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Biographical Details Dr Frances Wilson read English at Oxford and gained her PhD at the University of Sussex for her thesis on Henry James. She now lectures in English Literature at Reading University. Her first publication was a new edition (1995) of the Everyman Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb’s fictionalised account of her infatuation with Lord Byron – ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. This was followed in 1999 by her editing a collection of essays on Byromania – Portraits of an Artist in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Culture (Macmillan), where the subject’s personality as well as writings excites an emotional response from readers. This theme she later developed further in Literary Seductions (Faber and Faber 1999), a series of studies in how some writers seemingly compel their readers to sacrifice all on the strength of a few words. Amanda Foreman’s critique described Frances Wilson as ‘a writer’s writer who will no doubt inspire her own cult following’ The Courtesan’s Revenge (Faber and Faber, 2003) is a biography of Harriette Wilson (no relation) ‘the most despised woman in Regency London’, whose life as a courtesan drew in the Prince of Wales and three future prime ministers as well as most of the dandies of Mayfair. When her expectations of annuities from her patrons and lovers were disappointed, she published her Memoirs by instalments, offering her subjects the choice of exclusion at a price (the Duke of Wellington’s response, ‘Publish and be damned,’ guaranteed his inclusion). This is the raw material for this year’s lecture, sponsored by Hadens Solicitors. How shape and form are given to a life whose public narrative was a highly edited fiction and whose reality depended on make believe.
The Eleventh Annual Johnson Lecture 2 March, 2004 Frances Wilson The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson: The Impossibility of Biography. ‘How,’ exclaimed Virginia Woolf when she began her biography of Roger Fry, ‘can one make a life of six cardboard boxes full of tailors bills, love letters and old picture postcards?’ Harriette Wilson presents her biographer with a challenge even more extreme. Would that there were one tailor’s bill or picture postcard belonging to her, one recovered love letter. Courtesan, memoirist and blackmailer, from being amongst the more notorious figures of her day, as famous in Mayfair circles as Byron and Beau Brummell, Harriette Wilson has long been on the list of history’s missing people. She was one of Regency London’s most and least visible figures, always on display in her opera box or her carriage, yet vitally separate from the high society who courted her. She lived on the far side of the sword, as Virginia Woolf describes the shadow dividing the respectable world of marriages and mistresses from the sexual underworld, a realm whose existence was rarely admitted to by the men who crossed with regularity from sun to shade. There is scarcely a mention of Harriette Wilson in the biographies of her many protectors, men such as the Duke of Wellington, George Canning and Lord Palmerston (to name just the prime ministers). Nor does she feature in the biographies of Frederick Lamb, whose brother was another prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and whose father had also been Harriette’s lover; or Lord Ponsonby, Lamb’s cousin and the brother-in-law of Earl Grey, also a prime minister, or Lord Clanricarde, the son-in-law of George Canning. Neither is she mentioned in association with Henry Brougham, the founder of London University, the inventor of the Brougham carriage, the Whig politician who became Lord Chancellor soon after Wilson began blackmailing him. Brougham, the highest law lord in the land, acted in the interests not only of Harriette herself but of her reckless publisher, John Joseph Stockdale and her feckless ‘husband’ William Henry Rochfort, who she may or may not have married after retiring from her profession but with whom she certainly lived during the time she was writing her memoirs. Harriette Wilson’s blackmail of King George IV and his mistress, Lady Conyngham, was not explored until The Courtesan’s Revenge uncovered the degree to which Wilson was regarded as a threat to the state. As a courtesan, the centrality of Harriette Wilson’s presence in the lives of the most powerful men of the Regency has been erased. As a blackmailer, all but a few of her letters have been destroyed and the identities of many victims will never be known. Only her extortion letters to Brougham, stored in the Brougham archive at University College London, and to her adored Lord Ponsonby, stored with the Grey Papers at Durham University, survive to tell the tale of her remarkably successful attempt to hold the British Aristocracy to ransom. So if one challenge of writing the life of Harriette Wilson is the absence of source material by or about her, another is the way in which Wilson is represented by the texts in which she is mentioned. As the facts of her fifty