There is no mystery to the lack of connection between the two men—Rousseau’s sexual politics were famously austere and his attitude toward female emancipation conservative in the extreme. See: Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean Jacques Rousseau (University of Chicago Press, 1984).

50 Casanova did not speak and did not seriously try to learn English. His movements around London were facilitated by a black manservant named Jarbe whom he hired upon arrival and “who spoke English, French, and Italian with equal facility.” Despite this barrier, there were plenty of Italians in the Covent Garden area he could speak to and he also found that many well-born Englishmen and women spoke passable French. The relative ease with which he moved through London without the native language is testament to the cosmopolitan nature of the city in this period but also to the insignificance of English as a transnational language: a veteran traveler like Casanova needed only French to make his way around the world.

51 John Hawkesworth, An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His present Majesty: for making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (London, 1773), 480–482.

52 The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville 1767–68, ed. and trans. John Dunmore (London, The Hakluyt Society, 2002), 63.

53 Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire, (London: Icon, 2003), 114.

54 Such associations would persist for some time. Fascinated by what he heard of Tahiti, James Boswell asked Captain Cook at dinner whether he might join the next expedition to the island. This did not happen but he later defended Tahitian mores to a skeptical Samuel Johnson. Erasmus Darwin, in his The Loves of the Plants (1789), describes Tahiti as the home of the Adonis plant, with a hundred male stamens and a hundred female pistils within a single flower—a botanical metaphor for Pacific polygamy and free love. Claire Clairmont, the unhappy sometime lover of Lord Byron, described the Shelley-Byron circle as “tribe of the Otaheite philosopher’s [sic],” a joke that played on the widespread assumption that the group were practitioners of free love. Byron’s grandfather, the sailor John Byron, had conducted expeditions in the South Pacific in the 1760s and had command of the Dolphin before it was handed over to his deputy, Samuel Wallis.

55 Denis Diderot, Political Writings, eds. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 68, 69, 73.

56 Casanova, History of My Life, Vol V, Chapter V, 101.

57 George Gordon Byron [Lord Byron] to Douglas Kinnaird Venice, October 26, 1819.

58 Compare Byron telling Teresa Guiccioli in a letter from 1819 “I am a citizen of the world—all countries are alike to me.” (Origo, Last Attachment, 170) with Casanova’s oft-proclaimed cosmopolitan status; for example, Albert Haller’s account of him: “He tells me he is a free man, a citizen of the world.” (Ian Kelly, Casanova, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) 237.

59 Ah! pieta Signori miei, 2:10b:

Ah, be not so hard upon me,

Give me leave, good friends, to speak!

Wrongs like yours surely had undone me.

But, believe me, I am not he you seek.

I will tell you how my master, did from bad to worse descend.

Donna Elvira, do you tell them,

By what arts he gains his end;

As for thee, I’ve not a notion what befell thee;

As this lady here can tell thee,

For I met her, with him philand’ring,

Well I knew how all would end;

And to your lordship, I will admit it,

I’ve acted wrongly, not as befitted …

I know I’ve trespas’d, I ask your pardon,

Lost in the darkness, I entered the garden,

Not thought t’offend. ’Twas a blunder;

Greatly I wonder, how all was known!

Masters, I would now with speed be gone.

accessed from http://www.opera-arias.com/mozart/don-giovanni/ah-pieta-signori-miei.

60 See Kelly, Casanova, 335; and “Don Giovanni,” Dyneley Hussey, Music & Letters 8, No. 4 (Oct., 1927), 470–472; Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights at the Opera (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 78–87; Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1929), 237, 439; and Goldoni, Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni, who writes on page 173: “everybody knows the wretched Spanish play which the Italians call “Il Convitato di Pietre,” the French “La Festin de Pierre,” and the English “Don Juan.” In Italy I always considered it with horror, and I could not conceive how such farce could for so long a time draw crowds together, and prove the delight of a polished people.” Nonetheless, it was a great success for Goldoni in the 1730s.

CHAPTER THREE

1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 3–5.

2 Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, Volume V, (1822) 56–58.

3 On her travels through Scandinavia she comments unfavorably on local drinking habits and Maria, or The Wrongs of Women contains this brilliant description of a hungover libertine: “The squeamishness of stomach alone, produced by the last night’s intemperance, which he took no pains to conceal, destroyed my appetite. I think I now see him lolling in an arm-chair, in a dirty powdering gown, soiled linen, ungartered stockings, and tangled hair, yawning and stretching himself.”

4 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1–3.

5 See William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, (1798) Chapter 3, 214–15: “Mary was now arrived at the twenty-fourth year of her age. Her project, five years before, had been personal independence; it was now usefulness.”

6 Shortly before she left for Ireland she had another formative pedagogical experience. That October she visited Eton College and recorded her appalled impressions in a letter to her sister. “I could not live the life they lead at Eton—nothing but dress and ridicule going forward—and I really believe their fondness for ridicule tends to make them affected … for witlings abound—and puns fly about like crackers … So much company without socibility [sic], would be to me an unsuportable fatigue … Vanity in one shape or other reigns triumphant—and has banished love in all its modifications — and without it what is society? A false kind of politeness throws a varnish over every character—neither the heart nor sentiments appear in their true colours… . I am in a melting mood.” Mary Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft from Eton, Sunday, October 9, 1786. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, 79.

7 See Arthur Young, The Autobiography of Arthur Young: With Selections from His Correspondence, (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), 79–80.

8 Mary Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft from Castle Mitchelstown, October 30, 1786, Collected Letters, 84–86.

9 Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, 88.

10 For the quotes see p. 291 of the Oxford World Classics edition of the Vindication of the Rights of Women, which includes her history of the French Revolution and contains this quote; the second comes from the Vindication itself, Chapter 3. Wollstonecraft’s own unhappy peripatetic childhood in the countryside and the later success she achieved in London and Paris likely contributed to her skepticism of Rousseau’s pastoralism. In Norway she described one particularly isolated community as being “bastilled by nature—shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart” and while she shared in the general belief that cities were hotbeds of vice and corruption, she also saw them as places of progress, writing in her Historical and Moral View, that “it has been one of the advantages of the large cities of Europe, to light up the sparks of reason, and to extend the principles of truth.” (359)

11 Mary Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft from Dublin, March 24, 1787. Collected Letters, 114–115. She reaffirms this attitude of admiration in a review of the second part of his Confessions for the Analytical Review: “The writer of this article will venture to say, that he should never expect to see that man do a generous action, who could ridicule Rousseau’s interesting account of his feelings and reveries—who could, in all the pride of wisdom, falsely so called, despise such a heart when naked before him.” The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 7, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London, William Pickering, 1989) 228.

12 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft; also see Wollstonecraft on Lady Kingsborough, whom she judged to be “devoid of sensibility … vanity only inspires her immoderate love of praise—and selfishness her traffick of civility.” Janet Todd, Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 105.

13 For the Magdalen House, see Chapter 1. There is a passing but pointed allusion to the Magdalen in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “Many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere affectionate heart, and still more are, as it may emphatically be termed, RUINED before they know the difference between virtue and vice: and thus prepared by their education for infamy, they become infamous. Asylums and Magdalens are not the proper remedies for these abuses. It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!” (143)

14 John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831), 163–64. A cultivated disregard of fashion had been pioneered by Rousseau and remained in vogue throughout the pre-revolutionary period. During the revolution itself, Helen Maria Williams observed that: “The greatest simplicity in dress is observed, and is sometimes carried even to negligence. Every man seems at pains to shew that he has wasted as few moments as it was possible at his toilette, and that his mind is bent on higher cares than the embellishment of his person.” Helen Deborah Kennedy, Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 85–85.

15 Her first recorded review, in June 1788, of Edward and Harriet, or the Happy Recovery, a Sentimental Novel. By a Lady, was typically combative: “The Happy Recovery is an heterogeneous mass of folly, affectation, and improbability. Metaphors and vulgarisms abound. The countess, ‘wrapt up in the sable and all-encircling mantle of despair, is seized with a violent puking of blood.’ An analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can the cant of sensibility be tried by any criterion of reason; ridicule should direct its shafts against this fair game, and, if possible, deter the thoughtless from imbibing the wildest notions, the most pernicious prejudices, prejudices which influence the conduct and spread insipidity over social converse.” The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft: Volume 7, 19.

16 Godwin, Memoirs, 226.

17 Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars 1793-1815 (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 14.

18 Richard Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” 1789.

19 In Isaac Cruikshank’s 1790 cartoon “The doctor indulged with his favorite scene,” Dr. Price is shown watching the poissardes’ National Guard henchmen ransack Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom during the nights of October 5–6 through a peephole, with a little black demon for company. Price watches the scene kneeling, his hands in prayer. A speech bubble says: “Lord now lettest thou thy Servant depart in peace for mine Eyes have Seen.” This is a line lifted from his lecture “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.”

20 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (Oxford University Press, 1993), 14, 72, 76, 77.

21 Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 80.

22 Godwin’s diary quoted in Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 42.

23 Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795, eds. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, Mary Durham Johnson, (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 76–77.

24 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 179.

25 Women in Revolutionary Paris, 89–93.

26 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 65.

27 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 66.

28 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 106; Shortly afterward she takes an amusing potshot at Rousseau’s proposed system of education for girls: “The mother, who wishes to give true dignity of character to her daughter, must, regardless of the sneers of ignorance, proceed on a plan diametrically opposite to that which Rousseau has recommended with all the deluding charms of eloquence and philosophical sophistry.” (108)

29 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 71.

30 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 93. Wollstonecraft perceived and decried the notion that a woman would under-educate herself to appear unthreatening to a potential partner as “quitting a substance for a shadow.” (99)

31 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 196.

32 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 219. “I have before observed, that men ought to maintain the women whom they have seduced.”

33 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 113.

34 Wollstonecraft to Joseph Johnson, London, October 1792. Letters, 205,

35 Rachel Hewitt, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade That Forged the Modern Mind, (London: Granta Books, 2017), 192–193.

36 For Tahiti see Chapter 2. Southey even considered traveling to Tahiti, writing that “Otaheitii [had] independent of its women had many inducements, not only for the sailor but the philosopher.” This came to nothing and the pantisocratic scheme was also abandoned, but not before notions of free love were preemptively abandoned, too. “I am for Liberty & Long Petticoats,” Southey decided in the end. For a brilliant survey of the pantisocracy, free love, and a critique of the self-serving male aspects of the imagined sexual utopias, see chapters 7 and 8 of Hewitt, A Revolution of Feeling.

37 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, (1793), Volume 2, Chapter VI. Godwin also seemed to believe that in this exulted state of liberty individuals would cease to be the “slave of sensuality and selfishness” and that their interest in sex would become almost purely functional:

“Reasonable men then will propagate their species, not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right the species should be propagated; and the manner in which they exercise this function will be regulated by the dictates of reason and duty.”

It should be noted that Godwin also argued that in a world of perfect freedom the mind would conquer matter and then mortality. “In a word, why may not man be one day immortal?” He wrote. A crucial step on the path to immortality was the abolition of sleep: “before death can be banished, we must banish sleep, death’s image.” (Chapter VII)

38 Mary Wollstonecraft to William Roscoe, January 3, 1792 in The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, ed. David H. Weinglass, (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1982), 79.

39 Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 165.

40 Wollstonecraft, Letters, 204–05.

41 Note that by this point Wollstonecraft has, in the eyes of the conservatives, joined the ranks of the Francophile radical vanguard. See: Horace Walpole to Hannah More, August 21, 1792: “But it is better to thank Providence for the tranquility and happiness we enjoy in this country, in spite of the philosophising serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Woollstoncrofts [sic]. I am glad you have not read the tract of the last-mentioned writer. I would not look at it, though assured it contains neither metaphysics or politics; but as she entered the lists on the latter, and borrowed her title from the demon’s book, which aimed at spreading the wrongs of men, she is excommunicated from the pale of my library.”

