Week 26—“Holy moley!”

The interjection that provides the title for this week’s post is of obscure meaning. It was popularised in America in the 1940s by the comic book hero Captain Marvel (see, for instance, this), but had been used earlier. Here it is as used in an 1892 novel written in Australia.

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This week’s instalment opens with Captain Wragge expressing to Magdalen the opinion that “the time ha[s] come for bringing Noel Vanstone, with the least possible delay, to the point of making a proposal.”

Implicit in that expression of opinion is the notion that the dealings thus far between Noel and Magdalen have been such that he can now quickly be persuaded to propose marriage to her.

A summary of those dealings follows.

Magdalen arrives in Aldborough on JUL 24 1847 and, although Noel sees her that evening as she and Wragge walk by Noel’s house, he does not then meet her.

On JUL 25, at some time shortly after 2 pm, Noel meets Magdalen for the first time, during a walk on the Crag Path. They are two of a party of four, the others being Wragge and Mrs Lecount. We aren’t told the length of time that the walk takes, but it seems that it couldn’t be more than an hour, judging from Collins’s treatment of what occurs. During the walk, Wragge seeks to distract Mrs Lecount, so that she won’t hear any of the conversation between Noel and Magdalen. Then, at 7 pm that evening, Wragge and Magdalen go to Noel’s house, where they stay till 10pm. Again, the party consists of the four walkers and again, Wragge seeks to distract Mrs Lecount.

On JUL 26, at 11 am, the four walkers of the previous day travel together by carriage to Dunwich, a trip that I’ve suggested in an earlier post probably took about two hours each way. While they’re there for some unspecified period of time, Wragge contrives to have Noel and Magdalen be alone together for nearly an hour. At some point on the trip back, Magdalen, at Wragge’s instance, feigns neuralgia, so as to end her participation in any conversation.

Three days then pass during which Noel doesn’t see Magdalen, the last of them being JUL 29, on which day Wragge expresses the opinion with which I began this section of my post.

We thus see that so far Noel has only ever been in Magdalen’s presence on two days, for about four hours on the first day and for somewhat more on the second day, for part of which latter time, however, Magdalen wasn’t speaking. For almost all of the time that they’ve spent together on those two days, there have also been two other people present, although, during that time, Wragge has sought to distract Mrs Lecount, so that she won’t hear any of the conversation between Noel and Magdalen.

To accept that, on the basis of the dealings that I’ve just described, Noel could now quickly be persuaded to propose marriage to Magdalen calls for a greater suspension of disbelief than I, for one, am able to achieve.

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At about the date that our story has now reached, Drury Lane, London and its surrounding area were the scene of great poverty.

By way of confirmation, I mention that in the sketch entitled “Gin-Shops” in Sketches By Boz (1837), Dickens, having referred (here) to “Drury-Lane, Holborn, St Giles’s, Covent-garden, and Clare-market”, continues, “There is more of filth and squalid misery near those great thorough-fares than in any part of this mighty city.”

Further, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels describes (here) the dwellings in Drury Lane as “abominable” and writes, “In the immediate neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre [that is, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane], the second in London, are some of the worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park Streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor families.”

(The above 1872 drawing (from here) by Gustave Doré, depicts the inhabitants of Orange Court, Drury Lane. No very good reason appears to think that conditions in Orange Court were different from those in other parts of the Drury Lane area or were significantly worse by the date of the drawing than they’d been twenty-five years earlier.)

Poverty, however, wasn’t the only thing usually associated with the Drury Lane area in about 1847.

(The above print (from here) depicts a “woman of all trades” (a euphemism for a “female prostitute”) in the late eighteenth century. The woman depicted may have been from Drury Lane itself, since it constituted the eastern boundary of the Covent Garden area.)

Chapter 6 of Edward Walford, Old and New London (1890 edition) (here) is entitled “The Strand (Northern Tributaries)—Drury Lane and Clare Market”.

The chapter begins with two epigraphs:

“O may thy virtue guard thee through the roads | Of Drury’s mazy courts and dark abodes!”—Gay’s “Trivia”
“Paltry and proud as drabs in Drury Lane.”—Pope

(Although Walford doesn’t mention it, Gay’s “Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London” was published in 1716, while the line quoted from Pope appeared in his “Second Satire of Dr Donne”, published in 1735.)

In the body of the chapter, Walford, although without giving the name of the poem concerned or its date, quotes yet another poetic reference to the association of Drury Lane with prostitution, that of Goldsmith. He, like Pope, had referred to “the drabs … of Drury Lane”. (The poem is commonly called “Description of an Author’s Bedchamber” and is dated 1760.)

As well as quoting from eighteenth century poets about the association of Drury Lane with prostitution, Walford might have gone back earlier in time and quoted from the seventeenth century diarist Pepys (whom Walford does quote for other purposes related to Drury Lane). In a diary entry for MAR 21 1664/65, Pepys wrote (here), “In our way [to the Mewes] the coach drove through a lane by Drury Lane, where abundance of loose women stood at the doors, which, God forgive me, did put evil thoughts in me, but proceeded no further, blessed be God.”

In his most direct reference to the matter, Walford writes (I’ve added the bold emphasis and some bracketed publication information),

It will be remembered that in the Tatler (No. 46) [published in 1709] Steele gives a picture of the morality of Drury Lane, describing it as a district divided into particular “ladyships,” analogous to “lordships” in other parts, “over which matrons of known ability preside.” Its character, too, as well in the present as in the past century, is delicately hinted at by Gay, in the lines quoted from “Trivia,” at the head of this chapter. … [N]othing can confirm more clearly the character of the immediate neighbourhood, to which we have referred, than the fact that Drury Lane was the scene of the “Harlot’s Progress,” by Hogarth [published in 1732].