nine years have all but eroded, they have been replaced by the usual errors and fantasies attributed to those whose lives seem too unimportant, or immoral, for it to much matter what is said about them. And while the fantasies she inspired fuelled Wilson’s reputation when she was launching her career – and the fictitious stories in circulation about her family and origins were legion - those perpetuated since, by historians and biographers, have done little for her posthumous existence. Any mention of Harriette Wilson is usually followed by a litany of erroneous information; in fact there is barely a reference to her in which the details given are correct. While I was researching Harriette’s life I kept a file entitled ‘Errors’ whose bulk increased while my other files seemingly grew more slender. To take two random examples, an exhibition of Regency Lyme in Lyme Regis claims that Wilson went there to give birth to a couple of illegitimate children. The curator has confused Harriette Wilson, courtesan, who remained childless all her life, with Harriet Wilson Lowndes, respectable wife of a Knightsbridge property developer, who indeed had her children baptised in Dorset. Most recently, Julie Peakman in Mighty Lewd Books (2003), a scholarly study of eighteenth century pornography, writes that Harriette Wilson’s memoirs were banned and that she escaped prosecution by escaping to Paris, none of which is true. Her memoirs, unprotected by copyright laws, were widely pirated and sold astonishingly well; it was Wilson’s publisher rather than herself who was liable for prosecution, and when she went to Paris it was to join her husband, who was escaping from his creditors. The two previous accounts of Harriette Wilson’s life seem equally unconcerned with the historical reality of their subject. Unable to confirm the date of Wilson’s death, Angela Thirkell, whose otherwise respectable Fortunes of Harriette was published in 1936, concludes her book with the disinterested remark, unusual for a biographer, that such details are not ‘of very great matter.’
Valerie Grosvenor Myer’s Harriette Wilson, Lady of Pleasure (1999) replaces research with erotica and reimagines her heroine’s career with a liberty few biographers have before enjoyed: ‘blood sang in her ears;’ she writes of Wilson’s encounter with a male, ‘her nipples rose unbidden in response.’(Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Harriette Wilson, Lady of Pleasure, Ely: Fern House, 1999) And so forth. Both books rehearse, as does Katie Hickman’s brief account of Harriette Wilson in her recent Courtesans, the usual romantic cliches about courtesans; the tart-with-a-heart, the woman who broke the rules, the woman whose use of her sexuality liberated from the restraints of her class and gender. These narrative formulas are more comfortable than the truth, which was that Harriette Wilson’s heart was not her most salient feature, that courtesans, like all prostitutes, were chronically financially dependent – hence Wilson’s recourse to blackmail - that the lives of courtesans were constrained by rules to the point that they could only be seen in the park at certain hours, and that far from being liberated from her class and gender, far from being regarded as the equal of the circles she entertained, Harriette Wilson was reminded continually of her status as an employee. Courtesans, like courtiers, are professional flatterers, and Harriette Wilson excelled in this field and thus reached the top of her career. As a writer, she transgressed, but as a courtesan she played by the rules. Not that Wilson would object to her biographers trading reality for fantasy or disregarding the importance of dates. Part of what makes her such a difficult person to write about is her own continual blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, her own blatant disregard for historical accuracy. ‘Dates make ladies nervous and stories dry,’ she wrote in the opening pages of her infamous Memoirs, and ever keen to keep the juices flowing, not one date is mentioned. In the world Harriette Wilson describes she is the sun and those men she knew are mere planets circling her orbit. The Napoleonic wars appear, much as they do in the novels of Jane Austen, as a background of colourful uniforms and raffish officers. The threat Napoleon posed to the nation is never raised. But Harrriette Wilson is, albeit unwittingly, far from apolitical or ahistorical. What she gives us is a rare picture of the clandestine and exclusive sexual underworld inhabited by the country’s leading figures, where Whigs and Tories shared the same women, where the privileges of birth were exploited to the full. The most substantial source for Harriette Wilson’s life are her Memoirs, published in nine paper-covered instalments between February and August, 1825. It is here that the biographer’s real challenge begins. How should we read a document as complex as this? Having retired, Wilson asked various of her previous protectors to supply her with an annuity, the promise of which was part and parcel of the initial agreement between