Second paragraph of third chapter of Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson:

For some time after I came to Dublin, my body was weak, my health very precarious, and my spirits heavily oppressed. Pleasures seemed to have lost their exhilarating effect, and I experienced a kind of lethargy of the mind. In short, I fell into a state, the most destructive to virtue that possibly can be. It is when the heart is replete with sorrow and languor, that is most susceptible of love. In the midst of a round of amusements, each equally engaging, and a train of admirers the giddy female gives neither a preference, and has not leisure to attach herself to either. But when softened, and inactive, the tender passions find easy admission, and the comforter, and consoler soon becomes the favoured lover—such was my case.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore:

While Dardis continued to visit Peg when he could, she was lonely and missed her family. She confessed, ‘I was oppressed with anxiety, and could neither look back with remorse, nor forward without apprehension of what might follow.’ Her biggest concern was what her sisters and father might be making of her disappearance. She had fled he sister’s house telling no one where she was going and had left behind all her clothes. Anxious about the distress she was causing her family, she pleaded with Dardis to try and find out what they knew of her situation.

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book about Peg Plunkett, 18th century Dublin courtesan, off a remainder pile a few years ago, and thought I should prepare myself for it by reading the original memoirs, published in 1795-97 and available for free here, among other places.

Peg’s memoir is a tremendously interesting account of what it was like to make your living from sex in the Dublin of 250 years ago. She pulled herself up from a series of failed relationships and set up a brothel on what is now O’Connell Street with her friend Sally Hayes in about 1775; she would have been in her thirties (if we accept the 1742 birthdate proposed by Peakman) and Hayes a bit younger.

She faced a lot of violence from men who felt they should take it into their own hands to punish sex workers just for being sex workers, but interestingly (by her account at least) she managed to get the forces of law and order on her side, and usually won her day in subsequent court cases. She tells these stories with great humour, but it must have been very traumatic.

She does a lot of name-dropping of names that mean nothing to us now, but clearly she was accepted in the highest social circles. She had affairs with at least two of the English governors of Ireland, Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland, and John Fane, the Earl of Westmorland. She has a hilarious story about being challenged while at the theatre about her affair with the Duke; when hecklers yelled, “Peg, who lay you with last?”,

I with the greatest nonchalance, replied, “MANNERS you black-guards;” this repartee was received with universal plaudits, as the bon mot was astonishingly great, the Duke himself being in the royal box with his divine Duchess, who was observed to laugh immoderately at the whimsical occurrence, for ’tis a known fact, that this most beautiful of woman kind that ever I beheld, never troubled herself about her husband’s intrigues.

Still, it must have been pretty uncomfortable to have her sex life dissected in public like that, and it is impressive that she turns it into a joke. (The unfortunate duke died of alcoholism while still governing Ireland, aged only 33; his ‘divine duchess’ outlived him by more than forty years.)

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book hoping that it would fill in some of the gaps in Peg’s first person account. To what extent can her stories be independently verified by other records? Who is behind the various pseudonyms, such as “Mr. B——r, of Kilkenny [who] shortly after came to be Lord T——s, by his father’s obtaining a very ancient earldom”? How does her narrative fit into the overall analysis public discussions of sexuality and sex work in the English-speaking world in the 18th century?

I’m afraid that I was disappointed. Peakman’s book does resolve some of the pseudonyms, but otherwise doesn’t do much more than reheat and repeat Peg’s narrative for a modern audience; and frankly, Peg’s style is much more entertaining and engaging. I guess that for readers who don’t have access to the original documents, Peakman will do; but as I have found with that other great self-describer of a century later, Fanny Kemble, the original text is far more interesting than any modern re-hashing.

What I’d like to see is an edition of Peg’s memoirs where the blanks are filled in and where we get a decent best-guess timeline and maps showing the geography of the places where she was active. I think that it would sell rather well. Meanwhile you can get Julie Peakman’s book here.

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.^1
1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3

Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street

He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.

And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)

So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.