by DM Bryan
Truly, my mistress does not see as others see, and her way of looking is still novel to me. In order that I might better understand, I have asked her if we might close up our room for a few hours and venture forth into London’s streets. I would that we might find a printseller who displays Mr. Hogarth’s prints—London so loves his Harlot that such a shop should be easy to find—and then my mistress and I might more fully understand the nature of the inquiry in which we have played such an insignificant part.
This proposal my mistress has accepted, and so soon I shall write you the details of our excursion. I am very excited, sister, for although I love to be a laundress, I see vast quantities of washing and very little of the world. I fear one day I will have no conversation beyond how to get up lace and the best method of clear-starching. This last is simple enough: do not let cloths lie in starch; do not use hot water or make your lather with a whisk; do not neglect to use sufficient bluing in your rinse. If you do these things, sister, your muslins will not yellow.
You may see that I am truly your affectionate sister, Elizabeth.
Bell Inn Yard off Fryday Street, 1732
My dearest Sadie,
I shall enclose this letter with my last, for I have written them so close together, a single enclosure will do for both. They are as peas in a pod, and sister-letters to each other.
Just as she promised, my mistress let the fire go out under the pots on our hearth and bade me find my Brunswick jacket. Then, when we were properly arrayed against the day, she closed up our door but did not lock it, for as you know we lodge only and the door has no fastening. Our landlady heard our tread on the stairs and opened her parlour door. When she saw my mistress dressed and ready to go out, she could not restrain an expression of surprise. “La,” she said, “has someone died?”
You see, sister, many come up those stairs to bring us washing, and sometimes I run down on errands, but rarely does my mistress set foot in that dank front hall. But my mistress only smiled pleasantly at our landlady, and asked after the health of Mr. Hudson, and all the little Hudsons, a pack of whom looked out from behind their mother’s wide skirts. “We’re well enough,” said our landlady, “but I hope you haven’t left that fire untended upstairs, or we’ll all be dead when you come back.”
My mistress assured her the house was safe, and that she had all that family’s linens washed and drying on lines. She added, “The greasy spot in Mr. Hudson’s cuff is gone, and the threads restored to themselves.” She was right, for I’d removed that stain myself with a coal wrapped in a damp bit of brown paper, the heat doing what no soap could manage. My mistress tipped me a wink of her eye.
“That’s well done,” said our landlady, “and I thank you kindly. You must rap hard on the door when you return, for the girl says she cannot hear if people tap too politely.”
Sadie, you may imagine, with the two of us out together, our landlady had a rare chance to inspect our belongings—and her own as well, for the furniture of that room belongs to her. We should certainly return to whorled fingerprints on our shining copper pots, but Mrs. Hudson’s invasion held no fears for us. The woman is honest-minded enough, and the only items in our poor room left unsecured were Mrs. Hudson’s own linens, all neatly drying on the line. Washing those was part of our rent.
My mistress said, “If the girl is hard of hearing, I promise to knock very vigorously—in short, like a footman.”
The landlady’s pale mouth twisted. “Well, now, your business brings a few of those to the door, don’t it?”
“Yes, but they bring no invitations, only soiled breeches,” I said.
“Not their own, I hope,” said Mrs. Hudson, “for they should wash their own and save their pennies. A clever footman might go somewhere in this world.”
“What about your John?” I said, pointing behind her into the darkened parlour, with its half shuttered front window. A boy on a stool looked up. “John might go into service as a footman. Then he could come home of an evening and thunder with his staff on the door.”
“He might,” said his mother, but she didn’t look convinced.
“Is that a book you have there, John?” I asked.
John’s eyes flickered, submerged in some deep sensation. “It is a book,” said his mother with some pride. “He was given it at the school as a prize for his quickness.”
My mistress cooed like a pigeon. “Quickness, is it, John? That’s a fine quality in a boy.”
“Not quickness in running, mind,” said our landlady, “but in learning.”
