It will have been noticed that the parks and pleasure-gardens of London were the background for much mutual reconnaissance between the sexes. In 1700 Tom Brown in his Amusements Serious and Comical describes Spring Gardens as a place 'where both sexes meet and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way; and the windings and turnings in the little wildernesses are so intricate that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters'. Of these same gardens Sir Roger de Coverley is made to say:
'When I considered the fragrancy of the walks and bowers with the choirs of birds that sung upon the trees and the loose tribe of people that walked under their shades I could not but look upon the place as a kind of Mahometan paradise.' A masked harlot tapped Sir Roger on the shoulder and invited him to drink a bottle of mead with her, but he told her she was a wanton baggage and refused. His considered view on Spring Gardens was that he would patronize the place more often 'if there were more nightingales and fewer bad characters'.
The Dark Walks of Vauxhall were also haunted by ardent youths and reckless virgins. Mr Tyers, the proprietor, tried hard to keep the place respectable, but he had little assistance from the lieges. The magistrates in 1763 compelled him to fence off his Dark Walks and employ more watchmen, but the young gallants tore down his flimsy fences as soon as he erected them (rather as the young bloods tore down similar defences in the promenade of the Empire Music Hall nearly one hundred and fifty years later). A young Earl who gave a wench twenty guineas to walk with him in a dark alley was unable to catch her when she fled from him, such were the complexities of the gardens.
Ranelagh's habitues, too, were far from puritanical. One dayalso in 1763-a continental adventurer who had been sampling Ranelagh's delights stood fretting because his coach had failed to arrive. He was offered a lift by an attractive lady, whose hand he was quick to press when he entered the carriage. She returned his pressure, which encouraged him to kiss her cheek. This was so amiably received that he kissed her lips, a liberty which led to progressively greater liberties. It was not the first time he had worked fast in a carriage. 'Don't ask my name,' said the lady when the journey was over; and as she set him down she hinted that they might meet again. Some days later the adventurer, visiting a lady's house, saw his companion of the coach sitting reading a newspaper. As she gave no sign of recognition he asked whether she had forgotten him, only to be told with hauteur, 'A frolic does not constitute an introduction'. He was left to reflect on the incomprehensible ways of Englishwomen, who allowed themselves to be thus vigorously wooed first and introduced afterwards. His name was Casanova.
The fashionable throng flirted in the Mall, which was famous for pick-ups. Flower-girls did good business bearing notes from one party to another. Here Sir Francis Delaval brought off a coup memorable in the annals of courtship. Determined to have the fortune of Lady Isabella Paulet, who was worth £90,000 in funds and £150,000 in property, he persuaded a confederate to pose as a fortune-teller and tell the lady she was destined to marry a handsome stranger dressed in blue whom she would meet in the Mall. Two days later Sir Francis, dressed in blue, walked into her life, and in a very brief space of time they were married. Cynically Sir Francis referred to his honeymoon as his harvest-moon.
The alleys of pleasure-gardens were for flirtations and seductions. For more serious wooing, the eighteenth-century lover- if he were lucky-had his lonely garden, apart from the frivolling mob, in which landscaped Nature set the requisite mood of drama and melancholy. Mere geometric formalism in gardens disappeared as the century progressed; the nature copyists and improvers took over and gave full encouragement to cascades and sombre pools, to precipices and caverns, and linked them all with 'crescive paths and wild protuberant ways'. It has been suggested that this fashion developed because Englishmen on the Grand Tour acquired, not only a knowledge of continental vices, but a respect for dramatic scenery. Nature in the (apparent) raw had a mysterious potency; the beetling inspired deeper emotions than the footling. Ivied 'ruins', suitably displayed, turned the thoughts into sublime channels, whereas there was nothing in a box hedge to stir the soul. Thus, by Dr Johnson's day, the stage was already set for the posturings of the first Romantics. At times the landscape artists grossly surcharged the atmosphere with gloom, but in their more successful experiments they created a murmurous demi-paradise in which even the insanitary hermit retained (for a modest fee) to sit in the grotto seemed non-ridiculous and relevant. 'The eighteenth century daydream, the dream of an artistically arranged wilderness, met the need of the lover of the age to provide the right setting, the shut world for the beloved,' writes R. J. Cruikshank, conjuring up most skilfully the 'sense of closed enchantment' in these melancholy gardens. It must have been as difficult to flirt in these sombre surroundings as in a tomb;
solemn was the tryst and profound the sentiment. Lovers who wish to capture the half-sublime, half-frightening atmosphere of an eighteenth-century garden might try isolating themselves in an overgrown, bird-haunted chine on a thunderous afternoon.
