Gabby Harlot

TRIBUTE FOR HARRIETTE--Angela Thirkell--Random House ($2.50).

In the early years of the 19th Century, when England was ruled by the fat and foolish Prince of Wales, when Beau Brummell set the fashions, when Byron was revelling in the popular success of Childe Harold, a sprightly young lady named Harriette Dubochet, who had run away from home to become a prostitute, was at the height of her career. Very small with brown hair and large eyes, the daughter of a well-to-do stocking-mender, her life as a courtesan was not sufficiently distinguished to win her a place in history. She exercised no political influence, such as her contemporary Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, enjoyed through her hold on Lord Nelson. She never even inspired deep affection in her lovers. But as Harriette Wilson she traveled with the big names of a bad age, and her observation thereof has clinched for her the dubious honor of being the most articulate British prostitute.

Late in life Harriette wrote her Memoirs as part of a blackmailing scheme. Describing her former companions in long and lurid detail, she thoughtfully gave each the opportunity to be omitted from the volumes, or to be described in a very good light, in return for a cash payment. Harriette, even when her professional career was in full flower, had wanted to be a writer. But the highbrow novels and plays she turned out were affected, pompous, unreadable. When she slapped out the 250,000 words of her Memoirs for a despicable purpose, writing about the life she knew best in language that was appropriate to it, she revealed a genuine literary ability, a keen sense of character, a sharp eye for the stupidities of the gentlemen who had been her friends and customers.

When Harriette left her father she ran off with young Lord Craven to Brighton. A dull, contented young man, Craven was interested only in his experiments with cocoa trees and with his military instructions, constantly expounded both to amuse his young mistress. "It was, in fact," she recalled later, "a dead bore." She did not deceive Craven, although she often thought of it. "How, indeed, could I do otherwise, when the Honorable Frederick Lamb was my constant visitor, and talked to me of nothing else?" The Honorable Frederick was Craven's closest friend. "I firmly believe," Harriette wrote, "that Frederick Lamb sincerely loved me, and deeply regretted that he had no fortune to invite me to share with him."

Faithful though she was to Lord Craven, he heard of Lamb's visits to her, dismissed her at once, telling her she might have got away with anything had she only been discreet. "This," the girl reflected, "is what one gets by acting with principle." She never made such a mistake again. She left Craven for Frederick Lamb, and Lamb for the Duke of Argyll. She left Argyll for the Duke of Wellington, Wellington for Lord Ponsonby, Ponsonby for the Marquis of Worcester. She knew and corresponded with Byron, urging him, after she read Don Juan, not to turn into "a coarse old-libertine." This good advice she supplemented with requests that he send her some money. She had a spiteful respect for Beau Brummell, fought incessantly with her older sister who tried to take the Duke of Argyll away from her, became a well-known figure at the opera and at the parade grounds at Brighton. Wellington she found tedious, goodhearted, generous. He tried to reform her. The old soldier could not keep up with her, laboriously suggested that she ought to get married, beginning his sermon by remarking, "I was thinking of you last night after I got into bed. . . ." "How very polite to the Duchess!" Harriette snapped, which effectively stopped the Duke's crusading spirit. Wellington refused to pay for being omitted from the Memoirs, consequently was presented in a farcical light.

Closest Harriette ever came to respectability was when the Marquis of Worcester wanted to marry her. After prolonged negotiations with his father she gave him up, returned his letters for -L-200 a year. Angela Thirkell pictures Harriette as being of a divided mind over Worcester, torn between greed, affection and fear of losing both money and lover, declares that "she played her cards badly" in this crisis and then went into her final decline. Readers who note that Harriette began her Memoirs soon after, and who appreciate the sprightly tone of their best passages, may reach a simpler explanation of Harriette's career. Temperamental, impractical, she was always ready to sacrifice her personal advantage for the sake of a good phrase. In her early career she made enemies by a wit she could not control. Likewise, the gabby impulse which compelled her to write her Memoirs ruined her chances of collecting further tribute. All assets gone, Harriette died poor.

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