We knew, but again we chirruped our pleasure, sparrows now.
“He will read you something, if you like.
Sister, what could we do but watch poor, persecuted John rise from his stool and come to stand beside his mother in the door. His book came before him, its unbound title page a papery shield against the stupidity of laundresses. Can you guess the book, Sadie, for you and I knew it well enough in our day? How often did our child-selves stand like apron-wearing soldiers in ranks before the trustees of the Bread Street Charity School, waiting our turn to be examined? Now, ten years later, I could still join with John, both of us reciting from Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs:
The Praises of my Tongue
I offer to the Lord,
That I was taught, and learnt so young
To read his holy word.
“How do you know it?” said the boy, when we’d finished together upon that pleasant itch of an un-rhyme. He was as reluctant to admit a laundress might read as he was to demonstrate his own accomplishments.
“John,” I said, “do you think I was hatched from an egg?”
The boy blushed, and I heard his sisters laughing from the room behind.
“I won’t be a footman,” he said.
“Then don’t be one,” said I and turned away quick enough.
I was sorry to have exposed him to embarrassment. I wished I had not repeated the verse with him, but sister, my tongue does offer praises. I am well aware of those advantages accorded me by Bread Street. My numbers are copperplate, while my mistress must count linens with marks on a tally sheet. Whenever we have a tallowed rush to spare in the evenings, I can read, while she must only listen. Her news is rinsed and rinsed again—it is never fresh—but I can read a broadsheet over a gentleman’s shoulder as well as any maid alive.
However, I am forgetting my tale, which I must pick up again at the moment my mistress and I passed out of the Bell’s yard and began walking up Fryday Street. And because John and schooling was our theme as we walked, my companion set me to reading the name of every signpost she knew. “Health to the Barley Mow,” I read, as we passed by what my mistress calls The Sign of the Haystack. “The Arts of Peace,” said I, as we moved beyond what she’s always named The Dove and Olive.
“The Awful Roe,” she said, as we passed beneath the last signpost of Fryday Street. “Well,” she added, “what think you of my kind of reading, Mrs. Betty?”
I did not understand her at all, and turned back to consider the wooden board. It hung outside a public house, The World’s End, and showed a painted, flame-spewing globe. I wondered what manner of disaster the anonymous artist anticipated. As I gazed, the signpost creaked a little. A pauper breeze, starved of any real force, blew up Fryday Street. “Row?” said I, “A row of what? How so a row, mistress?”
“Why, roe is round and pale—like the egg in the signpost. Mind you, I’ve never seen it split like that, with its yoke spilling out. You find it in the innards of a fish—in lengths, long and yellow, like a skein of lamb’s wool. Full of bubbles like wash water. Have you never opened a herring, Mrs. Betty?”
I had, but I’d always found fish inside, no froth, no flame. “It’s the end of the world, mistress. That’s our home there on fire—all of mankind lost in the flame. The signpost shows what the poets call our planet, our terrestrial orb.”
“Now you think I was hatched from an egg,” said my mistress, content in her reading.
We were walking again, leaving behind the inn, whatever its name might be. We reached Cheapside, and as one, we turned right toward the dome of St. Paul’s, plump as any breast on Poultry Street. Wide and loud stretched this end of Cheap, filled with the sober coats of men of business and the rough-spun skirts of country girls. Criers swung their wares and lifted their voices, their shoulders balancing full pails of milk or baskets of fish, perhaps full of roe. Wagons and horses sent up spumes of dust, for we’d had no rain for days. At the mouth of the Old Change, we passed a ballad singer making a great noise, although she was so drunk I could not determine the nature of her song. She decanted her notes in a staggering sort of tune that, upon reflection, sister, she must have intended as that familiar melody Lillibullero. Over and over again she sang the refrain, or rather bawled it out, as we descended the rest of Cheapside and turned into Pater Noster Row. I felt very sorry for her, for I began to doubt her right in the head, and I was glad to leave her behind.
