1. Hammersmith Area outside of London proper, north of the Thames and directly west of Kensington.
2. Which illustrates Paraphrased from Moral Maxims by the Duke de la Roche Foucault, which was first translated into English in 1694. In the 1748 Dublin edition the maxim reads, “In the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us” (131). In the 1751 Dublin edition it reads, “In the Adversity of our Friends, we always find something that don’t displease us” (58).
3. guineas To translate eighteenth-century pounds into today’s dollars, multiply by 100. A guinea equaled a pound and a shilling, making it worth 105 dollars. The modern equivalent of these lodgings would be approximately 210 dollars. A certain prestige was attached to the guinea, which was a high-status pound. “The [guinea] was so named because the gold from which it was made came from the Guinea coast of Africa and because it was first struck to celebrate the founding in 1663 of the slave-trading monopoly known as the Royal Adventurers into Africa” (Vincent Carretta, Equiano: The African [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005], xxiii).
4. sack A general name for a class of white wines formerly imported from Spain and the Canaries (Oxford English Dictionary).
5. chair For those with money there were several kinds of transportation possible within the city of London at midcentury: post chaise, post coach, stagecoach, hackney coach, or chair. A post chaise was a traveling carriage, either hired from stage to stage or drawn by hired horses. It usually had a closed body and seated two to four people. The driver, or postilion, rode on one of the horses. A post coach was a stagecoach used for carrying mail. A stagecoach ran daily or on specified days to convey passengers or parcels. A hackney coach was a four-wheeled coach kept for hire. It was drawn by two horses and seated six people. A chair was an enclosed chair or covered vehicle for one person, carried on poles by two men (OED).
The post chaise or post coach was the most expensive form of long-distance coach because it was fast and private. The stagecoach was cheaper because it was slower and more crowded. Coaches were a common form of transportation, although they tended to be bumpy and very noisy. At two-thirds the cost, the chair offered some privacy as a passenger could embark from home. Chairs were uncomfortable for women since “their hoop petticoat has to be squeezed in by bending it up on each side.” However, “their construction was ingenious. The roof was hinged so that you could walk in from the front without stooping and sit down. The roof was closed, and you shut or perhaps locked the door in the front. In cold weather you might have a foot-warmer ready on the floor” (Liza Picard, Dr. Johnson’s London [New York: St. Martin’s, 2001], 27). Chairs were sometimes taken even short distances just to avoid being muddied by the dirty streets of London. (Also see Kirsten Olsen, Daily Life in Eighteenth-Century England [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999]).
6. lie-in Give birth.
7. chocolate In the 1758 edition Henrietta drank coffee rather than chocolate. Simon Varey explains the relationship between the medicinal and exotic qualities particularly associated with chocolate. “Coffee tended to be served the same way almost everywhere: black, in a dish, with a stick of cinnamon and some sugar, but chocolate was more likely to be prepared with a greater sense of adventure” (21); it was consistently associated with Mexico and it “was considered an aphrodisiac [as opposed to coffee and tea], and therefore dangerous” (42). He also explains that “Quaker families, who pioneered chocolate manufacture in England, . . . cornered the market [and] retailed their product as beneficial to health” (31). “Three Necessary Drugs,” in 1650–1850; Ideas, Aesthetics: An Inquiry in the Early Modern Era, vol. 4, ed. Kevin Cope (New York: AMS, 1998).
8. New Atlantis The New Atalantis was a novel published in 1709 by Delarivier Manley. Its publication led to the arrest of Manley and her publisher on charges of scandalum magnatum (libel). A political satire, the novel deals with the sexual escapades of courtiers, courtesans, politicians, and aristocrats of early eighteenth-century England. The book tells of the goddess of justice, Astrea, who comes to earth to gather information about public and court life on the mythical island of Atalantis. Manley herself described it as a “publick attempt made against those designs & that [Whig] ministry which have been since so happily changed” (cited in Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003], 69). She is thought to have been instrumental in bringing about this change. (See G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne [London: Collins, 1965], I:194, II:62; Gwendolyn B. Needham, “Mary de la Riviere Manley, Tory Defender,” Huntington Library Quarterly [1948–1949]: 263.) Ros Ballaster argues that “Manley concealed the ‘transgression’ of representing and embodying female political ambition beneath the ‘lesser’ transgression of representing and embodying active female sexual desire” (Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1992], 116).
