Lady Campbell eventually forgave Amelia her marriage and stood godmother to the Dubouchets’ first child, who died aged two. Their second daughter, Jane, was born in the spring of 1779. Jane, whom Harriette would call her ‘Diana’ in her Memoirs, never married, staying in love ‘with a very stupid brother of a very stupid lord’ for twenty years.1 She was musical and the only one of the children whose education was properly attended to; it was Jane who taught Harriette to read. Two years later, in 1781, John and Amelia moved with their family from Mount Street to Carrington Street. Here a third daughter was born who was christened Amelia and known as Amy. Fanny, who arrived the following year, was Harriette’s favourite sister. Mary, dubbed ‘Paragon’ – ‘very sharp, very dark, very clever’2 – came next, following a winter that was so cold that trees froze and split. Harriette’s playmate as a child, Mary was possibly the only one of the girls to have a conventional marriage and children born within wedlock. Harriette followed, and soon after her birth, appearing roughly at two-yearly intervals, came Sophia, the second and last daughter to die in infancy; John Emmanuel; Charles Frederick; another Sophia; George; Julia; Rose; Charlotte, and finally, Henry Cook, named after Amelia’s adoptive parents.
Rates records show that the year in which Charles Frederick was born, 1791, John Cook swapped houses with John Dubouchet. The Cooks’ house on Queen Street was larger and this must have been a major reason for the move, but it was also here that the stocking business was based and as her step-parents grew older, Amelia’s role in managing the cleaning became more prominent. Queen Street was in a prime position, running between two other smart addresses, Curzon Street and Charles Street. Number 23, where the growing Dubouchet girls would sit all day at the window and watch the young men saunter past, was at the Curzon Street end of the road. At the other end and on the opposite side was a dairy with a large golden cow in the window; girls in poke bonnets would appear from the door to sell milk from buckets. Their new neighbours were Dr Merriman, the apothocary, Lord Craven, Lord Lucan, Lord Whitworth, the Dowager Countess of Granard, Captain Hadfield, and the Bishop of Oxford and Throckmorton. Beau Brummell later moved there too, as did Lord Frederick Campbell, after Amelia’s patroness, Lady Campbell, was burned to death in 1812 at a fire in their country house.
It looks as though John Cook gave Amelia and her husband everything he had and more besides; rate records show that Dubouchet had the lease on another house in Queen Street between 1788 and 1793, which was let to tenants. This was presumably a gift from Cook and it provided the family with an extra income until Dubouchet took up as a coal merchant, a year before the second Queen Street lease came to an end. Living in Queen Street was more expensive than living in Carrington Street; the Cooks’ house was rated at £24 a year rather than the £17 the Dubouchets paid for the smaller house, but it was in a smarter, more exposed, road. Carrington Street had no titled residents; it was a dead end and so no one walked through. It led only into and out of the market, which would be frequented by servants rather than their masters.
The household in Queen Street was tough, busy and energetic. Harriette had no solitude as a child; the sisters slept in two adjoining rooms at the top of the house where they squabbled, cold-creamed their freckles, and divided themselves into gangs. When the space got too small they would feed the crows from the roof or go to the local parks. Growing up as a middle sister and with an ever increasing number of demanding, mostly female, siblings taught Harriette to be rivalrous and competitive. As an adult, she resisted forming close and trusting connections; she disliked the demands of intimacy, the commitment, weakness and exposure it entailed, and preferred the company of men to that of women. ‘The fact is’, Harriette later wrote, ‘I was never much amused in ladies’ society. I ought not to confess this, perhaps; but I never happen to be so fortunate as to meet with pleasant women.’3
Harriette was an ambitious child, and the focus of her drive was to better anything done by Amy, her elder sister. Amy Dubouchet was ‘a fine dark woman with a Siddonian countenance and a masculine spirit’,4 which description could also fit Harriette, likewise compared with the actress Sarah Siddons, likewise seen as boyish. Even Harriette’s wit seems to have been developed to rival Amy’s; in a throwaway remark Harriette described her sister as ‘really very funny, however spitefully disposed towards me’,5 and it was Amy’s company that was sought by the wits of the day, Luttrell and Nugent. Amy appears also to have been musically gifted and ‘an excellent linguist, speaking the French, Spanish and Italian languages with the greatest fluency’.6 Harriette and Amy would not have suffered such enmity were they not both jockeying for the same position; they were too similar – in profession, appearance, temperament and character. Harriette gives little space in her Memoirs to the rise of her sister, whose fame as a courtesan preceded her own. All we are told about Amy is that she was a miser, and yet the parties she threw were for years the focal point of what would become known later in the century as the demi-monde. Amy seems to have been every bit as popular as Harriette, although she courted less controversy and kept a lower public profile. Throughout their lives the two sisters circled cautiously around one another, never getting too near or moving too far away, neither one shifting her gaze from the other.