42 Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 167–68.

43 David Andress, The Terror, (London: Abacus, 2006), 114.

44 Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 91.

45 To William Roscoe, November 12, 1792, Wollstonecraft, Letters, 206–208,

46 To Joseph Johnson, December 26, 1792, Wollstonecraft, Letter, 216–217.

47 Mary Wollstonecraft, “Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation,” Paris, February 15, 1793; also see John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 438–440.

48 Helen Maria Williams Letter V p77, see also Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 94.

49 Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 63; and HMW Letter V p77.

50 Her obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1828, where Williams was damned as “among the violent female devotees of the French revolution,” was also home to some choice words for Stone. Writing apropos of her later disavowal of the Revolution, the Magazine declared that “she thus showed that her democratic consistency equalled the republican morality she had previously exhibited by living ‘under the protection’ (as the phrase is) of the quondam Rev. Mr. Stone,—one of those singularly black sheep, which even the liberal politics of modern ecclesiastical government cannot tolerate.” Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, 240–41.

51 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 211.

52 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 236.

53 For a concise survey of the themes of The Emigrants, see John Seelye, “The Jacobin Mode in Early American Fiction: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants,” Early American Literature, 22, No. 2, Politics as Art, Art as Politics: Literature of the Early Republic, 1760–1820 (Fall, 1987), 204–212.

54 Virginia Woolf wrote of Imlay’s courtship of Wollstonecraft, that “tickling minnows he had hooked a dolphin,” a view that captures the persisting view that Imlay was a romantic chancer and a human mediocrity, who ran amok in the emotional world of one Europe’s greatest female writers and thinkers with little care or concern for the disastrous consequences of his coquetry. This view is anchored in an oblivion of literary evidence. We have none of Imlay’s letters and consequently only Wollstonecraft’s side of the story. For an evenhanded treatment of the Imlay-Wollstonecraft connection see Richard Holmes’s essay, “The Feminist and the Philosopher: A Love Story (1987),” in Sidetracks (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

55 Andrew Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 56.

56 Godwin, Memoirs, 241–42.

57 Wollstonecraft to Imlay August, 1793, Wollstonecraft, Letters, 228; Todd, 216; Andress, 155–70.

58 Wollstonecraft to Imlay September, 1793, Wollstonecraft, Letters, 231; Imlay, November, 1793, 232.

59 Wollstonecraft to Imlay January 1, 1794, Wollstonecraft, Letters, 238.

60 Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, (Lomdon: Longman, Brown, & Co., 1854), 58–59.

61 Rousseau argued that by installing women in the house they would become the true rulers of France. His model was Sparta, which he argued was nominally run by men but whose controlling influence were Spartan wives and mothers. See, “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva,” the preface to the Discourse on Inequality: I must not forget that precious half of the Republic, which makes the happiness of the other; and whose sweetness and prudence preserve its tranquillity and virtue. Amiable and virtuous daughters of Geneva, it will be always the lot of your sex to govern ours. Happy are we, so long as your chaste influence, solely exercised within the limits of conjugal union, is exerted only for the glory of the State and the happiness of the public. It was thus the female sex commanded at Sparta; and thus you deserve to command at Geneva.” See also: Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: NY Cornell University Press, 1988), 70–75.

62 Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 126.

63 Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795, 180.

64 Helen Maria Williams recorded that even among hardened Jacobins the masturbation slander was regarded as needlessly overblown: “When, Hebert accusing Antoinette of having committed the most shocking crime, she turned with dignity towards the audience, and said, ‘I appeal to the conscience and feelings of every mother present, to declare if there be one amongst them who does not shudder at the idea of such horrors.’ Robespierre, struck with this answer as by an electrical shock, broke his plate with this fork. ‘That blockhead Hebert!’ cried he, ‘as if it were not enough that she was really a Messaline, he must make her an Aggripina also, and furnish her with a triumph of exciting the sympathy of the public in her last moments.” Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France in 1790, eds. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001), 172–173.

65 Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795, 213–216.

66 See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1989) 637, 653, 686, and Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 112, 126.

67 Wollstonecraft would consistently refer to herself as Mrs. Imlay until 1796 and it was widely believed that she was legally married to him until she married William Godwin.

68 To Imlay, p253-54; to Ruth Barlow May 20th Wollstonecraft, Letters,

69 To Imlay, September 22, 1794. Wollstonecraft, Letters, 263–64.

70 To Imlay, Friday June 12, 1795. Wollstonecraft, Letters, 297.

71 Wollstonecraft, Letters, 130.

72 Holmes, “The Feminist and the Philosopher,” Sidetracks.

73 To Imlay, September 27, 1795. Wollstonecraft, Letters, 322.

74 Godwin, Memoirs, 258–259.

75 Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 170.

76 Wollstonecraft, Maria, 102.

77 Wollstonecraft, Maria, 137.

78 For a full treatment of seduction laws in England and America see chapters 4 and 5.

79 Wollstonecraft, Maria, 170–171.

80 Godwin, Memoirs, 256.

81 Holmes, Sidetracks, 210.

82 Purely by coincidence, Godwin’s memoir was published at the same time as another scandal broke whose particulars were skewed to defame the late Mary Wollstonecraft. Shortly after she died, her former student Mary King was at the epicenter of a salacious affair seemingly lifted from the pages of Clarissa. In October 1797, Mary eloped with her cousin, Henry Gerard Fitzgerald. She was retrieved from London and sent back to Castle Mitchelstown. Her brother, Colonel Robert Edward King, fought a duel with Fitzgerald in Hyde Park on the morning of October 1. This was inconclusive, so they agreed to meet again the next day. They were arrested under the orders of the Duke of York before they could do so. Shortly before Christmas, Fitzgerald was spotted lurking about Castle Mitchelstown in disguise. Robert found out which inn Fitzgerald was staying in, went to his room and shot him dead “on the account of [him] seducing his sister.” In between his duel in Hyde Park and this murder in County Cork, Lord Kingsborough had died, and Robert had inherited the title. Consequently, he was permitted to request a trial in the House of Lords where he was unanimously acquitted in May 1798. In the run up to the trial, the press began to pick up on the connection between Mary King and her (very briefly) governess Mary Wollstonecraft. The unhappy events in the King household were subsequently held to have been part of the perverse legacy of Wollstonecraft’s “detestable system” of morality and education.

See, Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, Volume 31, King, Robert (1754–1799); and N. F. Lowe, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Kingsborough Scandal,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 9 (1994), 44–56.

83 The Anti-Jacobin review and magazine. v. 1 (July–Dec. 1798), 98 and Index; and William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex’d and Proper Females, (Manchester University Press, 2002) 13–16, 28.

84 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, 1825.

CHAPTER FOUR

1 Shelley, for his part, believed the whole phenomenon of “seduction” was a product of a corrupt and oppressive moral order, a view he delineated in a letter to Sir James Lawrence in August 1812: “Love seems inclined to stay in the prison, and my only the reason for putting him in chains, whilst convinced of the unholiness of the act, was a knowledge that, in the present state of society, if love is not thus villainously treated, shew who is the most loved will be treated worse by a misjudging world. In short, seduction, which term could have no meaning in a rational society, has now a most tremendous one; the fictitious merit attached to chastity has made that a forerunner to the most terrible ruins which in Malabar would be a pledge of honour and homage. If there is any enormous and desolating crime of which I should shudder to be accused of it is seduction. I need not say how I admire “Love”; and, as a British public seems to appreciate its merit, in not permitting it to emerge from a first edition, it is with satisfaction I find that justice had conceded abroad what bigotry has denied at home.’

Percy Shelley to Sir James Lawrence, August 17, 1812, dated Lymouth, Barnstaple, Devon.

2 H Shelley to C Nugent, November 20, 1814, A Shelley Library, A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters, ed. Thomas James Wise, (London: Privately Printed, 1924).

3 Letter from MWS to Unknown, Geneva, June 1, 1816.

4 This disastrous sojourn was later dubbed their “treacle-moon” by Byron.

5 “Lord Byron took every pains to convince his wife of improper relations subsisting between himself and his sister.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Vindication of Lady Byron.

6 Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834), 142.

7 This was at first part of her appeal to him. In one (pre-nuptial) encomium Byron described her as “a poetess, a mathematician, a metaphysician; yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension.” Later he would parody these same traits in Don Juan:

Her favourite science was the mathematical,

…

Her thoughts were theorems, her words a problem,

As if she deem’d that mystery would ennoble ’em.

The notion that Lady Byron was especially “cold and mathematical” would become something of a trope among Byron’s partisans. One defender in the Atlantic Monthly wrote that “finding that she could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional rules of her own mode of life, [she] suddenly, and without warning, abandoned him in the most cruel and inexplicable manner.”

8 Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, (London: Pimlico, 1993), 211–12.

9 In her 1830 testimony, Lady Byron described her flight from her husband in January 1816:

The facts are, I left London for Kirkby Mallory, the residence of my father and mother, on the 15th of January, 1816. Lord Byron had signified to me in writing, Jan. 6, his absolute desire that I should leave London on the earliest day that I could conveniently fix. It was not safe for me to encounter the fatigues of a journey sooner than the 15th. Previously to my departure, it had been strongly impressed on my mind that Lord Byron was under the influence of insanity. This opinion was in a great measure derived from the communications made to me by his nearest relatives and personal attendant.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), 108.

10 Fewer than 350 such divorces had been approved by this method in all English history.

11 Medora Leigh herself believed she was Byron’s daughter and said as much in her memoir. There is no genetic evidence available to confirm or deny the allegation.

12 “From the time Mrs L— came to Bennet St. in the year 1813—Lord B—had given her various intimations of a criminal intercourse between them,” Marchand, Byron, 229–30

13 “The English women are the only good-looking women in Brussels; though, with true English Bullism, they vest here a complete Anglomanian costume, preserving their French fashions for the English winds to waft.” Polidori, Diary, 58.

14 Moore records a hilarious dialogue between Polidori and his employer that took place as they traveled from France to Switzerland: A dialogue which Lord Byron himself used to mention as having taken place between them during their journey on the Rhine, is amusingly characteristic of both the persons concerned. “After all,” said the physician, “what is there you can do that I cannot?” “Why, since you force me to say,” answered the other, “I think there are three things I can do which you cannot.” Polidori deigned him to name them. “I can,” said Lord Byron, “swim across that river and I can snuff out that candle with a pistol-shot at the distance of twenty paces and I have written a poem of which 14,000 copies were sold in one day.”

Moore, Life of Byron, Vol III.

15 Polidori, Diary, 97.

16 Polidori, Diary, 98. On the way to Dover they had visited the grave of Charles Churchill (1732–1764) a poet, satirist, and legendary rake. This lay-by produced a poem “Churchill’s Grave”: “I stood beside the grave of him who blazed / The Comet of a season”

17 Marchand, Byron, 288. Robert Southey had observed them in Geneva and spread rumors back in England about the Byron-Shelley-Godwin-Clairmont group, leading Byron to rage in an 1820 letter to Hobhouse: “The son of a bitch on his return from Switzerland, two years ago, said that Shelley and I ‘had formed a League of Incest, and practised our precepts with, &c.’ He lied like a rascal, for they were not sisters … he lied in another sense, for there was no promiscuous intercourse, my commerce being limited to the carnal knowledge of Miss C.” He later took his revenge on Southey, a radical turned conservative, in the bitter dedication to Don Juan:

Bob Southey! You’re a poet—Poet-laureate,

And representative of all the race;

Although ’tis true that you turn’d out a Tory at

Last—yours has lately been a common case;

…

Europe has slaves—allies—kings—armies still,

And Southey lives to sing them very ill.