a protector and his courtesan. As a career woman, a courtesan needed a pension. The subsequent refusal of these men to support her resulted in Wilson’s decision to expose them. Those she threatened felt little anxiety; it was unlikely, they believed, that an illiterate whore could ever produce a book, less likely that anyone would want to publish it, unthinkable that people would actually read it. The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, which Harriette produced at break-neck speed, were written as an exercise in blackmail on a grand scale, and implicate in some way almost the entire establishment. Wilson would revise any memory for a fee and she thus allowed the official story of her life to go in any direction, depending on negotiations with key-players. Prior to publication, she and her publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, wrote to two hundred or so of her former lovers and acquaintances giving them the opportunity to buy themselves out for £20 per annum or a lump sum of £200. These were quite modest payments considering the wealth of her victims and the value of a reputation. Some took up the offer, such as George IV, who lay on his deathbed four years later cursing ‘Harriette Wilson and her hellish gang’, while others, such as the Duke of Wellington, challenged her, so the legend goes, to publish and be damned (which infamous rebuke, typical of Wilson’s legacy, has no basis in fact). Those men who bought Wilson’s silence had the passages in which they featured simply crossed-out. Occasionally, if she felt malicious, various lovers who had bought-out would get a very handsome write-up indeed, which the canny reader would recognise for being the under-hand exposure it was meant to be. Henry Brougham, for example, who represented Wilson’s legal interests as well as paying her an annuity in exchange for her silence, was praised by her as a man of ‘brilliant talents’, actuated ‘solely by the spirit of philanthropy.’ The higher the payment, the greater the flattery. On the other hand, minor figures in her life such as the Duke of Wellington, with whom she had a brief liaison before his marriage, or Frederick Lamb, take on major roles in the Memoirs as a result of sufficiently irritating her when she was demanding payment. Never once, however, does Harriette Wilson mock the sexual prowess of her lovers. Wellington is sent up for being a class-A bore, Lamb is mocked for his stinginess. The poor hygiene of various of her lovers is bemoaned, and invariably Wilson criticised their callous behaviour towards her. The manner in which the Memoirs were edited and published challenges directly our most cherished assumptions about the memoir as a form of writing: that it relates to memory, that memory represents what is true – memory being regarded as the very signature of the self, the hallmark of identity. In Harriette Wilson’s hands the Memoir held only an indirect relation to the truth. Before the publication of the first instalment, Stockdale, who had a genius for publicity, advertised in the newspapers the list of whose names would appear, unless they paid up, and he continued to advertise on the back of each part those who would appear, unless they paid up, in the next instalments. This enabled Harriette Wilson’s readers to follow the ever-evolving developments of the plot, to watch as terrified politicians bought themselves out of this damning, alternative history of the Regency, and to observe, in an extra-textual drama, how Wilson was gaily allowing her life story to be constructed in this lottery. Readers were able to work out, from the list of names on the back of the previous instalment, who had bought himself out from the present one. The newspapers joined in the game, commenting on the lateness of the next expected instalment and speculating on the back-stage negotiations which were delaying publication. As names paid up, Wilson’s narrative had always to elastically re-form itself around the subsequent ellipsis, regardless of the reader’s being perfectly aware of the artificiality of this act. Readers knew they were reading not the truth of HW’s lived experience but an edited version, that her eventual printed account had a very strained relation to fact, and Harriette Wilson herself had little control over the narrative form her autobiography would take, in what direction the plot would go next. Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs were for her readers both a documentary-in-the-making and a highly edited fiction. More scandalous than Harriette Wilson’s career as a courtesan was her career as a writer; it was less what she said than what she did not say that caused the problem, and less problematic than what she did not say was the form in which she did not say it. How are we then to read Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs? The problems for the historian I have outlined, but how might a literary critic approach her work? Wilson’s style is celebrated for its naturalness, its openness, the absence of cant and false modesty. Here are the famous opening lines.
