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

performances ever sparked a serious fire.
    Graham promised to tell the secrets of "rendering permanent the Joys of the Marriage Bed; of preserving and heightening personal Beauty and Loveliness" and how to maintain the "deep—full—LONG toned juvenile virility" that "ensures female admiration." Although his argument that pleasurable sexual activity was important to a marriage was revolutionary in an age when men married wives to breed children and maintain their home, and kept mistresses for sex, the lectures revealed more about male ideas of female sexuality than conjugal equality. In a torrent of suggestive rhetoric, verbal pyrotechnics, and explicit description, he trumpeted the "balmy—spirituous—vivifying" properties of the male emission. "Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle," he claimed, "continually circulating in every part," no "man or woman canenjoy health.” Graham successfully exploited widespread ignorance about sex, fears of infertility, and fashionable obsessions with electricity, recently discovered and barely understood. Preposterous as his breathless panegyrics were, they were the nearest most had to sex education. At the close of the show, the audience received electric shocks by means of conductors hidden under their cushions. As a finale, a spirit apparently emerged from under the floor and handed the doctor a bottle of Electrical Aether. Then the windows fell dark, the room was suddenly illuminated, and a Goddess appeared. She began to worship the Aether.
Hail! Wondrous Combination!!!—but chief—THOU FIRE ELECTRIC!
—Celestial Renovator!—Thou Life of all Things—Hail!
——In Majesty and Mystery combin'd!
Enthron'd—unveil'd—in this tremendous—this most genial Temple!
    To the teenage Goddesses, the Temple was a hilarious joke. Behind the glitz was a chaotic mass of hired clutter, and Graham was always trying to seduce young girls (Mary Robinson later gave up acting to write novels and ridiculed him in Walsingham as a lecherous fraud). And yet it was surely hard not to be affected by the pathos of the desires of many of those who gazed upon them: youthful health, happiness in love, and children. When Graham stopped ranting about electricity, his advice to the infertile was genuinely useful. Borrowing his point from Dr. George Cheyne's influential English Malady that plain living was the cure for society's debilitating addiction to fashion and luxury, Graham declared that moderate consumption of rich food and alcohol, fresh air, and exercise, along with regular sex, could encourage conception. To cure overindulgence, he recommended a diet of vegetables, plain meat, and barley, a striking precursor to modern wheat- and dairy-free diets. Rather less beneficial was his extreme detoxifying diet, composed of apples and half a roast potato a day.
    The Goddesses had to sell Graham's “cures.” He wrote hundreds of pamphlets and books claiming that his potions of electrical fire could remedy every possible ill, including “excessive gaiety,” consumption, blindness, and infertility, as well as preserving beauty through “exciting the electrical fire in the body and limbs.” Graham made preposterous claims for his special potions, probably a collation of salts and water, if not arsenic or worse. Electrical Aether rallied the impotent “exhausted by inordinate and excessive sacrifices to Venus and Bacchus,” and Imperial Pills cured venereal disease. Nervous Aetherial Balsam induced an abortion, or asGraham put it, abolished "every menstrual obstruction in the world— however complicated, or however confirmed."
    Many declared the Temple no better than a brothel. ∗ Although Graham declared that the Bed was reserved for married couples, many men followed the example of the Prince of Wales and took their mistresses. It was said that the Goddesses were available for hire on the bed. A rake living nearby joked that one of Graham's beautiful employees had