18 Moore, Life of Byron, 279.

19 The very first reference Polidori made to Mary and Claire is revealing. Shelley, he recorded, “keeps the two daughters of Godwin who practise his theories [free love].” Leaving aside his clear ignorance of the stepsisters actual relations (he was not alone in either his confusion or his indifference to clearing it up) it suggests a certain presumption on his part: perhaps Mary might practice Godwin’s theories on him?

20 Giovanni Aldini, An account of the late improvements in galvanism (1803), 216. Accessed at: https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b20595256#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=210&z=-0.0666%2C0.3626%2C1.1478%2C0.6168.

21 Don Juan, Canto I, CXXX, 35.

The full quote makes the allusion to Aldini’s Newgate experiments even more explicit:

And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,

But has not answer’d like the apparatus

Of the Humane Society’s beginning

By which men are unsuffocated gratis

The Humane Society had collaborated with Aldini in his 1803 experiments.

Richard Holmes notes that Shelley had been passionately interested in electricity since his Oxford days when he had kept an “electrical apparatus” in his room and spoke “with vehemence of the marvellous powers of electricity, of thunder and lightning” while he tinkered with it. (Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 44.

22 The same point is made in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979): At the same time, just as surely as Eve’s moral deformity is symbolized by the monster’s physical malformation, the monster’s physical ugliness represents his social illegitimacy, his bastardy, his namelessness… . Mary Shelley’s monster has also been “got” in a “dark and vicious place.” Indeed, in his vile illegitimacy he seems to incarnate that bestial “‘unnameable’ place” And significantly, he is himself as nameless as a woman is in patriarchal society, as nameless as unmarried, illegitimately pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin may have felt herself to be at the time she wrote Frankenstein. “This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Mary commented when she learned that it was the custom at early dramatizations of Frankenstein to place a blank line next to the name of the actor who played the part of the monster. But her pleased surprise was disingenuous, for the problem of names and their connection with social legitimacy had been forced into her consciousness all her life.

23 And to her estranged husband: My dear Bysshe let me conjure you by the remembrance of our days of happiness to grant my last wish—do not take your innocent child from Eliza who has been more than I have, who has watched over her with such unceasing care.—Do not refuse my last request—I never could refuse you & if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of.

Accessed at: http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/harriet-shelleys-suicide-letter#Transcript.

24 The Shelleys also tried, more gently, to dissuade him. In a letter from Pisa, dated October 21, 1821, Percy offered to take Allegra into his own household: The Countess tells me that you think of leaving Allegra for the present at the convent. Do as you think best; but I can pledge myself to find a situation for her here such as you would approve in case you change your mind. Wise, A Shelley Library, 66.

25 Mary Shelley to Claire Clairmont, May 11, 1821, My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Muriel Spark, (London: Allan Wingate, 1953).

26 This is now known to history as “A Fragment of a Novel.” It is only a few pages long and contains no reference to vampires or vampirism.

27 The Vampyre was quickly translated into French and German and was wildly popular in both countries. In France it also became the basis for the popular plays Lord Ruthann ou les Vampires, by Cyprien Bérard (1820); The Bride of the Isles, a Tale, by J.R. Planché (1820); and Le Vampire, by Charles Nodier (1820); and La Guzla by Prosper Mérimée. Many of The Vampyre’s knock-offs claimed to have been written by Byron himself, and for many in Europe it was the first piece of Byron they ever read. Goethe famously, and hilariously, described it as “the English poet’s finest work.” (See Chapter 2 of Christopher Frayling’s, Vampyres.)

28 Confusingly, “Oneirodynia” is now the technical term for nightmares but in the early 19th century the word was used to refer to sleepwalking, or somnambulism.

29 The connection of sleep with the disabling of man’s reasoning faculties was widespread. Describing her sister in a delirious fever, Mary Wollstonecraft had compared her condition to “something like strange dreams when judgement sleeps and fancy sports at a fine rate.” (See Todd, Wollstonecraft, 45.)

30 Anthelme Richerand and John Howell, Elements of physiology (Bristol Royal Infirmary, 1815).

31 Joseph Deleuze, Francis, A critical history of animal magnetism (University of Leeds, 1816).

32 Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, No. 1, Romanticism and the Sciences of Life, Spring, 2004.

33 Deleuze A Critical History of Animal Magnetism, 1816.

34 Dr. John Bell, The General and Particular Principles of Animal Electricity and Magnetism (1792), 65–70; See also The Skeptic (1800), accessed on British Library http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.

l&frbrVersion=1610&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.the%20skeptic%201800&dstmp=1512332185264.

35 Richard Holmes, Age of Wonder, 273, and Anonymous, The Skeptic (1800), British Library, Digital Store Cup.407.gg.37. DRT

36 “The apples and the horse-turds; or, Buonaparte among the golden pippins,” James Gillray, 1800 British Museum, Museum number 1851,0901.1018

37 Review of Du Fluide-Universel, de son Activite et de l’Utilite de ses Modifications, &c., Anti-Jacobin Review (1806).

38 Louis Odier (1748–1817) a Swiss doctor whose research was, typical to his era, diverse, encompassing pediatrics, vaccinations, laughing gas, and animal magnetism. Intriguingly, in the aforementioned Anti-Jacobin Review article on universal fluid, the author notes that somnambulism is associated with the doctors of Lyons and Geneva but not Paris, who hold it “in just contempt.”

39 Polidori, Diary, 119–22.

40 New Monthly Magazine, Volume 31, 180–85.

41 Byron may well have approved of the comparison for he was a huge fan of her grandfather’s work both on the stage and in Parliament, and had, off course, sat on the board of the Sheridan family’s Drury Lane Theatre. The great man died in July 1816, and Byron composed his elegy “On the Death of Richard Brinsley Sheridan” while staying in the Villa Diodati.

42 Thornton Butterworth, The Journal of Henry Edward Fox (London, 1923), 292.

43 There is scholarly debate as to whether the story was Mary’s or Claire Clairmont’s. See: Bradford A. Booth, “The Pole: A Story by Clare Clairmont?,” ELH, 5, No. 1 (March, 1938), 67–70.

44 From The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Vol. 4, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960–63), 110-11.

45 During the same period Haydon records a conversation he had with Edward Ellice, an acquaintance of Byron and a minister in Lord Grey’s cabinet, on the subject of Byron’s wife that is revealing of contemporary male sexual attitudes: “I said, ‘She was a prig—she married him to reform him.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Ellice, ‘not only to reform him but to refuse him.’” Haydon confides in his diary that if Lady Byron should have actually “checked his [Byron’s] natural appetites” then he should have “prostrated her by force!—at any rate a man can’t be hung for a rape on his wife.” Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 99–100.

46 Following his participation in the Greek War of Independence, Trelawney had proposed marriage to both Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley. The latter rejected him in brutal fashion, with a wonderfully backhanded compliment thrown in for good measure: My name will never be Trelawney. I am not so young as I was when you first knew me, but I am as proud. I must have the entire affection, devotion, &, above all, the solicitous protection of any one who would win me. You belong to womankind in general, & Mary Shelley will never be yours. Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley: A Biography (London: Constable, 1993), 122.

47 Under Breach of Promise to Marry, plaintiffs could seek damages on the grounds of seduction—that is, if the promise of marriage led to sex—but even in the absence of that were secure in claiming compensation for the psychic, emotional, reputational damage sustained by the unexpected and undesired end to their nuptial plans. The results could be ridiculous but also fortuitous at a time when social mobility was limited and women’s life prospects were particularly tightly constrained. In 1828, the 58-year-old Sally Simpson was overjoyed to discover that an obviously humorous offer of marriage made nineteen years earlier by a local landlord resulted in a court-ordered payout of £350. Nonetheless, leading English jurists took the suit seriously. Referring to the survival of “contract marriage” in Scotland, Lord Brougham observed in 1849: “the promise [of marriage] is made secretly, in the course of a seduction, and is parcel of the act of seducing the female. Then the difficulty is for the female to prove it.”

See: Denise Bates, Breach of Promise to Marry: A History of How Jilted Brides Settled Scores (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2014); and Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford University Press, 1990), 80–81.

48 Fluke had been castrated by shrapnel at the battle of Waterloo and thereafter was taken into the household service of the Nortons, one of whom was his commanding officer in the Lowlands.

49 Much like the lawyers and jurists in nineteenth-century Crim. Con. cases, contemporary historians have probed the historical record for conclusive evidence as to whether Melbourne and Norton were, in fact, intimate. The closest to a smoking gun is a letter Melbourne’s brother sent to their sister five days after the trial: Quel triomphe ! J’ai ta letter du 23 … Don’t let Wm think himself invulnerable for having got off again this time; no man’s luck can go further.

The “again” refers to Lord Brandon’s Crim. Con. suit that Melbourne had rid himself of earlier in the decade. The affair was common knowledge at the time. Lord Malmesbury, hearing of Melbourne’s acquittal, joked that to accept the court’s ruling one would have to believe that “Melbourne had had more opportunities than any man ever had before, and made no use of them.” Quoted in: The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne, eds. James O. Huge and Clarke Olney (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974); Stone, Road to Divorce, 280.

50 For an account of the trial see: Diane Atkinson, The Criminal Conversations of Mrs Norton (London: Preface Publishing, 2012), 8–22.

51 Letter from Caroline Norton to Mary Shelley, June 25, 1836, quoted in Jane Gray Perkins, Life of Mrs. Norton (London: John Murray, 1910), 95.

52 Letter to John Murray, 1838, quoted in Perkins, Life of Mrs. Norton, 151.

53 BROTHELS, &C. SUPPRESSION BILL., House of Lords Debate, June 14, 1844 vol. 75 cc877-91.

54 See Hansard, House of Commons Debate, June 23, 1847 vol. 93 cc811-4.

55 The Spectator, for example, praised the Bill: Such a law would entail responsibility on another; it would operate as a check on seducers, and a powerful one—for all deceivers of women are mean men. The prospect of having to pay heavily for their “successes” would convert many a Don Juan into Scipios. Scipio was the Roman general known for his temperance and moral rectitude. In Littell’s Living Age, Vol. 14, July–September, 1847.

56 Married Women and the Law, Eds. Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 7.

57 THE HON. G. C. NORTON AND THE HON. MRS NORTON, The Morning Post (London, England), Friday, August 19, 1853.

58 Caroline Norton, “English Laws For Women in the Nineteenth Century,” 1854.

59 Allen Horstman, Victorian Divorce, (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 77.

60 These clauses were:

21 — Protects earnings of a wife deserted by her husband

24 — Court could direct payment of separate maintenance to a wife or to her trustee

25 — A wife can inherit and bequeath property like a single woman

26 — A Separated wife was given power of contract and suing, and being sued, in any civil proceeding

61 Sybil Wolfram, “Divorce in England 1700–1857,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 5, No. 2, (Summer, 1985), 155–86.

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Jack Johnson, My Life In the Ring and Out (New York: Dover, 2018), 48.

2 Ida B. Wells, The Red Record, (1895), Chapter 3, “Lynching Imbeciles.”

3 As opposed to the English tradition which required that fathers or guardians bring them on behalf of their daughters using the fiction of a putative “loss of services” from their seduced daughters. See Chapter 4 for an overview of the English actions.

