Book reviews
jocelinebury looks
at the latest books from
the jane austen worldthe long 18th century is generally
reckoned to have begun in the reign of
Queen Anne (1702-14), England’s last
Stuart monarch, and ended with the death
of George IV in 1830. It was a period of
the most extreme extremes: it was an
age of political turmoil and revolution –
agrarian and industrial, as well as political
and military. It was an age of adventure
and discovery, scandal and intrigue, and
extraordinary creativity in the arts. It was
an age, in short, of fabulous and fantastic
stories, and Joanne Major and Sarah
Murden have gathered a couple of dozen of
them together in this wonderful collection.
Colourful and eccentric characters
abound: the book opens with an account
of the origins of Doggett’s Coat and
Badge race, a Thames watermen’s tradition
that began in 1715 and continues to this
day. Thomas Doggett was an Irish actor-
manager and a great supporter of the new
Protestant king, George I, who acceded to
the throne after the death of Anne (despite
17 pregnancies, she had no surviving heirs).
He instigated his annual contest, open to
watermen just out of their apprenticeship,
in commemoration of George’s coronation,
and the race still begins at the site of the old
White Swan Tavern at London Bridge.
The famous and the infamous are
profiled: we meet the “king of the
resurrection men” – the (probably) falsely
accused bodysnatcher William Millard,
as well as Jonathan Martin, a Darlingtontanner who set fire to York Minster, and
John Frith, one of at least three people
who made an attempt upon the life of
George III.
On the whole, though, the women have
the best stories. The Wallen sisters, Sarah
(“Crazy Sally”) and Maria, found fame in
wildly different circles. Sally, possessed of
“phenomenal brute strength for a woman”,
was a bonesetter, who plied her trade in the
Surrey racing town of Epsom, where she
found “a plentiful supply of broken bones
from tumbles on the turf ”. So sought-after
were her services that people travelled for
miles to avail themselves of her skills and
she was rumoured to earn 20 guineas a day,
a phenomenal sum. Her sister, meanwhile,
changed her surname to Warren and made a
name for herself as an actress, most famously
in the role of Polly Peachum in John Gay’s
successful and long-running play, The
Beggar’s Opera.
Then we have the cross-dressing Jenny
Cameron, rumoured to have been the
mistress of Bonnie Prince Charlie; Mary
Doublet, Countess of Holderness and
“the queen of smugglers”; the stunningly
beautiful and famously cold-hearted
courtesan Emily Warren; female jockey and
star of Astley’s circus Alicia Massingham;
the Sicilian Fairy Caroline Crachami – the
extraordinary list goes on.
This is a splendid collection of vignettes
of Georgian life, superbly illustrated and
full of flavoursome nuggets of social history,