The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (16 page)

Towards the end of his life, after he had achieved a degree of respectability, Derrick inevitably found himself in a position to lament a number of the actions of his impetuous youth. His love of Jane Lessingham was one of these regrettable episodes. Jane, even more than Charlotte Hayes, was responsible for disordering Sam’s state of mind most enduringly. By 1756, he had spent a year educating his prodigy and boasting of her talents to all who would listen; now she was ready to be revealed. Shortly before the start of the 1756–57 season, John Rich, the manager of the Covent Garden theatre, was looking for a new face to take on the role of Desdemona in a production of
Othello
. After some consideration, he approached Jane for the part. In that short period of time between Rich’s engagement of her and her actual debut in November of that year, something happened to Jane Lessingham: she became a prima donna. Overwhelmed by her good fortune and the adoration she was now receiving from Rich and
other
members of the theatrical community, Jane allowed events to go to her head. Now that she was to be a luminary of the stage, she no longer required anyone to coach her or make her introductions. Even those indifferent to her when she was escorted through the theatres and taverns by Derrick had noticed a change in her behaviour. With a heightened sense of confidence, Jane sought to shine at the centre of every social gathering, and even resorted to ‘assuming men’s attire and frequenting the coffee houses’ in order to raise eyebrows. With her new prospects and important friends, it wasn’t long before her little garret on Shoe Lane and the poor poet who lived there were deemed not good enough.

Before the curtain rose on the premier performance of her career, Jane ran off with another man. Whoever he was, he had more money than the penurious Sam Derrick and was able to place her in high-keeping. To add insult to injury, Jane had no qualms about shedding the surname of her devoted tutor in order to make a debut under her lawful title, Mrs Stott. It was a gesture of mean ingratitude from which Derrick smarted for years to come. It was also a rather ill-timed and misjudged action. No sooner had Mrs Stott appeared on the London stage than a gentleman calling himself Captain John Stott appeared in town after a three-year absence. In spite of their complete estrangement, the Captain was mortified to learn of his wife’s public indiscretions during his period at sea, and filed for divorce. By this time, however, Jane had already moved her affections elsewhere and was enjoying the attention she received as the mistress of her husband’s commanding officer, Admiral Boscawen.

In the following years, Jane progressed through as many keepers as she had starring roles. Throughout the 1760s and ’70s, she reinvented herself as a comedic actress. As Jane’s fame continued to rise, so did her demands on the men in her life. Although she bore two children by her admiral, Jane’s allegiances shifted to that of the new manager of the Covent Garden theatre, Thomas Harris. Like any driven actress, she was not immune to the advantages to be gained by turning a stage manager into her lover. With Thomas Harris accompanying her about town, the two became the eighteenth-century equivalent of a celebrity couple. Together they reigned as the ‘King and Queen of
Clubs’,
their stories appearing in scandal sheets and newspapers, their names on the lips of all Covent Garden. But Harris had no sooner bought her a house in fashionable Mayfair than Jane was off again, this time with Justice William Addington, who was richer still than the stage manager. In a short time, Addington too was cursing her when she replaced him and the Hampstead house he had built for her with a strapping young actor. Is it any wonder the male pundits were so censorious?

In the eyes of many an injured party, Jane Lessingham was poison. Justice Addington vowed never again to speak her name, while Thomas Harris and Sam Derrick passed their evenings discussing her demerits over cards and cold suppers. Unfortunately, Derrick’s name had been the first on her list of lovers and not one of the later ones. Had he known what havoc she was liable to wreak in his life, he might never have stopped to flirt with her on the evening when they first met. Had he never seen a spark of talent in her or a flicker of love cross her face, he would have lived his life a richer, if not a more respectable man. Had he never set up home with such a woman, had he never attempted to fool his friends as to their marital state, had he not insisted in living in sin and leading his life in the depraved swamp of Covent Garden, he would never have had to author the
Harris’s List
.