Fanny, the second of Harriette’s sisters to become a courtesan, was the peacemaker, loved by everyone and sufficiently different from Amy or Harriette to present no threat or challenge to either. Harriette was to Fanny as the fiery Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was to her elder sister Jane. Harriette’s refrain was that Fanny, with ‘that laughing dark blue eye of hers’ was the most beautiful of them all, ‘the most popular woman I ever met with. The most ill-natured and spiteful of her sex could never find it in their hearts to abuse one who, in their absence, warmly fought all their battles, whenever anybody complained of them.’7 Julia Johnstone described gentle Fanny as ‘a poor timid, good-natured thing, incapable of doing either harm or good, she scarcely knew the distinction between virtue and vice, when she did good, it was from accident, when she committed evil, it was from want of knowing better, and she had a vacant, see-saw way of thinking that everything happened for the best’.8
Amelia, permanently pregnant, raised her family while she ran the business; John Dubouchet, rarely there, beat his daughters when he was irritated. Aged five, Harriette tore up one of his mathematical problems to make a fly-trap and sooner than apologize she let her father birch her until she was senseless. She recalled being ‘thrown on the bed and whipped, till my body was disfigured from head to foot’, all the time hearing from behind the door the desperate cries of her mother. Harriette was stubborn and maddening, she recalled, and concedes that her father ‘acted from principle, for he was not habitually cruel to children’.9 However much she apologized for her father’s violence, fear of Dubouchet played a major part in Harriette’s running off when she did.
As soon as she could read, Harriette ‘began teazing everybody for books’. Her birth coincided with that of the romantic novel, which she scorned but her sisters brought home from the circulating libraries by the dozen. Nor could Harriette ‘endure story books about naughty boys and girls, &t’.10 Her childhood reading suggests that she was being bred as a lady; the books she re-read were Gil Blas, The Vicar of Wakefield and The Speaker, an anthology of extracts taken from popular plays, essays and prose, compiled with the aim of educating the youth of Warrington in taste and elocution. The Speaker contained, Harriette recalled, ‘scraps of Shakespeare, and other great authors, which delighted me, especially Cardinal Wolsey’s speech [which] … I read … over and again, and asked Diana the meaning of every line.’11 Gil Blas, Alain-René Lesage’s great comic work of seventeenth-century France, was the book Harriette returned to throughout her life and knew ‘by heart’.12 It became her ambition to write the female Gil Blas much as Charlotte Lennox had written the Female Quixote. A picaresque novel, Gil Blas tells the story of a rogue who has many adventures, including joining a band of robbers, who becomes a corrupt politician and is rewarded by being made a lord, living a life of luxury and ease. Harriette’s affection for the novel tells us a good deal about her; Byron, who was obviously much influenced by the picaresque, says that men liked the book but women hated it because it lacked the sentimentality which is their only empire. But Harriette had no real interest in sentimentality, always preferring the variety and surprise of the picaresque, and it was the spirit of adventure she enjoyed so much in Gil Blas that she later recaptured in her Memoirs.