4 These were Alabama, Alaska, California, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. Washington, D.C. also enacted the reform. All but Alabama eliminate the lost services clause; five states (Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia) did not extend the right to sue to woman on her own behalf. The rest enacted both reforms simultaneously.

5 M. B. W. Sinclair, “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman,” Law & Inequality 5, no. 1 (1987), 57, 64.

Note how closely the language of the law (“priceless. jewel”) mimics that of sentimental literature, such as Richardson’s Pamela: “that jewel, your virtue, which no riches, nor favour, nor any thing in this life, can make up to you.”

6 Larry Whiteaker, Seduction, Prostitution, and Moral Reform in New York, 1830–1860, 143.

7 H. W. Humble, “Seduction as a Crime,” Columbia Law Review 21, no. 2 (Feb. 1921).

8 As absurd and condescending as these ideas now seem, they do not devalue the NYFMRS’s attempt to introduce seduction legislation. The attempt to introduce these laws cannot be understood without a proper understanding of the legal and political landscape that these women were operating within. Nineteenth-century American women had very few sexual rights. The age of consent was ten years in the majority of states, and as low as seven in some. Rape convictions were very hard to come by as the law assumed that any failure to actively resist at any point in an assault was evidence of consent. The threat or use of violence by men to extract sexual compliance was not automatically considered rape. The demonstrative injustices posed by the rape laws filtered into other aspects of sexual existence. Identifying genuine sexual consent in such a deeply unequal, deeply patriarchal society was very hard. Furthermore, women were punished in the marriage market for any extramarital sexual encounters they may have had, consensual or otherwise, damaging their prospects for long-term financial and physical security. Finally, women could not vote and were not expected to involve themselves in politics in any way. They were locked out of the only institutions that could have improved their position. In such an environment, the fact that the NYFMRS proved themselves capable of mobilizing women activists to generate popular support for improved sexual protection and extract such protections from an all-male legislature was no small feat.

9 Mary Frances Berry, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” in Black Southerners and the Law: 1865–1900, ed. Donald G. Nieman; See, for instance, the case of Emmett Till and his accuser Carolyn Bryant who later admitted that her allegation was completely fictitious; Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, 2017. Lynching was a wedge issue within the feminist cause, with black women reformers constantly at odds with their white allies over the issue. Black women recognized that the uncompromising rhetoric of the WCTU and similar organizations on matters of sexual discipline endangered black lives. When white reformer Mrs. Ormison Chant voted against an anti-lynching resolution at the National Conference of Unitarian Churches in 1894, black reformer Florida Ruffin Ridley wrote an open letter declaring “We here solemnly deny that the black men are the foul fiends they are pictured; we demand that until at least one crime is proved upon them, judgement be suspended.” Frances Willard was famously silent on the subject of lynching—she wished not to antagonize her Southern allies—leading to a public spat with Ida B. Wells, who dedicated a whole chapter of The Red Record to criticizing Willard and the WCTU for their policy toward lynching. The upshot of these internal tensions was that black women stayed out of the age of consent campaign. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 29–33. (It is important to note that policing sexuality was not the only motivating factor for lynch mobs. The desire to appropriate the property of a new class of black landowners was often a material factor in designating the victim. See: https://features.propublica.org/black-land-loss/heirs-property-rights-why-black-families-lose-land-south/. “Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research, at Morgan State University, told me, ‘There is this idea that most blacks were lynched because they did something untoward to a young woman. That’s not true. Most black men were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.’”)

10 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 33–35.

11 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 38.

12 Johnson, 37–39.

13 Ada “Bricktop” Smith would later write of Johnson’s smile: “There were reasons why his smile was so famous. It reflected the real champion, the warm generous, impulsive, wonderful, loveable man. That smile gave him the handsomeness his looks didn’t really deserve.” Bricktop, Bricktop with James Haskins (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 43.

14 Indeed, Johnson experienced the global sporting scene as his travels, celebrity, and legal misadventures took him across the world. “I had opportunities to observe denizens of the underworld in nearly every country of the world,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I have witnessed scenes among them that have no parallel even in the most imaginative fiction of melodramatic writers.” Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 112; Bricktop would later describe him as “this champion of the world, driver of fast cars, escorter of beautiful women, symbol of the wild, irresponsible sporting man,” Bricktop, 46.

15 Johnson, 63–65, and Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, (London, Yellow Jersey Press, 2015), 77.

16 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 65.

17 Bricktop, 185.

18 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 44.

19 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 52.

20 Johnson, 66.

21 “He made Chicago his home. I can understand why—it was big and sprawling, full of vitality and excitement, just like Jack.” Bricktop, 43.

22 The Ketchel fight was one of Johnson’s more gruesome encounters. Ketchel, a former bouncer, was a brutal puncher but was 49lbs/22kgs lighter than the champion. Johnson quite literally carried Ketchel around the ring for 11 rounds. In the 12th, Ketchel launched a blistering attack that sent Johnson to the ground and sent the almost entirely white crowd to their feet. An enraged Johnson got to his feet and threw a brawling right hand with such conviction that it carried him over Ketchel and onto his knees on the other side of the ring. Ketchel was out for a minute and a half, a starfish in center ring. Even in the grainy black and white film Johnson can be clearly seen picking out three of Ketchel’s teeth from his glove, and letting them sprinkle down onto the canvas. Then he leans back with one arm across the rope to admire his work.

23 Johnson had no illusions about Jeffries motivations. In his memoirs he describes him as “a one-time champion … had been coaxed back to contend for the title in order to satisfy jealousy, hatred, and prejudice.” He also recalled with some bitterness how Jeffries had diminished his victory over Tommy Burns by attacking “Burns for fighting me, saying that he was money-mad and that he had sold his pride and the pride of the Caucasian race by fighting me.” Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 134.

24 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 197; This “bull fiddle” was in fact a bass viol that Johnson had learned to play with some skill during his nomadic youth. The bass viol is essentially the largest type of viola. It is not as big as a cello but is played in the same way, that is, seated. It is not clear when Johnson learned to play or why he chose this particular type of viol, though it is possible that this was simply the type best-suited to his size. Full string sections were common in the better sort of clubs and bars that Johnson frequented at this time and one of his party tricks was to join in with these bands when the fancy took him. As a voracious reader, it might have pleased Johnson to know that the bass viol had a Shakespearean pedigree. The instrument was popular among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century players and is referenced on occasion in Shakespeare’s plays. One allusion, from A Comedy of Errors, is especially fistic: in Act 4, Scene 3, Dromio describes Adam, the sergeant of the guard, as “he that goes in the calf’s skin … he that went, like a bass-viol, in a case of leather.”

25 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 198

26 Examples are all taken from Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975) 60–66.

27 Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Da Capo Press, 1986, 36.

28 In a striking example of how anti-Johnson feeling ran concurrent with progressive sentiment, Thetus Sims of Tennessee was a passionate supporter of women’s suffrage. In the official history of the suffrage movement he is named alongside the eponymous champion of the Mann Act as one of those who went above and beyond to ensure the passage of a suffrage bill in the house in 1918: “Republican Leader Mann of Illinois at much personal risk came from a hospital in Baltimore. He had not been present in Congress for months and his arrival shortly before five o’clock caused great excitement in the chamber. Representative Sims of Tennessee, who had broken his shoulder two days before, refused to have it set until after the suffrage vote and against the advice of his physician was on the floor for the discussion and the vote. Representative Barnhart of Indiana was taken from his bed in a hospital in Washington and stayed at the Capitol just long enough to cast his vote. One of the New York Representatives came immediately after the death of his wife, who had been an ardent suffragist, and returned on the next train.” The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V, ed. Ida Husted Harper.

29 Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 90.

30 “Women Denounce Vice.” New York Tribune, 1901; as early as 1885—amid the campaign for the age of consent laws—Willard had called for the “punishing with extreme penalties such men as inflict upon women atrocities compared with which death would be infinitely welcome.” The same logic was at work in her subsequent campaign against the White Slave Trade. See Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 19.

31 Chapter 30, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or War on the White Slave Trade, ed. Ernest A. Bell (1910).

32 In his memoirs, Johnson mentions in passing that the Café de Champion’s art collection included “a few real Rembrandts which I had obtained in Europe.” This is a casual and quite transparent lie, but if reflected his interest in being taken seriously as a man of the world with refined tastes. Through his travels, notably his recent trip to Paris and London, Johnson had “had gained a comprehensive idea of decorative effects; I had viewed some of the most notable amusements centers of the world, both as to their exterior and interior arrangements. I also had collected many fine works of art, curios, and novelties.” He wanted his club to be a showcase for his cultivation/discernment. Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 59.

33 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 68.

34 Suicide seems to have dominated the Times’ columns that September. Excluding the coverage of Etta Duryea’s death, the Times ran no fewer than twenty-two stories on, or closely related to, suicide, including the incredible:

SHOOTS HIMSELF; WINS GIRL.; Rejected for Another, Young Georgian Sways Her by Trying Suicide.

35 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 301.

36 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 302–303.

37 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 302–312.

38 Al-Tony Gilmore, “Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact,” The Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1, (January 1973).

39 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 97.

40 Chicago Defender, October 26, 1912.

41 Lucille “begged me to marry her,” Johnson wrote in his memoirs, “declaring that not only had she been ruined in the eyes of the world, but that furthermore her mother was making her the object of abuse and nagging which she could not bear.” Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 70.

42 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 107.

43 See New York Times, December, 1912. It should be noted that these declarations were widely condemned by politicians and by commentators in the press. The Times joked that Blease “Out-Tillmans Tillman in South Carolina and elsewhere.” Benjamin Tillman was a notorious racial demagogue, rabid Redeemer, and South Carolina Senator. In 1928 Blease would have the dubious distinction of being the last American legislator to agitate for a constitutional amendment that would have outlawed interracial marriage.

44 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 108.

45 In the same December 1912 conference, Blease cited a “higher law” than the constitution in defense of lynching. This was an exact duplication of abolitionist William Seward’s famous statement that there was a “higher law” than the constitution which justified resistance to slavery. Abolitionists, like lynchers, were disdainful of the constitution which they called a “covenant with death” because of its codifying of slavery.

46 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 122.

47 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger, 125.

48 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 72.

49 http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/second-draft-champion-boxer-jack-johnson-got-under-white-peoples-skins.

Also Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 344–49

50 Jessica R. Piley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 101.

51 For more on how women with interracial lovers and/or johns were treated in court, see the example of Ray Vernon discussed in Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America, 131–35.

52 David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act.

53 Piley, Policing Sexuality, 107–13.

54 Piley, Policing Sexuality, 112–13.

55 All quotes from Caminetti v. U.S., (1917), no. 139 http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/242/470.xhtml.

56 Additional biographical material is available in: 100 Americans Making Constitutional History: A Biographical History, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky.

57 Both men were out within a year and there was a happy ending to this story for Maury Diggs, at least. Maury and Marsha married in San Francisco in 1915 and remained married until his death in 1953 in St. Helena, California. After his release from prison Diggs resumed his career as an architect and became a specialist in design and construction of horse race tracks. He was responsible for the designing some of the largest in the state, including Golden Gate Fields in Albany, San Francisco.

