England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton by Kate Williams Read Free Book Online

queuing in their carriages outside the Temple in the hope of being cured of their infertility. Graham's rhetoric harmonized with the widespread belief that conception occurred only when the woman had an orgasm, which caused her to ovulate spontaneously. It was not until 1845 that scientists discovered that dogs ovulated in regular cycles and began to suggest that the same principle might apply to humans. Although a belief in the need for ovulation encouraged an interest in female sexuality, medical books did not encourage men to try to please their wives. Authors placed the responsibility firmly on the woman to greet her husband's efforts with “equal ardour.” Infertility was always seen as the fault of the woman: she was weak, undersexed, or simply lazy.
    As a Goddess on the stage and performing around the bed, Emma was the luminous star of Graham's light and sound spectacular. As Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun claimed, Emma, as Graham's Hygeia or Goddess of Health, “attracted the curious and the idle in droves; artists were particularly charmed by her.” 1 Emma became a symbol of beauty to the capital's most fashionable citizens. “Daily he attracted overflowing audiences,” claimed a neighbor, and Henry Angelo described “carriages drawing up next to the door of this modern Paphos, with crowds of gaping sparks on each side, to discover who were the visitors, but the ladies faces were covered, all going incog.” Famous customers included John Wilkes, the rabble-rousing former lord mayor of London, and also tabloid-courting MP Charles James Fox. The Prince of Wales enjoyed its “superior ecstasy” as well, probably with his mistress, the actress Mary Robinson (who never guessed that the Goddess dancing around her bed had recently been one of her dressers at Drury Lane). Following behind Fox and the rebellious prince trailed the fashionable Whig set, the main political opposition who grouped around the heir to the throne. Graham ensured their attention by criticizing the Tory government and the war with America. The Bed, he declared, would create “Beings rational, and far stronger and more beautiful” than thepresent "puny" race that "crawl and fret, and politely play at cutting one another's throats for nothing at all."
    The daily work of a Goddess began with menial domestic tasks: dusting and cleaning the Temple, running errands, and even slopping out the basement (all the houses in the Adelphi flooded when the Thames overflowed). Throughout the day, patients arrived to receive the curing vibrations of the magnetic Celestial Throne, electric shocks in milk baths, or friction rubs and pulses of electric current. By half past four, the patients had returned home and the Goddesses began dressing for the evening's work in white dresses and pink sashes.
    The heavy doors creaked open at five. For two guineas, London's socialites secured seats while "harmonious sounds… breathed forth from the altar of the great electrical temple." At seven, an explosion of fireworks stunned the audience into silence and Graham emerged from a trapdoor in the floor, swathed in satin and encircled by his parading Goddesses, who wore, as one visitor noted, "no more clothing than Venus when she rose from the sea." He then delivered his "libidinous lecture" on the "celestial brilliancy of that universal resplendent and tremendous fire" in his medicines and bizarre apparatus and their power to cure sexual ills and general debility. Quacks at the humblest fair put on a show, but none had ever fused the theatrical with the "medical" with such verve. Bursting with self-promotion, sexual titillation, and semi-mystic promise, Graham held his audience spellbound. All the while, the Goddesses sang ethereal airs while dancing and posing to show off their radiant health or demonstrate the exercises he recommended. Candles blazed, fireworks exploded, electricity bubbled, and the more louche guests lit pipes—surprisingly, none of the hyped-up doctor's