The reader, assumed to be male and aristocratic, is flirted with, flattered, confided in, and told precisely nothing. Harriette Wilson, ever the cryptic courtesan, begins with an announcement of what she won’t say rather than what she will. She does not say, for example, whether Craven was her first lover which might suggest to modern readers, who assume that her Memoirs begin at the beginning, that she began her career at the age of fifteen. Readers in 1825, however, alert to the peculiar dynamic of this cut-and-paste text, would understand Wilson’s implication that those men she knew prior to Craven had bought themselves out of her life-story. Her career most probably began when she was thirteen, and Craven’s younger brother, Berkeley, was almost certainly one of the earlier lovers whom Harriette successfully blackmailed. Wilson begins her Memoirs with a brazen refusal to conform to the existing plots of the penitent, apologetic, or vindicatory whore. Memoirs such as the Confessions of Julia Johnstone, written by herself in contradiction to the fables of Harriette Wilson, which was published at the same time as Harriette’s Memoirs and written by Julia Johnstone, a fellow courtesan and ex-friend of Harriette’s, with the sole purpose of undermining her rival’s book, followed what, since the eighteenth century, had been the more familiar narrative trajectory of the fallen woman’s story: the seduction by a dastardly milord of an innocent woman from a good family, her consequent fall into vice, her future suffering and her eventual penitence. ‘Let no one condemn me who has not been placed in a similar situation,’ pleads Julia Johnstone before listing her misfortunes. Johnstone’s Confessions are, typically, her vindication and her appeal to be readmitted to ‘good’ society. They present the reader with a cautionary tale and they give an account of feminine sexuality as something either good or bad and as constructed around a moment of deflowering which divides the lost, ordered world from the chaotic underworld into which the fallen woman is cast. In her own Memoirs it is nowhere suggested by Harriette Wilson that any fall has taken place. The deflowering which the scandalous woman’s memoir situates as the central defining moment of both her life and her narrative never occurs. There never was an innocence to violate, a virginity to lose, or any subsequent experience of guilt or suffering. Her tone suggests, rather, that she experienced a good deal of pleasure as a courtesan; she implies that as opposed to being his victim, it was she who was the seducer of Lord Craven. She mocks the literary clichés employed by other confessing courtesans in her refusal to disclose whether ‘it was love, or the severity of my father, or the winning arts of the noble lord,’ which drew her into the demi monde. Despite the apparent ‘naturalness’ of her voice, its absence of literary artifice and its departure from convention, Wilson resists revealing ‘inner self’ or ‘true self’ as she was expected by her readers to do; she appropriates instead a voice which masquerades as readable but refuses to be read. The question any biographer of Harriette Wilson is then up against is this: how do we read her autobiographical voice? If the Memoirs do not disclose the facts of her life, what might they tell us about the necessary fictions and how might a reading of those fictions help us to understand something of the ‘real’ Harriette Wilson? Given the understanding shared by biographers and their readers alike of the ‘true self’ as the product of the materiality of experience, does Wilson’s unashamedly problematic relation to both truth and experience undermine the value of her memoirs? Wilson places herself in an entirely unstable position in relation to her own story, she played with her life as a narrative construct, she rejected the pressure to define her femininity within the available terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’ her fall, or to define herself at all in relation to either context or experience. Her Memoirs disregard as insignificant time, place, major event, a great many chief players and a great deal of personal revelation. She stated in her opening paragraph that none of these things ‘much signify,’ that fact and fiction have an equal weight in the formation of a self and of a narrative. Feminine identity for Harriette Wilson was not something whole and given, structured like a predictable plot with a beginning, a deflowering, and an end, but rather, like the formation of the Memoirs themselves, it was something perpetually in process. And like the story she sold, the self for Harriette Wilson was always incomplete. But that is not the full story, and the temptation succumbed to by Harriette Wilson’s biographers and editors to complete her story has resulted in the more conventional narratives that surround her. Frustrated by Wilson’s own refusal to conform to the plot of purity stolen by an demon seducer, and lacking the textual evidence to concoct this story themselves, they are nonetheless determined to use this narrative somehow. What we see then, in the biographies by Angela Thirkell and Valerie Grosvenor Myer and in the introduction to the Memoirs by Leslie Blanch, is that this essential plot has simply shifted, so that instead of accounting for Harriette Wilson’s life as a scandalous courtesan it accounts for her fall into scandalous writing. What we find described in each instance is how Harriette Wilson, a literary innocent, was lured not into sexual vice but into literary vice by her vindictive, shadowy husband (always described, of course erroneously, as illegitimate, as though this would somehow account for his ‘evil’), who forced her into writing her Memoirs. It is then the writing of the Memoirs which becomes the moment of deflowering, the single event which divides the good woman from the bad, the innocent one from the guilty, which results in Harriette Wilson’s future suffering and fall from grace. It is the buying up and selling of her story which becomes the fatal act of which Harriette Wilson must, but never does, repent.
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The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket
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