58 Three justices dissented. Justice McKenna wrote the minority opinion in which he attacked the “immoral purposes” clause as imprecise but also argued that in the context of the law’s specific mission to erase the threat of White Slavery the “immoral purposes” could only reasonably be applied to “commercialized vice, immoralities having a mercenary purpose.” McKenna then went further and challenged the assumptions underlying both the law itself and the majority opinion of the court: There is much in the present case to tempt to a violation of the rule. Any measure that protects the purity of women from assault or enticement to degradation finds an instant advocate in our best emotions; but the judicial function cannot yield to emotion—it must, with poise of mind, consider and decide. It should not shut its eyes to the facts of the world and assume not to know what everybody else knows. And everybody knows that there is a difference between the occasional immoralities of men and women and that systematized and mercenary immorality epitomized in the statute’s graphic phrase “white slave traffic.” And it was such immorality that was in the legislative mind, and not the other. McKenna also concurred with the Times that the law’s naive view of prevailing social and sexual morality opened the door to abuses, blackmail in particular: There is danger in extending a statute beyond its purpose, even if justified by a strict adherence to its words… . The present case warns against ascribing such improvidence to the statute under review. Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen, using the terrors of the construction now sanctioned by this court as a help—indeed, the means—for their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause. It certainly will not be denied that legal authority justifies the rejection of a construction which leads to mischievous consequences, if the statute be susceptible of another construction.

59 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 76–80.

60 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 379–81.

61 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, Johnson, 115.

62 There is a long and revealing passage in his memoirs where he describes an indigenous tribe his party encountered during their travels in Mexico:

“We discovered that it was not uninhabited, but that it was the camping place of a tribe of Indians, the name of which I never learned. Perhaps they had never acquired any designation for they were without doubt the lowest in the human scale that I had ever seen. They had human forms but other than that they were animals. They were even worse than animals so unclean and lazy as they were. They were naked and their skins were filthy with slime. They lay about in camps like vermin, men, women and babies piled up together with dogs who had the same privileges as the others—privileges which permitted them to nurse at the breasts of the human mothers who lolled listlessly about, a suckling babe on one side, a dog on the other.”

Even Johnson, who knew all there was to know about racial prejudice, was not free of the racist assumptions of his time. Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 95.

63 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 98.

64 Zelda made it clear to her friends, at least, that her acceptance of his proposal was contingent on his acceptance by a publisher. A friend of both F. Scott and Zelda recalled the latter’s attitude as: “If Scott sells the book, I’ll marry the man, because he is sweet.” But sweetness was no substitute for financial security. In the event, Zelda became Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald a mere eight days after the publication of This Side of Paradise. This was a book that contained the observation (from Rosalind, a Zelda avatar) that “given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.” David S. Brown, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2017), 75, 90.

65 Paula S. Fass, The Damned and The Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920’s (Oxford University Press, 1977), 22–23.

66 Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 425.

67 All Fitzgerald quotes are taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Modern Library, 2005).

68 Recent Social Trends in the United States; Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), 417–419

69 Sinclair, “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman.”

70 Pippa Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 40–46.

71 Piley, Policing Sexuality, 132.

72 Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 87–88, 93, 95–97.

73 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (New York: Penguin, 1998); McLaren, Sexual Blackmail, 172.

74 This interpretation continued to baffle her long into her life: “The thing that was so amazing and truly surprising to me was that it was widely interpreted as giving free rein to predatory males to take advantage of chaste maidens which, of course, was diametrically opposed to what my conception was. I thought—and I still think—that it was an early blow for women’s liberation.”

75 The seven states that passed anti-heart balm legislation in 1935 were Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. California, Colorado, and Massachusetts followed over the next five years. Florida abolished these actions in 1945.

Arizona, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, Ohio tried and failed in 1935 to pass similar legislation.

76 Among them was Illinois. A state which had searched the law books for any pretext to hold Jack Johnson for the crime of seducing a very willing white woman now described the heart balms as “action conducive to extortion and blackmail” and abolished them.

77 Sinclair, “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman”; for all details relating to Roberta West Nicholson, refer to the Roberta West Nicholson Oral History transcript at the Indiana State Library Digital Collections: http://cdm16066.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16066coll40/id/77.

78 Sinclair, “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman.”

CHAPTER SIX

1 Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 66.

2 Irving knew exactly what he was doing to the impressionable Stoker. “The effects of his recitation upon Stoker was all that Irving had hoped,” Irving’s son, Laurence, would later write, “—as welcome as the effects of the ‘Murder of Gonzago’ on his uncle were to Hamlet.”

Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 279.

3 Du Maurier would later state that Florence Stoker was among the three most beautiful women he had ever met. Punch, September 11, 1886, “Filial Reproof”; The Times, March 6, 1934 (ON THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF DU MAURIER’S BIRTH), citing E.V. Lucas’s The Creator of Trilby.

4 Oscar Wilde, in contrast, praised Irving effusively for resisting the lure of public favor and staying true to his artistic visions: “With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what it wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realize his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art.” Oscar Wilde, In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Writings, (New York: Verso, 2018), 28.

5 The Lyceum became one of the few places where the two men could be found together. By the 1880s Gladstone was going blind and had to be given a special seat in the prompt corner so he could follow the action. A very old and very frail Disraeli remained mischievous, however. When he came to see The Corsican Brothers in 1880, his companion Corry asked Stoker as they left the performance whether “we could have supper somewhere and ask some of the Coryphées to join us, as we used to do in Paris in the fifties?”

“Stoker hastened to explain that the ballet dancers at the Lyceum would be deeply shocked at such a suggestion and that Loveday had been driven frantic in trying to persuade them to overcome their suburban primness in the abandon of the bal masqué… . The Conservatives would be slow to change their view of the theatre as an Arcadia populated with captivating and warm-hearted nymphs who could be lured into ‘cabinets particuliers’ where their slippers, brimming with champagne, could be raised to Love, Life and Laughter.” Laurence Irving, Henry Irving, 363–64.

6 Horace Wyndham, The Nineteen Hundreds (London, 1922), 118.

7 The 1882 House of Lords select committee recorded the causes of mass juvenile prostitution: “A vicious demand for young girls; overcrowding in dwellings, and immorality arising therefrom; want of parental control, and in many cases parental example, profligacy, and immoral treatment; residence, in some cases, in brothels; the example and encouragement of other girls slightly older, and the sight of dress and money which their immoral habits have enabled them to obtain; the state of the streets in which little girls are allowed to run about, and become accustomed to the sight of open profligacy; and sometimes the contamination with vicious girls in schools.”

8 The Pall Mall Gazette, Tuesday, July 28, 1885.

9 Josephine Butler was later one of the vice-presidents (the president was the Duke of Westminster) of the National Vigilance Association (NVA), an organization created to ensure the enforcement of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the preeminent combatant of the white slave trade in the United Kingdom. The offices of the NVA were on 267 Strand—a short walk from the Lyceum.

10 Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914, (Princeton University Press, 1987), 10, 120.

11 W.T. Stead, If Christ came to Chicago! (Review of Reviews, London, 1894), 262; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 152–53.

12 See also Oscar Wilde’s criticism of sentimental philanthropy in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: “Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.”

The bill was certainly regarded as a seduction statute by its most vigorous supporters. In response to an 1899 survey of European and North American seduction laws conducted by the International Congress on the White Slave Trade, the British delegation declared that the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was the governing British law on such matters and “has been used to punish married men who have seduced girls under promise of marriage.” Indeed, the successful campaign by Butler and Stead to introduce and enforce the 1885 law was the inspiration for Frances Willard and the WCTU in their campaign to increase the age of consent in American states discussed in Chapter 5. See: The White Slave Trade: Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trade, (London: Office of the National Vigilance Association, 1899), 19, 60.

13 On of the prominent victims of the law in its early years was Captain Verney, MP, who The Times described as “conspicuous for his zeal in the ‘purity movement’ and for the unction of his language in discussing questions of morality, while he was leading a double life and methodically employing a procuress in the service of his profligacy… . His evil practices were deliberate, systematic, and apparently long continued. His punishment is heavy, and the 12 months imprisonment is, perhaps, the lightest part of it. As Sir Charles Russell said:—‘His position is lost, his rank in the Navy is gone, his honoured name has departed from him.’” “CAPTAIN VERNEY, M.P., pleaded guilty yesterday.” The Times, Thursday, May 7, 1891.

14 Ironically, Stead was charged with abduction of a minor and tried under the new legal procedures stipulated in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. See: The Times, Wednesday, November 11, 1885. High-profile campaigns to release Stead were launched, including a direct appeal by Josephine Butler to the Home Secretary (see The Times, Friday, November 13, 1885), but Stead served his full six month sentence, the majority of it at Holloway Prison whence he continued to edit the Pall Mall Gazette. He took some pride in his imprisonment and each year would pose for photos in his old prison uniform to commemorate the day of his conviction.

15 Letter from Dighton Macnaughten Probyn to Henry Irving, July 4, 1885. Irving’s own antipathy toward evangelical Christianity was shaped by his mother, an unbending Methodist, whodisowned her son for his decision to work in the theatre.

16 For Stead, as places of entertainment theatres were scenes of seduction; as places of business they were scenes of debauchment. For example, in the “Maiden Tribute” series: “It is said that at a certain notorious theatre no girl ever kept her virtue more than three months.”

17 Through Watts, Terry met all the major figures in this circle: Millais, Rossetti (who was John Polidori’s nephew; see Chapter 4), Hunt, and Leighton. She married Watts not long after the most famous Pre-Raphaelite muse, Elizabeth Siddal, died of a laudanum overdose. Siddal was most famous for being the model of Ophelia in Millais’s famous painting. Despite her own immense success, Terry lived in the shadow of Siddal’s legend and her own breakout performance was of Ophelia in Irving’s Hamlet, the first play run at the Lyceum in 1878. Terry and Siddal’s portraits (posing as Lady Macbeth and Ophelia respectively) can now be found on the same wall at the Tate Britain.

18 Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (London: Phoenix House 1987), 116–17.

19 “Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde,” The Times, Monday, January 25, 1886; 13.

20 From the outset Lankester made it clear that he saw this law at work on human society:

“Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration ; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organisation in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly-gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.” Edwin Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, (London: 1880).

21 TATTOOING IN FRANCE, The Pall Mall Gazette, Tuesday, October 25, 1881.

22 THE SCIENCE OF CRIME, The Pall Mall Gazette, Monday, October 10, 1887.

23 Letter in the British Museum. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/anonymous-letter-to-city-of-london-police-about-jack-the-ripper. Also says: “I thought it Strange this Play Should have Commenced before the Murders for it is Really Something after the Same Stile. The Murders take place on Saturday nights Mr M never has A Performance on Saturday. The Murders Once Took Place on Friday & once Mr M Was to ill to Perform at the Saturday Morning Performance.”

24 Daily Telegraph, Friday, October 12, 1888, Dramatic and Musical.

25 Stoker also knew another man suspected of being the murderer: his great friend Hall Caine’s acquaintance Francis Tumblety.

26 The Spectator, October 6, 1888.

27 Laurence Irving, Henry Irving, 333–34.

28 The Pall Mall Gazette, September 8, 1888.

29 Neil R. Davison, “‘The Jew’ as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, ‘Trilby,’ and Dreyfus,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, 8, No. 2/3 (Winter–Spring, 2002), 73–111.

“‘The Jew’ remained subversive, powerful yet morally inferior, and degeneratively feminized throughout the decade and beyond.”

30 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 140; also see the Austrian delegation’s comment on the white slave trade made in 1899: “The agents [of the white slave trade] themselves are invariably Jews. The victims are not sent directly to Constantinople… . But they at length arrive in that city. From thence some are forwarded to Cairo, some to Trezibond: none of them ever come back to their native country.” The White Slave Trade, 83.

31 “Is It Not Time?,” The Pall Mall Gazette, October 16, 1883. See also: Willian Henry Wilkins, The Alien Invasion, Chapter 3, “Jewish Immigration.” (London: 1892).

32 Anti-Semitism in British Society: 1876–1939, Colin Holmes, (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979). For specific association with Ripper case, see Jewish Chronicle, October 12, 1888. Accessible one: http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/jewish_chronicle/jc881012.xhtml.