Masquerades continued to lend cover to disorderly love affairs and were increasingly criticized by the righteous. Thomas Marriott in his long verse essay on 'Female Conduct' (1760) says:
Mask'd virgins, when their blushes are concealed,
Grant favours which they would deny unveiled,
But power of blushing, Nature's inborn grace,
Will soon forsake a masquerading face. . . .
The music softens, while the wine inspires,
Disguise emboldens, while the dancing fires,
Thence wanton pairs to brothels take a flight,
Concealed In masks and friendly shades of night. The tone of some of these gatherings will be judged from an entry in William Hickey's diary. After a bout of hard drinking he went to a masquerade in the Haymarket dressed as a nun, hiccuping and reeling. 'The novelty of it attracted universal admiration', he wrote.
Another escapade by Hickey casts light on the difficulty of snatching casual kisses in those days. On his journeys from Salt Hill to Soho Square by coach, he made love to Charlotte Barry while her protector, Captain Henry Mordaunt, obligingly slumbered in the other corner. They 'kissed and fondled like a pair of turtle doves', but with the unfortunate result that he became covered with pomatum and powder, so that on each journey his coat was ruined. Even the sleepy Captain Mordaunt noticed the ravages to Hickey's clothing, and had to be told that Charlotte had fallen asleep with her head against Hickey's shoulder. Making love to a heavily made-up beauty, in those days of imperfect cosmetics, was like making love to an odorous, tacky puffball which was liable to dissolve in dust; a daunting thought in a day when the evidence of an exchange in a taxicab can usually be wiped out with the dab of a handkerchief and a flick of the fingers.
It is important to remember that London's morals were not England's, nor even Europe's. The city was as near 'wide open' as made no matter. Unmarried couples who chose to sleep together did not live in fear of a midnight rapping on their hotel doors by purity patrols. In Italy, as the exasperated Casanova found, the doors of hotel rooms were without bolts, in order that the agents of the Holy Inquisition might investigate whether men were sleeping with their wives; in Spain hotel doors were bolted on the outside, for the same reason. The boxes in the theatre in Madrid had open fronts, so that lovers could not commit improprieties without being seen by the Inquisitors, who were seated in a box commanding a view of the audience.
On the Continent the reputation of Englishmen as lovers was far from high. They were regarded as stiff and gauche. Sir Isaac Newton was said to have plugged his pipe absent-mindedly with his lady's finger when holding hands. Lord Chesterfield said there was no instance on record of an Englishman being suspected of a gallantry with a Frenchwoman of social standing, though every Frenchwoman of standing was more than suspected of having a gallantry. Englishmen, he said, took up with prostitutes, dancing women 'and that sort of trash'-'if they had better address, better achievements would be extremely easy'.
It was in the middle years of the century that Lord Chesterfield wrote the famous letters to his lumpish sou, instructing him in the art of courtship and polite behaviour. Possibly the father preached the inferiority of women in order to give his son confidence, to goad him into having an affaire. On the subject of women the Earl said:
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly forward child, but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he does both; which is the thing in the world that they are proud of. ... No flattery was too gross for women to swallow. 'Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person. If her face is so shocking that she must in some degree be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amend for it.' Least susceptible to flattery was a woman who knew she was beautiful-'she is therefore obliged to no one for giving it her. She must be nattered on her understanding.'
When his son was in Rome, Lord Chesterfield wrote to inquire what progress he had made in 'the language in which Charles V said that he would choose to speak to his mistress', with all its tender diminutives, in etta, ina and ettina.
Constantly the father plied the son with Ovidian advice, taunting him with being frightened by the semblance of unassailable chastity. In desperation he suggested wooing a Madam Dupin, who still retained 'enough beauty for a young puppy'. When the unpolished and unpolishable son died, it was found that he had secretly married woman of similar disposition to his own.
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