‘Morning, noon and night,’ she recalled of her early teens, ‘I heard nothing but the softness of Tom Sheridan’s hand, the brightness of Berkeley Craven’s eyes etc etc.’13 Her sisters talked endlessly of their ‘conquests, the kiss that Tom Sheridan had given Fanny, the appointment that Paragon had made to walk with Ned Jess, etc.’ Fanny read aloud every evening the love letter she had received from one of her Swiss cousins until Harriette could stand it no more and stuffed it under the lid of a meat pie she was taking to the baker. She pronounced herself ‘disgusted’ with her sisters’ conversation and their ‘desire to be followed and made love to in the streets’, and was thus made to feel like a ‘spy amongst them, and only because I could not enter into their feelings’. She was naturally shy, Harriette says, and she repeats this claim throughout her life. She seems to have been the type whose shyness was eased in a crowd, who felt happiest performing and most vulnerable when the public mask was removed. She was teased by her sisters for being a ‘tell-tale brown, straight-haired figure of fun’, and believed herself to be ‘ugly and in every way uninteresting’.14 Harriette presents her subsequent development into an accomplished flirt not, as it had been with Amy and Fanny, as the result of an awakened sex drive, but as one of the predicaments of the Romantic movement: the natural, innocent self threatened with corruption by pressure from the artificial world of codes and manners. ‘Now, I will ask my readers whether it be possible for a child to listen for months and years together, to a set of gay young girls, for ever raving on their love, their lovers, their sensations, without having her curiosity just a little bit excited? At length I began to look slyly under my bonnet at these lovers they all made such a fuss about, and as soon as I took the trouble to curl my hair, I was beset with a host of admirers, who sent me messages, and pretty copies of verses by our maid servant, for I appeared much older than I really was.’15 Another version of Harriette’s reception at this time is given in a letter to The Times written in 1825. The writer, signing himself ‘An Old Rake’ and claiming that Harriette will know who he is, recalled ‘a little dirty girl, whose name was Du Bouchet, who was five and twenty years ago a regular tramp in St James’s Street’. The child was, he recalled, ‘bunch backed with a shuffling gait’, which description does little to account for Harriette’s rise to sexual celebrity.16
She had decided by the age of ten that she was not going to follow the same path as her mother and might have absconded sooner had Amelia, aware of the ‘admiration’ Harriette ‘excited in the street’, not sent her away to the Ursuline Convent in Rouen to keep her out of harm’s way.17 Harriette had been at school for a while prior to this and returned home when she was eight years old, it being clear to all that she ‘could only learn what struck my fancy and nothing that any person might wish to drive into my head’.18 The Dubouchets were proud and could afford it and so they sent their girls to boarding schools, but the education Harriette received there was little better than that of the daughters of artisans or poor tradesmen who went to local day schools. The staple diet of reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the catechisms and learning the basics of writing and arithmetic was of no real use to Harriette, who could read already and whose father was a mathematician. She may have picked up her French, which was fluent if imperfect, from the Ursulines, but again she could have learned this at home, her father being from the French-speaking region of Switzerland.
Her journey to the Convent of St Ursula with John Dubouchet (spiced up in her own account with a tale of attempted seduction during the crossing) was the first time that Harriette had been out of London (‘I was, however, disappointed in the pleasure I expected to derive from a first view of the country’19) and she was to be the school’s first and only English pupil. During her two-year sojourn, the convent failed to influence her religion, education or virtue; the Abbess found the new pupil ‘too ignorant even for the third and lowest class … so I was an outcast, and I used to amuse myself with drawing horses and cows on my slate’ while the other pupils diligently took dictation.20 Harriette continued to be delinquent. She teased, misbehaved and generally bemused the nuns, making no friends and learning nothing.
She returned home to Queen Street in 1800, her schooling complete, to find that Amy and Fanny ‘had both ran off; – one with Mr Trench, the other with Mr Woodcock’.21
Notes
1 Memoirs 1831, vol. 5, p. 379.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 263.
4 Confessions, p. 55.
5 Memoirs, p. 31.
6 The English Spy, vol. 2, p. 47.
7 Memoirs, p. 29.
8 Confessions, p. 5.
9 Clara Gazul, p. xii.
10 Ibid., p. xvii.
11 Ibid.
12 Memoirs, p. 19.
13 Clara Gazul, pp. xxiv–xxv, xxii.
14 Ibid., p. xxv.
15 Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii.
16 Bell’s Life in London, 20 March 1825.
17 Clara Gazul, p. xxvii.
18 Ibid., p. xxii.
19 Ibid., p. xxviii.
20 Ibid., p. xli.
21 Ibid., p. l.