33 See Anthony S. Wohl, “Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien, Journal of British Studies, 34, no. 3, Victorian Subjects (July, 1995), 375–411; Pick, Svengali’s Web, 130–31: Carlyle on Disraeli: “a superlative Hebrew conjurer, spellbinding all the great Lords, great parties, great interests of England.”

34 Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 48–49; Luther called the Jews “a whoring and murderous people,” “bloodthirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom,” witches and magicians capable of “conjuring signs, figures, and the tetragrammaton of the name, that is, with idolatry, envy and conceit.”

35 The epicenter of late-Victorian discourse on hyponosis was the Parisian hospital of Salpêtrière, where Jean-Martin Charcot conducted his famous experiments on “hysterical” women. In 1885 Sigmund Freud was one of his students. The fissure within the field of hypnosis was between the “Parisian school” led by Charcot and the “Nancy school” led by Hippolyte Bernheim. The latter argued that all women were susceptible to the power of suggestion and hypnosis, not just hysterics. This debate was followed in England and was the subject of debate at the Second International Congress of Psychology in London in 1892. Pick, Svengali’s Web, 66–67.

Charcot is directly referred to in Dracula during a conversation between Seward and Van Helsing: “Yes,” I said. “Charcot has proved that pretty well.” He smiled as he went on: “Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of course then you understand how it act, and can follow the mind of the great Charcot—alas that he is no more!—into the very soul of the patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to conclusion be a blank? No? Then tell me—for I am student of the brain—how you accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things done to-day in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity—who would themselves not so long before have been burned as wizards. There are always mysteries in life.” See also: Ralph M. Leck, Vita Sexualis (Champaign: Illinois University Press, 2016). Jean-Martin Charcot’s 1882 Inversion du sens génital et autres Perversions sexuelles was one of the first books to link degeneration with sexual deviance, which becomes a trope in French medical and scientific discourse in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

36 The geographic reach and temporal endurance of this canard is remarkable. When Olga Ivinskaya was questioned about her romantic association with the poet Boris Pasternak in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1949, her interrogator expressed disbelief that a Russian woman could be attracted to a Jewish man: “I can’t believe that a Russian woman like you could really be in love with this old Jew—there must be some ulterior motive here! I’ve seen him myself. You can’t love him. He’s just mesmerised you, or something.” Anne Pasternak, Lara, (London: William Collins, 2016), 98.

37 Hypnotism was also posited as an explanation for the Ripper killings, either as a tool for the murderer to use on his victims or as a device used to compel the murderer to kill. See, for example, The Evening News, October 16, 1888: HAS THE MISCREANT BEEN HYPNOTISED? and the Daily Chronicle: “Hypnotism and Crime.” For the connection made between hypnotism and crime see: Ruth Harris, “Murder Under Hypnosis,” in The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. 2, ed. W. F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985); for a contemporary account of the connection between seduction and hypnosis see Ernest Mesnet, Outrages Against Modesty (1890).

38 “Svengali’s vanity, treacherousness, selfishness, personal uncleanliness and so forth,” George Orwell observed, “are constantly connected with the fact that he is a Jew.” As I Please, George Orwell, Tribune, December 6, 1946.

39 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford University Press, 2000), 91–92.

40 Jeannette L. and Joseph B. Gilder, eds., Trilbyana: The rise and progress of a popular novel (New York: The Critic, 1895), 8.

41 “No such magnificent or seductive apparition has ever been seen before or since on any stage or platform—not even Miss Ellen Terry as the priestess of Artemis in the late Laureate’s play, The Cup.” Trilby, p209 Nina Auerbach argues that Terry was in fact the inspiration for Trilby. When she was newly wed to artist George Watts in the 1860s, Du Maurier had been a visitor to her husband’s home at Little Holland House and had been scathing of the pretentious old artists who gathered there and the women who fawned over them. Whether this image of the teenage Terry—then Nelly Watts—as the beautiful plaything of older, bohemian men survived the thirty year interval between his visits and the publication of Trilby is hard to know, but alluring nonetheless. See: Auerbach, Ellen Terry, 109.

42 The Times, Friday, May 28, 1897.

43 Rossetti had himself indulged in some pretty ghoulish antics in his time. In 1860 Rossetti had married Elizabeth Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelite muse and model. In 1862 Siddal had died of a laudanum overdose and Rossetti had buried her with a notebook of his unpublished poetry, much of which concerned his love for her, nestled amid her golden hair. In 1869 he decided he wanted the notebook back and had her corpse exhumed by the light of an enormous fire lit by her grave in Highgate Cemetery. According to Hall Caine, her body had not decomposed and they found her as beautiful as ever, the volume of poetry still in her hair. This was retrieved, the body returned to the ground and the verses returned to Rossetti. It is not clear whether Stoker knew about this story, though given Cain’s role in recording the event for posterity, and given that Rossetti was long dead by the time Dracula was written, it is plausible that he told Stoker at some point during the writing process or before. He could also have heard it from Ellen Terry who was a part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle as a young woman. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his family-letters, with a memoir (1895), 274–75.

44 “With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” For a critical discussion of this scene and others see: Dejan Kuzmanovic, “Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 37, no. 2 (2009), 411–25.

45 Stoker had a personal connection with the region through his brother, George, who had served as a doctor there during the Russo-Turkish war and published a book recounting the experience. David J Skal, Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, (New York: Liveright, 2016), 109.

46 Spectator, November 10, 1888, “Transylvania” book review. Interest in the region was piqued in this period by the “Eastern Question,” a slow-moving geopolitical crisis generated by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The English public’s concern with the Eastern Question helped stoke mainstream anti-Semitism, partially because Disraeli was largely indifferent to the matter, which his more scurrilous critics, Gladstone included, alleged reflected his Jewish indifference to the suffering of Christians in the Ottoman domains. See: Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press, 2010), 264–65.

47 Dracula: “a tall thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard”; Svengali: “bold, brilliant, black eyes, with long heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black, which grew almost from under his eyelids; and over it his moustache, a shade lighter, fell in two long spiral twists.” See: Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford University Press, 1986), 343.

48 Stoker had used anti-Semitic tropes in his other novels. The Watter’s Mou’ (1895) features the wicked German-Jewish money lender Solomon Mendoza, an “elderly man with a bald head, keen eyes, a ragged grey beard, a hooked nose, and an evil smile.”

49 Historian Anthony Julius notes that anti-Semitic discourse in 1890s England attached itself to the Boer War, which was allegedly orchestrated by and for Jewish “gold bugs” intent on securing the mineral wealth of the Transvaal. See: Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 271.

50 There is an interesting if somewhat opaque allusion to Dracula’s Jewishness in his ability to turn into a wolf. Jews had long been associated with magical powers, including the ability to assume animal form. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” a 1584 treatise on witches includes a description of “one Bajanus a Jew, being the sonne of Simeon, which could, when list, turne himselfe into a wolf.” It is of course highly improbable that Stoker would have been familiar with this obscure text, but he did know The Merchant of Venice and may have absorbed, by osmosis if nothing else, Gratiano’s attack on Shylock in from Act IV, Scene I:

O, be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog!

And for thy life let justice be accused.

Thou almost makest me waver in my faith

To hold opinion with Pythagoras,

That souls of animals infuse themselves

Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit

Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,

Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,

And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam,

Infused itself in thee; for thy desires

Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.

51 Max Nordau, German-Jewish author whose best-known work, Degeneration, was published in England in 1895. Stoker would not have to had read Nordau to be familiar with the broad contours of his theory of cultural and metaphysical decay. It includes a sustained attack on Ibsen along lines illustrative of what many contemporaries found objectionable in the playwright’s work. Nordau saw in Ibsen’s plays “such unqualified approval of all feminine depravities, was bound to secure the applause of those women who in the viragoes of Ibsen’s drama—hysterical, nymphomaniacal, perverted in maternal instinct—recognise either their own portrait or the ideal of development of their degenerate imagination.” He also considered the proliferation of ghost stories that include themes of “hypnotism, telepathy, somnambulism” a hallmark of the collapse of high culture—ironic, given the positive allusion to him in Dracula. George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) made the robust case for the connection between Ibsen and “the woman question.” For a more balanced, modern take on the relationship between Ibsen and late-nineteenth century feminism see: Joan Templeton, “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen,” PMLA 104, no. 1 (January, 1989), 28–40.

52 “In some faculties of mind he has been, and is, only a child,” and also “The criminal always work at one crime—that is the true criminal who seems predestinate to crime, and who will of none other. This criminal has not full man-brain. He is clever and cunning and resourceful; but he be not of man-stature as to brain. He be of child-brain in much. Now this criminal of ours is predestinate to crime also; he, too, have child-brain, and it is of the child to do what he have done. The little bird, the little fish, the little animal learn not by principle, but empirically; and when he learn to do, then there is to him the ground to start from to do more.”

53 Pick, Svengali’s Web, 63–66, and Harris, “Murder Under Hypnosis, 207, 217–18; the latter contains an account of the 1878 rape trial of a French Jewish doctor, Paul Lévy, who allegedly used hypnosis to molest a young, gentile girl. He received ten years imprisonment. The case was referred to in the more famous Bompard trial of 1890 in which the defendant, Gabrielle Bompard, alleged she had been hypnotized by her lover, Michel Eyraud, and made an accessory to the murder of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé while the powerless tool of Eyraud.

54 As defined by Thomas Hardy the New Woman was:

“The woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement—the slight, pale “bachelor” girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises.” Thomas Hardy, postscript to Jude the Obscure, first edition 1895.

55 There were inevitable comparisons made with the French Revolution. See the Quarterly Review on the “New Woman” in 1894: “she advances, with drums beating and colours flying, to the sound also of the Phrygian flute, a disordered array, but nowise daunted, resolute in her determination to end what she is pleased to define as the slavery of one-half the human race.”

Quarterly Review (1894) 179, quoted in, Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 39.

56 The New Woman, and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, (Oxford University Press, 1998).

57 DRAMA AT ROYAL ACADEMY, The Era, Saturday, May 18, 1895.

58 Edy helped radicalize her mother, who by 1914 was boasting to Australian journalists “Of course you know I’m a suffragette. Of course I am and so is my daughter Edith Craig.” From 1909 Edy was involved with the Actresses’ Franchise League and directed A Pageant of Great Women which opened on November 12, 1909 featuring Ellen Terry as eighteenth-century Drury Lane actress Nance Oldfield. See: Michael Holroyd, A Strange and Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and their Remarkable Families (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 426, 432.

59 “Woman, however, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words. As yet the man who avoids women, and the woman who seeks men are sheer anomalies.”

Psychopathia sexualis, Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing; only authorized English adaptation of the twelfth German edition by F. J. Rebman,1893.

60 In Man and Superman John Tanner, the Don Juan stand-in, accuses Ann Whitefield of being a vampire in the play’s final line.

61 In Chapter VIII: “We had a capital ‘severe tea’ at Robin Hood’s Bay in a sweet little old-fashioned inn, with a bow-window right over the seaweed-covered rocks of the strand. I believe we should have shocked the “New Woman” with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them! Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls. Lucy was really tired, and we intended to creep off to bed as soon as we could. The young curate came in, however, and Mrs. Westenra asked him to stay for supper. Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller; I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic. I think that some day the bishops must get together and see about breeding up a new class of curates, who don’t take supper, no matter how they may be pressed to, and who will know when girls are tired. Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing-room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself.”