In Pater Noster Row, the dust settled a little, and the traffic in the street diminished. Now the bookseller’s and printseller’s shops began in earnest, their windows fanged with pages, so many white teeth. Here we slowed and stopped, standing before this window and that, taking in the sharp-engraved pictures, with their crisp lines. One window displayed a row of characters from Mr. Laroon’s Cryes of the City of London, and although those pictures are not modern like Mr. Hogarth’s, I saw all Cheapside behind the glass: the orange seller with the basket on her head and the gentleman wearing all his hats for sale. Had my mistress and I not walked beside just such a mud-soled woman with braids of onions tipped over her shoulders? We looked for a while, my lady and I, and then we passed by the crowd and left them behind again.
The next window held naught but books, bound already in tan skins and tipped with thin lines of gold across the stitched spines. So many books, some standing shoulder to shoulder, others propped open so that we might see the neat lines of type. Some of them were already old, showing signs of past reading, their pages sliced open and their bindings cracking. I do not care if a book is a little musty, but many of these looked to be the works of divines upon matters theological. We passed on.
The third shop held both prints and books hung, stacked, spread open, the better to invite fine folk to dawdle and then to enter. The bindings seemed fresh and the prints new. This was precisely the kind of shop genteel enough to sell Mr. Hogarth’s work, but now that I’d found the right kind of premises, I learned that for a laundress to enter there was a different and more difficult matter. In short, Sadie, I lacked the courage. With my nose pressed to the glass, I attempted to see over the display in order to discover the faces and, more importantly, the disposition of the bookseller and his clerks. A kindly face might encourage me. The sun glanced brightly off panes and pages alike, but behind that, all was gloom.
Sister, I tried, but I could not lift the latch. My jackets and my petticoats are always clean and presentable but, still, I am ever only a washerwoman. You know the few books in my collection: that ragged copy of Mrs. Jane Barker’s Love Intrigues (the work my mistress loves best); the clean copy of Mrs. Haywood’s Secret Histories (that she cares for less, even though I read Fantomina to her as often as she will allow); and the halved copy of Moll Flanders (that she will not suffer me to read to her even though I beg). Moll is best loved by you and me, Sadie, and I hope you are happy in your continued enjoyment of the half you took when you went to Hackney. Do you still favour Moll’s romance with her Lancashire husband? As for me, I still love to lie abed for the length of a candle stub, feasting on Moll’s pocket-cargos of watches, wigs, and good Brussels lace.
But no matter which I praise most—Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Haywood, or Mr. Defoe—not one of these works did I purchase from a bookseller’s shop. Secret Histories I had from an upstairs maid, who’d had it from the lady’s maid, who’d had it from her mistress. Moll Flanders I purchased for a copper from a street-peddler in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Mrs. Baker’s novel, you will remember, came from poor Mrs. Cooke after her eyes went. When a person can acquire such an exhaustive collection of volumes by happenstance and good fortune, why need she ever pass over a bookseller’s threshold? So I did not attempt this one, preferring, like so many of us, to run my eyes over the volumes in the window and my tongue over my teeth.
I would be there yet but that my mistress put her hand to the door and, with a slithering of skirts, passed by the jambs and vanished inside. I could do nothing but follow, pulling open the door with little grace and flinging myself in sideways. (Sister, the doorway was very narrow, even for a laundrymaid like myself, who is never elegant in side hoops.) I found my mistress standing before a very surprised-looking gentleman, who sat at a writing desk under the window. He held his wig in his hands, and we must have come upon him just as he was giving his scalp a good scratch. With ill-concealed annoyance, he slammed his wig back on his head so that white dust shot out from behind his ears and drifted downwards.
“Mr. Hogarth’s prints of The Harlot’s Progress,” said my mistress, sounding very businesslike indeed, “we should like to see them.”