We thus see that for a period of over two hundred years, between 1664/65 (Pepys) and 1890 (the date of the relevant edition of Walford’s book), the Drury Lane area was usually associated with prostitution.

No doubt, the poverty with which Drury Lane was usually associated was a cause of the prostitution with which it was also usually associated. However, there was at least one other cause as well, mentioned incidentally in the passage from Engels quoted above. That was the presence in the area of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which, in company with other similar places of entertainment, provided a ready source for prostitutes of moneyed clients.

(The above 1828 print, after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, is © Trustees of the British Museum. It depicts the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane generally in the incarnation in which it presently remains (compare this present-day photograph). Note that Brydges Street is now called Catherine Street. Also, the street that’s depicted crossing Brydges Street isn’t called Great Russell Street, as appears at the right of the print, but Russell Street, Great Russell Street being a different street north of the Theatre Royal’s location.)

Coincidentally, by the year that our story has now reached, the problem of the London theatres as a catchment area for prostitution clients had become so great that the Lord Chamberlain forwarded a circular to metropolitan theatre managers, the manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane obviously being among them. That circular read (here), “The Lord Chamberlain having been informed that prostitutes are admitted without payment to some of the theatres and saloons open under the authority of his licence, his Lordship requires you to state in writing whether any such practice exists at the _____ Theatre.”

Whether the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane facilitated prostitution in the way described by the Lord Chamberlain, I can’t say, but, even if it didn’t, prostitutes still found the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane a lucrative source of business.

*****

After Captain Wragge has discovered that Noel’s been told by Mrs Lecount to check to see whether Magdalen has two moles on her neck, the following dialogue ensues between Wragge and Magdalen:

“I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles.”

“They can’t be painted out,” said Magdalen. “No colour will stop on them.”

“My colour will,” remarked Captain Wragge. “I have tried a variety of professions in my time—the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-colour stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles.”

Who was it that suffered from those bruises around the eyes to which Wragge refers, which bruises were of all sorts, shades and sizes? Who was it that, suffering from such bruises, found it important to attempt to hide their presence? To me, the answer seems evident—at some unspecified time in the past, for some months, Wragge had been providing his painting service to prostitutes in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, where he then lived.

When Wragge tells Magdalen that he “lived some months … entirely on Black Eyes”, what exactly does he mean? Does he mean that he was in the business of painting black eyes for money and that that business was sufficiently remunerative that he was able to live entirely on his earnings from it? Or since, as we know, Wragge isn’t exactly scrupulous about how he earns his living, is there any chance that he means instead that he lived entirely on the earnings of a woman or women with a black eye or eyes? In other words, does he mean that he had been living entirely on the earnings of a prostitute or prostitutes?

When, in an earlier weekly instalment, Collins described Wragge’s consideration of whether to assist Magdalen in her plot to trick Noel into marriage, he (Collins) had this to say about Wragge’s character:

A man of boundless audacity and resource, within his own mean limits; beyond those limits, the captain was as deferentially submissive to the majesty of the law as the most harmless man in existence; as cautious in looking after his own personal safety as the veriest coward that ever walked the earth.

That doesn’t sound to me like the description of a man who would be prepared to do what would or, at least, could be required in order to live on the earnings of a prostitute or prostitutes.

Incidentally, prostitution was the subject of two of Collins’s later novels, The New Magdalen (1873) and The Fallen Leaves (1879). One of the prostitutes who appears in the latter novel is beaten by her “protector” and bears bruising (although not on the face) as a result.

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Having hidden Magdalen’s moles from view, Wragge then invites Noel to look for them. According to Wragge, “The [alleged] moles supply us with what we scientific men call a Crucial Test.” Plainly what he means is that their presence or absence on an inspection of Magdalen by Noel will determine whether Mrs Lecount’s allegations about “Susan Bygrave” are all true or all false.

Wragge’s use of the term “Crucial Test” is surprising for more than one reason.

First, “we scientific men” don’t usually use the term “Crucial Test”; instead, for a reason that I’ll mention in a moment, “we scientific men” usually use the term (at least in English) “crucial experiment”. Secondly, if, as well as being scientific men, we are also classical men, as Wragge has earlier claimed to be, we probably wouldn’t be using the English term anyway; instead, we’d probably be using the Latin term “experimentum crucis”, used by Sir Isaac Newton (here) in 1671/72 to describe what was perhaps his most famous experiment, involving the use of two prisms. Newton used the term in a published letter containing his “New Theory about Light and Colors [written thus]”. (It was, of course, the Latin term used by Newton that led to the usual English term’s containing the word “experiment”, rather than the word “test”.)

I haven’t found sufficiently interesting to include in this post any representation of Newton performing his experimentum crucis. However, I have found a representation of an alleged discovery by Newton that so tickles my fancy that I simply can’t resist including it here.

The following 1827 painting by the Italian painter Pelagio Palagi (from here) is entitled “Newton’s Discovery of the Refraction of Light”.

The woman and child depicted have been said to represent Newton’s half-sister and her child. If the painting does indeed represent a half-sister of Newton’s, it must be his half-sister Hannah Barton, since his other half-sister was childless, while Hannah had two children, one of whom, Catherine, was said to be a favourite of Newton’s.

There’s only one little difficulty in the way of accepting Palagi’s charming domestic scene as accurate. While in his Opticks (1704), Newton does speak of experiments performed with soap bubbles, he says that the experimenter was himself and makes no reference to the involvement of anyone else, such as, for instance, his half-niece Catherine.