62 After Marie Stopes published Married Love, a celebration of female sexuality, in 1918 she received an angry letter from an anonymous aristocrat enraged at her proselytization of the joys of sex. “Once you give women a taste for these things,” he wrote, “they become vampires, and you have let loose vampires into decent men’s homes.” Quoted in Carol Dyhouse, Heartthrobs (Oxford University Press, 2017). William J. Robinson of Bronx hospital in his Married Life and Happiness (1922) describes wives who want sex every two weeks/ten days as normal but: “there is the opposite type of woman, who is a great danger to the health and even the very life of her husband. I refer to the hypersensual woman, to the wife with an excessive sexuality. It is to her that the name vampire can be applied in its literal sense. Just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep while they are alive, so does the woman vampire suck the life blood and exhaust the vitality of her male partner—or victim. And some of them—the pronounced type—are utterly without pity or consideration.” Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 344.

63 One prominent male ally of the women’s movement was W.T. Stead who voiced his support in an article entitled “The Novel of the Modern Woman” (Review of Reviews, 10, 1894). The New Woman was only claiming “rights, privileges, and responsibilities of a human being,” he wrote, “[she] is not going back to her old position. Through whatever stormy seas and across no matter what burning desert marked by the skeletons and haunted by the ghosts of those who have fallen by the way, she will press on, fleeing from monogamic prostitution of loveless marriage and the hideous outrage of enforced maternity.” A.L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 21–22.

64 Ruth Brandon, The New Woman And The Old Men: Love, Sex and The Woman Question, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), 197.

65 Sheila Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day (London: Verso, 2010), 61.

66 Charlotte Despard, Woman in the New Era (The Suffrage Shop, 1910), 32–33.

67 The New Womanhood, Winnifred Harper Cooley, 1904

68 Rowbotham, Dreamers, 65.

69 Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How To End It, (1913).

70 See Sir T.S. Clouston: “The ideals which would exalt culture above motherhood are suicidal and should be abandoned. It will not do to say that women should have a choice either to take up culture and intellectual work, whether it has a lessened capacity for motherhood or not, or to select domestic life. Mothers of high brain power are as much needed for an advancing race as fathers—rather more so, in fact.”

Quoted in: Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, 154.

71 David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 43–44, 54–55; of course, at least one copy survived this purge and the film remains in circulation.

72 Ewers would later become an in-house novelist for the Nazi elite, writing, in one instance, a hagiographic portrayal of Nazi martyr Horst Wessel at Hitler’s request. See Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 79.

73 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947), 77–79.

74 See Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, chapters 1 & 2.

75 Adolf Leschnitzer, The Magic Background of Modern Anti-Semitism (International Universities Press, 1956), 144. Leschnitzer notes that this magical conception of Jews allowed for the suspension of certain logical precepts—clear causation, consistency of argument, generalization of behaviour to large, inchoate groups—which allowed for aggression toward an out-group without recourse to reality.

76 Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, 42.

77 One of Hitler’s favorite rhetorical turns was to describe Jews as “Schadlinge am Volkskorper,” “Parasites on the Body Politic.” The German Volkskorper better captures the anthropomorphic imagery. Combined with the near constant equation of Jewish men with sexual predation the listener’s thoughts are practically led to the image of the vampire feasting on a sleeping women’s arteries. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford University Press, 1990), 92.

78 The assumption that Jews ran the white slave trade in Central Europe was, by the 1920s, several decades old. “The majority of unfortunate girls who form the prostitutes of the larger towns have fallen through Jewish depravity,” Theodor Fritsch wrote in Antisemiten-Katechismus (1893), “the notorious ‘girl commerce’ will soon be carried on exclusively by the Jews.”

79 Dennis E. Showalter, Little Man, What Now?: Der Sturmer in the Weimar Republic (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), 100.

80 Theodor Fritsch The Riddle Of The Jews’ Success (1927), 191.

81 Fritsch, Riddle Of The Jews’ Success, 260.

82 This had been a recurring theme of Der Sturmer’s depiction of Jews as constantly seeking to entrap German women into sex through ostentatious displays of wealth. Such encounters always resulted in the ruin of the Gentile woman. See for instance “The Talmudist” in which a brutish Jewish lothario dresses himself while an Aryan swoons in post-coital shame in a soiled hotel bed. Alcohol lies around the room. The caption says: “The Goy’s Temple is Our Toilet.” (Showalter, Little Man, What Now? 89.) Another cartoon shows “The Beginning”—a Weimar flapper with a bob, professional clothes, and a clutch, hopping into a sleek car driven by a Jew—and “The End”— the same woman shivering on the street, now a prostitute with her Jewish pimp leering over her shoulder. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/images/sturmer/sturm06.jpg.

83 James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model (Princeton University Press, 2017).

84 Coincidentally, in the same year as the Prussian Memorandum was published, an anti-Semitic forgery now known as the “Franklin Prophecy” appeared in a pro-Nazi paper in the United States. It purported to be an extract from a “lost” speech given by Benjamin Franklin in 1787 and contained the following description of Jews:

“They are vampires and vampires cannot live on other vampires—they cannot live among themselves. They must live among Christians and others who do not belong to their race.”

85 One of the priorities of the exclusionary campaign was to exclude Jews from the practice of medicine. This had a clear sexual subtext as anti-Semitic propagandists believed that the Jewish monopoly on medical practice was a ruse to access Aryan bodies for sexual purposes. “Now we know why the Jew uses every artifice of seduction in order to ravish German girls at as early an age as possible,” Julius Streicher had written in Der Sturmer’s New Year’s issue of 1935, “while the Jewish doctor rapes his patient while they are under anaesthetic. He wants the German girl and the German woman to absorb the alien sperm of a Jew.” Louis W. Bondy, Racketeers of Hatred (London: Newman Wolsey, 1946), 48.

Nazi’s also believed that Jewish doctors were responsible for the undermining of the Aryan race through the provision of abortions. “The racial hatred Jews had for their Aryan host people extended to the growing life in a mother’s womb. Jewish scoundrels made this part of the programs of political parties. How many millions of unborn children and how many hundreds of thousands of mothers fell prey to the greed and racial hatred of Jewish doctors?”

Hanns Oberlindober, Ein Vaterland, das allen gehört! Briefe an Zeitgenossen aus zwölf Kampfjahren (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940), 152–67; The “Decent” Jew: A Letter to an Englishman, 1937.

86 See in connection with this Daniel Goldhagen on anti-Jewish legislation and social death. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996.

87 Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, 81–83.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1 See: The Communist Manifesto: “Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.”

2 Quoted in Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, (London: Vintage, 2018), 116.

3 Bellamy saw a eugenic benefit in allowing women to be the arbiters of the sexual marketplace under socialism: “You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical superiority of our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and moral improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has come to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction of duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The result is, that not all the encouragements and incentives of every sort which we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence of whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners… . Our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood.”

4 Ghodsee, Why Women, 118–19. It was this “communist morality” Yevgeny Zamyatin was satirizing in his great dystopian novel We (1921), in which the citizens (“ciphers”) of the One State have free sexual access to one another through the state distribution of pink tickets:

“Having subjugated Hunger … the One State began an offensive against the other master of the world—against Love. Finally, even this natural force was also conquered, i.e., organized and mathematicised, and around three hundred years ago, our historical Lex Sexualis was proclaimed: ‘Each cipher has the right to any other cipher as a sexual product.’” We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, (London: Vintage, 2007), 21.

5 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 202.

6 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 198.

7 Marcuse always deftly denied that he was in anyway the intellectual leader of the New Left, though he did coyly admit on at least one occasion that “it would have been better to call me not the father, but the grandfather of the New Left.” His influence on the student movement has likely been overstated even if his theories were taken seriously by the intellectual elite of the new left-wing and radical movements of the sixties and seventies. He was in any case, an odd choice of hero for the Easy Rider generation, this man who once described the motorcycle as “a fascist invention which equates speed and power with virility and besides it makes such a dreadful noise and pollutes terribly.” See: Tom Bourne, “Herbert Marcuse: Grandfather of the New Left” Change 11, no. 6 (Sep., 1979); and Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 5, eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Prince (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 201–05.

8 See Michel Houellebecq, Whatever (London: Serpent’s Tail ,1998), 40: “This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We’re a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented.”

9 Francis Fukuyama, Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, (New York: The Free Press, 1999.) “The changing nature of work tended to substitute mental for physical labor, thereby propelling millions of women into the workplace and undermining the traditional understandings on which the family had been based… . [B]roadly speaking, the technological change that brings about what economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ in the marketplace caused similar disruption in the world of social relationships.” (5–6)

10 Shere Hite argued for the primacy of economic factors to the success or failure of the sexual revolution. “It is important to remember that you cannot decree women to be ‘sexually free’ when they are not economically free; to do so is to put them into a more vulnerable position that ever.” See: Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (London: Talmy Franklin, 1977), 305. This was anticipated by Kate Millet in 1970:

“The goal of revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances.” Quoted in: David Allyn, Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.), 104. A similar point is made at the end of Alix Kates Shulman’s best-selling 1972 novel Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen when Sasha, the female protagonist, complains: “To find myself at thirty locked under a dryer eagerly studying ads in magazines while I worry about the sitter and my husband is away on a business trip; now, after my schemes and triumphs, my visions and dares, to be, without income or skill, dependent on a man and a fading skin—it can only be the fulfilment of a curse!” Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen, Alix Kates Shulman, (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019), 249.

11 See, Véronique Mortaigne, Je T’Aime: The Legendary Love Story of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, (London: Icon, 2019). For a contemporaneous perspective on the cultural influences of the sexual revolution see the brilliant scene in John Updike’s Couples in which the adulterous Piet surveys his lover’s husband’s bookshelf:

“Curiously he would finger and skim through Thorne’s bedside shelf—Henry Miller in tattered Paris editions, Sigmund Freud in Modern Library. Our Lady of the Flowers and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure fresh from Grove Press, inspirational psychology by the Menningers, a dove-grey handbook on hypnosis, Psychopathia Sexualis in textbook format, a delicately tinted and stiff-paged album smuggled from Kyoto, the poems of Sappho as published by Peter Pauper, the unexpurgated Arabian Nights in two boxed volumes, works by Theodor Reik and Wilhelm Reich, various tawdry paperbacks.” John Updike, Couples (London: Penguin, 1969), 63–64.

12 See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), 63. “Save for [the pill], the ‘New Woman’ of the twenties was as well off, and possibly better provided with sexual freedom, than the woman of the fifties.”

13 Perhaps not unrelated to the foregrounding of Enovid in the high cultural discourse of the sexual revolution was the high rates of uptake among the demographic consuming and producing such literature. By 1965 more than 80 percent of unmarried, white, non-Catholic college graduates, age 20 to 24 had used oral contraceptives. See: Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives 1950–1970, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 34.

14 There is a comparable trend in divorce, which was not legalized in Italy until 1970, Spain until 1981, Ireland until 1985, and Malta until 2011. See: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache/6790.pdf.

15 Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, No. 4 (2004), 339–63.

16 In Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, Nora Samstat’s verdict on the sexual revolution makes much the same point in pithier terms: “Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyer’s market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” Nora Ephron, Heartburn (London: Virago, 2018), 81.

17 Margaret Drabble, “The Sexual Revolution,” The Guardian, October 11, 1967; Elizabeth Hardwick, “Seduction and Betrayal,” originally published in the New York Review of Books, May and June 1973.

18 Stuart Jeffries describes Marcuse speaking in the summer of 1964 at a conference on the island of Korcula in Croatia:

“Why should the overthrow of the existing order be of vital necessity for people who own, or can hope to own, good clothes, a well-stocked larder, a TV set, a car, a house and so on, all within the existing order?” and quotes him in One-Dimensional Man (1964):

“Here, the so-called equalization of class distinctions reveals its ideological function. If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” Stuart Jeffries, Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, (London: Verso, 2016), 303, 305.