9. Adventures of Joseph Andrews . . . Mrs. Haywood’s Novels Joseph Andrews was Henry Fielding’s first novel (1742), satirizing Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) was a popular and prolific early novelist. Henrietta’s choice of Joseph Andrews over Haywood’s works indicates her preference for classical learning and references over the popular and perhaps scandalous. Haywood is condemned unfairly in Pope’s Dunciad (1729) as a “shameless scribbler” of “profligate licentiousness.” Her writing ranges from her explicitly erotic fiction of the 1720s to the more morally decorous prose and didactic fiction of the 1740s and 1750s.
10. sell his commission Officers had to buy their position in the army from a retiring officer or from one who had gotten a promotion. The only men able to do this were from the landed and aristocratic classes. This purchase did not include uniform and other equipment, which an officer also needed to buy himself. A commission was considered an investment, since the officer could sell it when he retired, when it would be worth the same if not more money. (H. C. B. Rogers, The British Army of the Eighteenth Century [New York: Hippocrene, 1977]). An ensigncy at midcentury would have cost about 400 pounds, while a lieutenant colonelcy was worth about 3,500 pounds (Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century [New York: Penguin, 1990], 114, 136). Purchasing a commission would be the modern equivalent of purchasing a medical practice (Barnett Correlli, Britain and Her Army, 1509–1970 [New York: William Morrow, 1970], 137).
11. Absence . . . more fiercely From the Duke de la Rochefoucault’s Maxims. It seems that Lennox translated this quotation from the French herself, as early eighteenth-century English editions offer different translations.
12. elegant writer Sir John Suckling (1609–1642), Cavalier poet. The quote, partly misremembered, comes from the fifth act of Suckling’s comedy Goblins.
13. wedded-love . . . miserable with it Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) echoes this sentiment: “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures” (The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by J. P. Hardy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 64).
14. pin-money An annual sum allotted to a woman in her marriage settlement for personal expenses in dress, etc.
15. citizen Usually applied, more or less contemptuously, to a tradesman or a shopkeeper as distinguished from a gentleman. Samuel Johnson: “a pert low townsman; a pragmatic tradesman.”
16. young girls of quality As a result of Louis’s revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had granted religious toleration to French Huguenots, as many as fifty thousand Protestant refugees fled to England, where they became textile manufacturers, goldsmiths, glassmakers, and wine merchants and lived in ghettos. Not only did they provide the British with additional reasons to oppose France, but these refugees also fought in England’s armies (William Willcox and Walter Arnstein, The Age of Aristocracy [Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1996], 15; Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 157; also see Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage [London: Routledge, 1985]).
17. corn-factor A dealer in grains—all grains, such as oats, barley, and wheat, are called “corn” in England.
18. cit Short for citizen; contemptuous designation for a tradesman, merchant, or shopkeeper.
19. Parade A public square or promenade.
20. staring with astonishment at him This passage omitted here: “When we were placed at table, I found myself opposite to him; and observing that he chewed his meat with great difficulty, for want of teeth, I was resolved to mortify him, by letting him perceive that I observed it, looking at him several times with a kind of sensibility for this so unavoidable a misfortune.”
21. Spring-Gardens In the 1750s there were two sites that might be invoked here. One was at Spring Garden, Stoke Newington, which was visited on Whitsunday evening by Londoners of the lower classes (Thomas Legg, Low-life; or, One Half of the World, Knows Not How the Other Half Live, 3rd ed. [London: J. Lever, 1764], 74). However, the most famous pleasure garden in London was Spring Gardens at Vauxhall. It came to be known simply as “Vauxhall” and offered a pleasant place to walk, with manicured gardens, walkways, arbors, nightingales, and orchestras. Admission was one shilling. “Tom Brown declares that in the close walks of the gardens ‘both sexes meet, and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way, and the winding and turning in the little Wildernesses are so intricate, that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters.’ ” All levels of society frequented this place, but “even Bishops have been seen in this Recess without injuring their Character” (Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century [London: Macmillan, 1896], 288, 292).
22. jointure An allowance written into the marriage articles to be settled on a woman for her maintenance if she outlived her husband.
23. saints of Whitefeld’s or Wesley’s creation George Whitefield (1714–1770), Methodist preacher famous for his oratory. John Wesley (1703–1791) was the founder, along with his brother Charles, of Methodism, which was an expression against the rise of the dominant Anglican tradition of moral and rational religion. Orthodox Anglicans attacked Wesley for “enthusiasm” (claims to special revelations), teaching salvation by faith, and breaches of church order. Women held more prominent positions in the Methodist church (Dictionary of National Biography; also see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language, Religion, and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000]).