Sam’s last gesture before he departed from the shores of Ireland in 1751 was to successfully bamboozle Mrs Creagh into believing that he was about to establish himself in London as a linen draper. What had begun as a small falsehood gathered mass like a ball of yarn. Sam had been spinning lies for five years, penning letters filled with deceptions and innocent requests for advances on his inheritance. His aunt may have been an old woman several hundred miles away, but even from that great distance she could scent a rat. Mrs Creagh had heard frustratingly little of her nephew’s life and it is likely that she suspected he was withholding essential information from her. She may have heard rumours or tittle-tattle, filtered across the water by way of letters and gossipmongers, that her nephew was living with a whore, that he was sleeping under bulks, or living fist-to-mouth from gaming table to pawn shop. Whatever the situation, Mrs Creagh’s suspicions had been raised.

A heavily edited letter in the National Art Library, preserved just enough to be readable today, attests to the event that changed Sam Derrick’s life. In it, an unknown Irish correspondent reveals to Sam that his aunt had ‘sent one of her emissaries’ to London with a specific mission in mind. ‘Apprais’d of your conduct’, the writer continues, ‘she [then] set her spies on your behaviour’. It seems that one day a stranger had come to call upon Sam and Jane at their lodgings in Shoe Lane. Sam had been out, but ‘Mrs Derrick’ invited the visitor inside. The visitor sat with her for some time, making polite inquiries about their lives and about Jane’s ‘husband’. With further prompting and some investigation, the spy was able to confirm what might have been suspected all along: that the two were living in sin, perhaps even raising an illegitimate child. Furthermore, there was no evidence that Sam was earning his living by the linen trade. The spy saw only indications of a depraved existence, one that had been hidden from Mrs Creagh for years. Wasting no time, the spy reported back, ‘in consequence of which’, the letter continues, ‘she has made a will and disinherited you.’

Condemnation was heaped upon Sam from friends and family in Dublin. ‘I would be sorry rightly to censure or condemn anyone, much more a man for whom I had a regard. Now I never imagined that you wanted sense and prudence to direct your conduct (Religion I leave out of the question) and to embarrass yourself with such vicious and ruinous connexions is a piece of frenzy’, one of his correspondents rails. But by the time Sam had received this news the damage had already been done. The inheritance he had lived for and lived on, on which he had secured credit and good faith, had been whisked out of his hands. The entire pattern by which he had lived his life until that day would have to be changed; his anticipated saviour would now never arrive. This was a blow to end all blows. He could see what awaited him on the horizon; the unpaid bills would be gathering with fierce speed. He could not expect the few handouts he had received from Mrs Creagh’s purse any longer, and once those friends from whom he had borrowed caught wind of this change of fortune, he would be ruined. Sam was simply too far in debt to pay anyone. Towards the end of 1756, as the storm clouds were mounting, Sam looked to Jane and her future
prospects
for hope, and what did Jane, dear ‘Mrs Derrick’, the source of much of his woes, do? She left him.

In later years, when the white hat of the Master of Ceremonies at Bath sat comfortably on his head, when Derrick had plenty of coal for his fire and food on his table, he must have looked back on the events of 1756–57 and shuddered. It was to be his
annus horribilis
, one of his darkest periods. The loss of his inheritance and his unrepentant betrayal by Mrs Lessingham, two calamities in rapid succession, would have exacted a toll on Sam’s normally resilient spirit. To exacerbate matters, early 1757 found him more destitute than usual. He had been counting on receiving some recompense for Jane’s tutoring through whatever earnings she would be bringing home. Without Jane’s assistance, Sam was no longer able to afford the poor attic lodgings they had rented together and turned once again to the streets. Additionally, his creditors were closing in. With his usual abandon, Sam had made a number of improvements to his wardrobe during his brief period of financial security. Towards the end of his relationship with Jane, an angry unpaid tailor had already appeared at their door and had succeeded in having him arrested for debt before ‘Mrs Derrick’ bailed him out. That she found the money to do so suggests that Jane was not averse to revisiting her old profession when needs must.