19 The factors he lists, which are those Angela Davis had identified in “Women and Capitalism” (1971), are the: alleviation of heavy physical labor, the reduction of labor time, the production of pleasant and cheap clothing, the liberalization of sexual morality, birth control, general education.

20 See “Marxism and Feminism” (1974); Marcuse pinned his hopes on the revolutionary potential of feminism as a political movement: “Feminism is a revolt against decaying capitalism, against the historical obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. This is the precarious link between Utopia and reality: the social ground for the movement as a potentially radical and revolutionary force is there; this is the hard core of the dream. But capitalism is still capable of keeping it a dream, of suppressing the transcending forces which strive for the subversion of the inhuman values of our civilization.”

21 This was the same argument Shulamith Firestone made in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) where she decried the “pseudo-liberation” of Western women: “They were told then as we still are now, ‘You’ve got civil rights, short skirts and sexual liberty. You’ve won your revolution. What more do you want?’ But the ‘revolution’ had been won within a system organized around the patriarchal nuclear family. And as Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilisation shows, within such a repressive structure only a more sophisticated repression can result (‘repressive de-sublimation’).”

22 Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency, trans. Jordan Levinson; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Bryan Singer (New World Perspectives, 1990).

23 Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 115–16.

24 Houellebecq, Whatever, 99.

25 Michel Houellebecq, Atomized (London: Vintage, 2001), 161–62.

26 https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25/17277496/incel-toronto-attack-alek-minassian.; https://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/24/us/elliot-rodger-video-transcript/index.xhtml.; https://nypost.com/2019/06/21/air-force-warns-about-nationwide-threat-of-incels/.; https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit.

27 Houellebecq, Whatever, 148. “No civilization, no epoch has been capable of developing such a quantity of bitterness in its subjects. In that sense we are living through unprecedented times.”

See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-recession-causing-sex-depression/586405/; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/.

28 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education ed. J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58; Catherine Hakim, “Erotic Capital,” European Sociological Review 26, no. 5 (2010).

29 Weber’s own methods were unabashedly amoral and casually misogynistic. They also relied heavily on the cultural tropes of his day. For example: “March in a peace demonstration, even if you’re secretly for war. I’ve heard countless stories of guys who’ve picked up fantastic broads at peace demonstrations.” (163); “One of the best ways to compliment a woman is to tell her you dig something about her she had no idea was particularly digable.” (60); “What else will make you look sexy? Experiment. When you find something that works you’ll know it from the way chicks start looking at you. Try on some of the new wild clothes. Bell bottoms and English boots and wide ties. Wear a body shirt or leather dungarees or a groovy vest. Be dramatic. Leave the top button on your shirt open. Wear shades or those new rimless glasses. Think sexy. Think, I am a virile male animal.” (p43); “Now you know damn well that the way these girls would like you to feel is not necessarily the way you’re going to feel. Half the time you want to pick up a girl it’s because she’s got a set of breasts that makes you dizzy. Or the face of a movie star. Or the hips of a belly dancer. Not because she has some magnetic inner quality… . But you can’t let them know that. You’ve got to pretend otherwise.” (53)

30 Randall Rothenber, “Copywriter’s Foray Into Book Writing,” New York Times, May 15, 1990; Eric Weber, How To Pick Up Girls! (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), 17; Suzanne Chazin, “Some Women Would Tell Eric Weber to Buzz Off, but Men Are Buying His Line on Picking Up Girls,” People, August 17, 1981.

31 Neil Strauss, “He Aims! He Shoots! Yes!!” New York Times, January 25, 2004.

32 The counterpoint to this mathematical attitude is a profound distrust of emotion (what Locke and Hume would have called the passions). See The Game, 22: “All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up,” Mystery continued. “They are there to try to confuse you, so know right now that they cannot be trusted at all. You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It’s uncomfortable, but you ignore it. It’s not part of the equation.” This was an attitude adopted by Mystery’s successors. In its promotional material Real Social Dynamics promised to “Make girls beg to sleep with you after short-circuiting their emotional and logical mind.”

33 Gloria Steinem, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” Esquire, September, 1962; interestingly Eric Weber made much the same point in his landmark seduction manual: “Women have come a long way recently. They’re learning they have the same right to sexual freedom that men have. In fact I think it’s going to be harder for men to adjust to the sexual revolution than it is for women.” How to Pick Up Women!, 22.

34 Hite, The Hite Report, 311, 319, 320.

35 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (London: New English Library, 1975), 327–28

36 See Chapter 5

37 Linda R. Hirshman and Jane E. Larson, Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex, 165.

38 Jane E. Larson, “‘Women Understand so Little, They Call My Good Nature “Deceit”’: A Feminist Rethinking of Seduction,” Columbia Law Review 93, no. 2 (Mar., 1993), 374–472.

39 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/neil-strauss-the-game/409789/.

40 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/10/neil-strauss-the-game-book-truth.

41 Houellebecq, Whatever, 41.

42 This is for heterosexual couples; the figure for same-sex couples is 60 percent. See: How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey data, managed by Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford University. For wedding data see https://www.bustle.com/p/how-do-most-couples-meet-these-days-online-is-the-top-way-people-are-finding-their-spouses-today-survey-finds-3344742. Numbers vary widely on both how many couples and marriages originate online. The only certainty is that is has increased a great deal and continues to rise.

43 See the chart in Rosenfeld et al., “Disintermediating Your Friends,” 2019: https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disintermediating_Friends.pdf.

44 https://hingeirl.com/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer/.; https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps/. This is data for straight men and straight women. The country data for Gini Coefficeints comes in this instance from the CIA World Factbook. The OECD-EU figures comes from “Understanding the Socio-economic Divide in Europe: Background Report,” January 26, 2017. (7) https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/cope-divide-europe-2017-background-report.pdf.

45 http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~tysong/files/Tinder.pdf. (4)

46 See: Christian Rudder in Dataclysm: “Translate this plot to IQ, and you have a world where the women think 58% of men are brain damaged.” Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: What Our Online Selves Tell Us About Our Offline Selves, (London: Fourth Estate, 2016), 23–24.

47 https://theblog.okcupid.com/a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d.

Elizabeth E. Bruch and M. E. J. Newman, “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets,” Science Advances 4, no. 8 (August, 8 2018).

48 Rudder, Dataclysm, 98.

49 Rudder, Dataclysm, 133. Given the lack of data, one can only speculate, but it seems likely that Tinder’s format, which consists of single images and very little written information, would tend to exaggerate this effect.

50 https://www.thecut.com/2014/02/okcupid-most-desired-people-in-new-york.xhtml.

51 Elizabeth E. Bruch and M. E. J. Newman, “Aspirational pursuit.” This is not to suggest that this is not necessarily an enjoyable situation to be in. Many women on online dating platforms experience harassment and obscene and objectifying proposals. However, one of the false intuitions about the dynamics of online dating is that the sheer quantity of messages (crude, polite, or otherwise) that women are receiving is dampening their enthusiasm to participate equally in contacting potential partners. Heterosexual women are 3.5 times less likely to send the first message than men but curiously this holds stable whether the women are deemed attractive or not and whether they are receiving a huge volume of messages or very few. https://theblog.okcupid.com/a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d.

52 https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-attraction-2009-2014-107dcbb4f060. Jevan Hutson, Jessie G. Taft, Solon Barocas, and Karen Levy. “Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias & Discrimination on Intimate Platforms, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , CSCW 2, Article 73 (November 2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274342.

53 Rudder, Dataclysm, 98.

54 Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Nearly all of the big dating apps are now owned by the same company,” (February 11, 2019). https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/11/18220425/hinge-explained-match-group-tinder-dating-apps.

55 Tinder Boost, https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029087891-Super-Boost.

56 Rebecca Jennings, “Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are free. But people say paying for them is worth the money,” (September 19, 2018). https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/19/17856860/tinder-plus-gold-bumble-boost-okcupid-a-list-dating-apps-premium. “Match Group, Inc. Report on Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year ended December 31, 2018.” Match Group annual financials available on: https://ir.mtch.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx. “Q1 2019 Investor Presentation—May 7, 2019” Quarterly Investor Presentation available on: https://ir.mtch.com/news-and-events/quarterly-results/default.aspx.

57 Baudrillard, Seduction, 39.

AFTERWORD

1 Sinclair, “Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman.”

2 Weinstein was quoted in Caroline Frankie, “Deciphering Harvey Weinstein’s bizarre defense against sexual harassment claims,” vox.com, (October 5, 2017). https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/5/16432006/harvey-weinstein-statement-sexual-harassment. Chantal Da Silva, “ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: IF YOU THINK U.S. SPIKE IN CELIBACY IS DUE TO ‘FEMALE EMPOWERMENT,’ YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT,” (May 13 2019). https://www.newsweek.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-if-you-think-us-spike-celibacy-due-female-1423889. Yvonne Roberts, “The sex revolution of my youth wasn’t so great. Maybe today’s celibacy is a sign of progress,” (April 7, 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-revolution-my-youth-wasnt-great-maybe-celibacy-sign-progress.

3 Ezra Klein, “‘Yes Means Yes’ is a terrible law, and I completely support it,” vox.com, (October 13, 2014). https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it.

4 The California State University and University of California systems backed the legislation having already adopted similar consent standards that year.; https://abc7chicago.com/news/yes-means-yes-california-sb-967-sex-assault-bill-signed/328741/.

5 https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/unpopular-speech-in-a-cold-climate.

6 Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, (New York: Verso, 2018), 76; Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk, The Sex Bureaucracy, 104; Calif. L. Rev. 881 (2016). For a general overview of the state of Title IX, the growing backlash against its execution, and a profile of Jeannie Suk Gersen, see Wesley Yang, “The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, (August 7, 2019).

7 See: “Netflix film crews ‘banned from looking at each other for longer than five seconds’ in #metoo crackdown,” The Independent, (Wednesday, June, 13 2018). https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/netflix-sexual-harassment-training-rules-me-too-flirting-on-set-a8396431.xhtml?amp.

For a comprehensive code of conduct that reflects the substance of progressive modern thought on sexual harassment in the workplace see the Code of Conduct of the International Faculty and Staff Sexual Misconduct Conference (FASSM) available at: https://facultysexualmisconduct.com/code-of-conduct.

8 “Reality Check: Is Malmo the ‘rape capital’ of Europe?,” BBC News, February 24, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39056786.

9 See Bryan Stevenson:

“The explicit use of race to codify different kinds of offenses and punishments was challenged as unconstitutional, and criminal statutes were modified to avoid direct racial references, but the enforcement of the law didn’t change. Black people were routinely charged with a wide range of ‘offenses,’ some of which whites were never charged with.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/07/13/presumption-of-guilt/

10 See “The Sex Bureaucracy,” and https://reason.com/2017/09/14/we-need-to-talk-about-black-students-bei/.

11 Emily Yoffe, “The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases,” The Atlantic, (September 11, 2017). https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-question-of-race-in-campus-sexual-assault-cases/539361/.

This article also notes a serious disparity in between the proportion of Asian students at Colgate (3 percent) and the number of Asian students accused of sexual assault (13 percent).

12 Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), quoted in Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought, (Princeton University Press, 2017), 89.

Gareth Tyson, Claudiu Perta, Hamed Haddadi, and Michael Seto. “A First Look at User Activity on Tinder.” In 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), San Francisco, CA (2016). Accessed from http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~tysong/#selectedpublications. The same report notes that 25 percent of messages from men to women are 6 characters or less.