24. Yet a writer . . . a very good return to it The writer described here is Samuel Richardson. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754), Mrs. Jervois/O’Hara, a woman of “abandoned character,” is converted by Methodists. Lady G explains, “[t]hose people [Methodists] have really great merit with me . . . I am sorry that our own Clergy are not as zealously in earnest as they. They have really. . . . given a face of religion to subterranean colliers, tinners, and the most profligate of men, who hardly ever before heard either of the word, or thing” (vi, 32). Richardson was known to be a Dissenter and to be supportive of many women writers, including Lennox.
Sir Charles Grandison came out in a third edition in 1754.
25. mussulmen Muslims.
26. alcoran The Koran, or Quran.
27. Envy will . . . the substance true Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), II. 466–67.
28. White’s In 1758 this was a well-known private gaming club where annual subscription fees were paid to the proprietor. It had formerly been associated with gallantry and intrigue, and even called “a den of thieves” (H. B. Wheatley, London Past and Present [London: Murray, 1891]).
29. Ranelagh Ranelagh Gardens were public pleasure gardens located in Chelsea, then on the outskirts of London, to which all classes resorted.
30. piquet A card game played by two persons with a pack of thirty-two cards (the low cards, from “two” to “six,” being excluded), in which points are scored on various groups or combinations of cards and on tricks.
31. cardinal A short cloak worn by ladies, originally of scarlet cloth with a hood (OED).
32. factors Agents.
33. packer A tradesman whose business is to pack goods for shipping.
34. the faults . . . justified From John Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern Translated into Verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer, with original poems by Mr. Dryden (London: Tonson, 1700), 174.
1. premune Colloquial contraction of praemunire: a difficulty, scrape, predicament, fix.
2. ingenious writer Footnote omitted in 1761. Fulke Greville, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections, Critical and Satyrical, and Moral (London: J and R. Tonson, 1756), 84. The 1756 edition reads: “Despair is the shocking ease to the mind that mortification is to the flesh.” There was also a 1758 edition.
3. spark A youngblood, beau, single young man.
4. temporising Equivocating.
5. neat’s Bovine animal such as an ox or cow.
6. sack Sweet wine.
7. baited Giving food and water to horses, especially on a journey.
8. capuchin A lady’s hooded cloak, in imitation of that worn by Capuchin friars.
9. Abigail Designation for a maid.
10. Jacobite A supporter of James II or his son, the Pretender; loyal to the deposed Stuarts. In this context a code for political sedition.
11. frowardness The quality of being “habitually disposed to disobedience and opposition” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “froward”).
12. Mrs. The use of this term here connotes respectfulness. Mrs. could be used to signal respect rather than as a marital designation.
13. Scandalum Magnatum A malicious libel upon a social superior.
14. Odso Contraction of “godso” or “oh god”; an exclamation of surprise.
15. Arthur’s A gaming house; a London coffeehouse that started out as a social club for the elite with gambling.
16. New-Market A racecourse.
17. deist One who does not believe in revelation but whose belief in God comes only from reason; e.g., one common deist position was that God was the original cause of creation, setting the world in motion, because that is all that reason could demonstrate. Deists did not believe in the immanence or omnipresence of God, and did not believe that he affected individuals but only collective bodies such as the church or the state.
18. dependent In this context, a lady’s companion, or a “toad eater,” one who is given room and board in return for being pleasing and accommodating.
19. mercer A person who deals in textile fabrics, especially silks, velvets, and other fine materials.
20. lappets Streamers attached to a lady’s headdress.
21. egrets From aigrette, a tuft of feathers, spray of gems, or similar ornament worn on the head.
22. French fillet A headband used to bind the hair, to keep the headdress in position, or simply for ornament.
23. tête From the French “head”; a woman’s head of hair, or wig, dressed high and elaborately ornamented.
24. pink and silver Colors of the pattern on the silk.
25. dishabille A state of undress, as in wearing nightclothes.
26. Trifles, light as air . . . Othello, III, iii, line 323.
27. Eloisa Heloise (also known as Eloisa) and Abelard’s twelfth-century love letters are a well-known example of early romantic love. Abelard was of a noble class, which he had renounced to become a philosopher and teacher. Heloise was of a lower social standing and his student. Their illicit relationship resulted in a child, a secret marriage, and ultimately, Abelard’s castration and life as a monk. Heloise became an abbess. The couple continued their correspondence, which at first was passionate but eventually became philosophical.
28. governor Tutor and guide.
29. Femme de Chambre A chambermaid. The implication is that a French chambermaid is more easily suborned, either because French morals are looser or because she is a new servant in Miss Belmour’s pay and hence less responsive to Henrietta’s wishes.