“You should like to see them,” echoed the bookselling gentleman, who now rose to his feet. (I never learned, Sadie, if this man were the proprietor or only a clerk left in charge.) My mistress waited—she knew how to outstare a man who was examining her person for social particulars. He finished his scrutiny. “So should half the world. Madam,” he said, placing a slight stress on that “madam.” Of course, he’d smoked us for what we were, but I suppose a customer is a customer, and I could now see he and we were the only bodies in the shop. I do not suppose we would have discovered the gentleman wigless and dressing his fleabites if business were good.
“Then you do not have that work by Mr. Hogarth—those moral prints so praised by all the world?” said my mistress, looking about her. The shop was not clean. Shelf after shelf of dusty books rose to the ceiling.
“I have some very nice prints by Mr. Bickham,” said the bookseller, although he made no move to show us any.
“Mr. Bickham,” said my mistress, “will not do.” She spoke as if she knew Mr. Bickham from Adam. Sister, I could not have dared to be so bold, but we were in a shop, not a drawing room, and only my mistress knew how many coins nestled in the purse beneath her skirts.
The bookseller sighed and crossed to a cabinet, low and wide, set with many drawers. Opening one of these, he pulled forth a sheet of paper, larger than a book. This he spread on his sloping desk, which lay near enough the windowpanes that the light fell full upon it. “I must agree with you madam,” said he. “Perhaps one of Mr. Vandergucht’s then? It is in the spirit of Mr. Hogarth’s productions.”
My mistress and I, after a moment’s hesitation, stepped forward to see. We looked in silence. “It is very amusing. Don Quixote takes the puppets to be Turks,” said the gentleman. He was making an explanation, I suppose.
“Yes,” said my mistress, “very funny. What a plume that fellow wears.”
“The gentleman is Spanish, you see,” said the bookseller.
“I see that he is,” she replied. “And he has knocked the little puppet theatre quite to pieces.”
We all gazed sadly at the ruin of the performance, over which a fellow with a sword was checked by a man, whose massive arms seemed to me the peculiar centre of the work.
“What do you think, my dear?” my mistress asked of me.
I thought it was sufficiently interesting that I longed to know the story behind the scene, but I dared not ask. “It is not Mr. Hogarth, is it,” was the most useful thing I could think to say.
The bookseller looked at me appraisingly. “No indeed,” he said, “Vandergucht’s work is all very well, but here the tableau is stiff and the line constrained. Do you make this purchase for another?”
&n
bsp; “Yes,” said I.
“No,” said my mistress.
“Ah,” said the bookseller, touching his finger to his nose and turning again to his cabinet of drawers. Sister, I never really understand what men mean when they do that. You never see a woman tapping her nose like a fool. But already a new print unfurled in front of us. And again we leaned in to see. This page was smaller, so we bent closer to examine the whirl of figures. I saw a pair of buttocks peeping from behind the curtain and a hoard of small figures administering a clyster-pipe as if holding a trumpet to a pair of lips. “This is all I have of Hogarth’s, if your master is such a dedicated collector.”
Clysters I have given for all manner of stomach aches, as well as to our mother when she was brought to bed with Harry, Samuel, and Small Jacky, but now I could feel the bookseller watching my face with such glittering eyes that I did not know where to put my own. I had no reason to be ashamed; what right had he to expect that sensation to redden my cheeks.
My mistress shook her head and turned away from the print on the desk. “I am sure it’s the Harlot we wish to see.”
“Well,” said the bookselling gentleman, lifting the page, “Mr. Hogarth sells them by subscription at a guinea for the six, but you must go to his shop in the Covent Garden for that.”
“Oh dear, I cannot walk so far,” replied my mistress, saying nothing about the astonishing price. A guinea for six sheets of paper? I fanned myself a little with my hand.
The bookman said, “Do you know the Overtons’ shop? It is nearer to here, at the sign of the White Horse.”
The White Horse lay close to St. Sepulchre’s. I knew the place. I’d been that way many times, although I never liked to take that road, which passed under the shadow of Newgate. I pressed my mistress’ arm. “We know it,” she said.