Sam was in dire straits when he encountered Tobias Smollett at the Forrest Coffee House in Charing Cross. The author of
Nocturnal Revels
records that, at the time, ‘he had neither shoes nor stockings that were wearable’. Painfully aware of the deficiencies of his dress, Sam made numerous trips to ‘the Cloacinian Temple’ (or water closet) in the attempt to adjust his stockings, ‘which wickedly displayed every few minutes such conspicuous holes … as put [him] out of countenance’. ‘Why Derrick’, asked Smollett, ‘you are certainly devilishly plagued with a looseness or else you would not repair so often to the cabinet?’ Derrick replied pitifully, ‘Egad, Doctor, the looseness is in my heels as you may plainly perceive’.

Smollett must have sensed that Derrick’s circumstances were far worse than he had revealed and not only took him home to Chelsea, where ‘he gave him a good dinner’, but allowed Sam to reside with him for the next several months. Smollett, who was known for coming to the
aid
of starving hacks with offers of work, engaged Sam to write for his
Critical Review
, and also may have provided him with some employment working on his
Complete History of England
. By pulling Derrick off the streets and providing him with a temporary refuge from his hounding creditors, the author had granted Sam an immeasurable favour. For a brief spell, he was able to catch his breath and add a few pennies to his purse before the bailiffs caught his scent.

In the eighteenth century, there was no quibbling about debt. If a person found themselves unable to pay their bills, they went to prison. The law was as straightforward as that. Where they were kept, how they were kept and who saw that they remained there, on the other hand, was a complicated affair. On the whole, debt collection was a lucrative business run by an assortment of bounty-hunting bailiffs hired by creditors to pursue and retrieve as much of the outstanding sum as possible. The chase, however, could continue for quite some time; Derrick’s relocation to Chelsea was all part of the game of wits. The bailiffs wasted several months turning over the back alleys of Covent Garden and Fleet Street until someone pointed them in the direction of Smollett’s home. When eventually they did alight upon him, Sam was escorted to what was known as a ‘spunging house’, a kind of halfway holding pen between freedom and the extreme discomforts of debtor’s prison. Here the debtor was kept until the final few pennies were exacted from their possession. As spunging houses were privately operated enterprises run from a bailiff’s home, a bailiff could do what he pleased in order to compel the prisoner to cough up the debt. While this might include physical coercion, it more frequently entailed allowing a prisoner to work outside the confines of the spunging house in order to earn some money. Ironically, in spite of having no funds, a bailiff’s captive was also charged for their accommodation, so whatever the debtor managed to earn through honest work generally never got beyond the spunging house’s coffers. Any sum left over tended to be swallowed up in legal fees. Once the bailiff tired of this vicious circle and the last few coins were emptied from the debtor’s pocket, he or she was handed over to the authorities, who in turn sent them to the Fleet or the Marshalsea.

In spite of the difficult state of affairs, it was not wholly impossible for a prisoner in a spunging house to make good on their debts, although
this
would have required exceptional luck, wealthy friends or a healthy dose of ingenuity. Derrick, in this case, had ingenuity on his side. In the confines of Bailiff Ferguson’s spunging house he was left to simmer in his own thoughts and contemplate a possible remedy. His mood would have been a black one indeed. To Derrick it must have seemed that he had tried his hand at everything and failed. As an actor he was abysmal. No one was interested in the plays he had written. He had not received the reception he had anticipated as a poet. He had no major literary works of which to speak. He had no income, no home, no mistress and no inheritance. The only thing he did have was friends in Covent Garden.

By 1757 there were virtually no faces to be found in the Piazza that Derrick didn’t recognise. He knew every actor, every bully, buck and bunter in circulation. Years of wearing down the benches at the Shakespear, the Bedford Coffee House, the Rose and the Piazza Coffee House meant that he was never short of a drink or of somebody with whom to converse. As an inveterate subscription-hunter, he excelled at ingratiating himself and making introductions. James Boswell was to learn that no one knew better than Sam Derrick the needs of the wealthy wastrel and the wandering wanton, and what both were likely to be seeking on a night’s excursion. He had personally inaugurated Boswell in the ‘sportive’ delights of the capital. Johnson’s biographer was duly impressed and later, with hindsight, thoroughly disgusted at the breadth of his associate’s knowledge. He chose his epithets carefully when referring to his former host, calling him ‘a little blackguard pimping dog’. It was a term that acknowledged, much to Sam’s discomfort, the fine line that existed between himself and those seasoned professionals of the Piazza.