The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold Read Free Book Online

whenever he had the opportunity. Scraping together the necessary pennies to secure himself a seat and slipping out, perhaps against the orders of his apprentice master, would have added to the thrill. There, both in the pit and backstage, he would have met with some of his more wanton companions and their thespian circle. The easy lifestyle of loose sexual morals and seemingly endless laughter would have been a profound enticement to a young apprentice. Above all, it would have presented him with an opportunity to chatter with those who shared his love for words and poetry.
    Remarkably, given the myriad distractions and temptations, Sam successfully completed his period of apprenticeship. A fear of the consequences of his failure to do so may very well have been the only impetus he required. Presumably Sam saw his occupation as a means by which he could achieve his greater aims. For all of the dullness entailed in a life based around the exchange and production of cloth, the profession did offer the benefit of frequent travel to London. The draper’s trade would have presented numerous opportunities for visits abroad and given him an ideal vehicle for peddling his poetry to potential sponsors. While Dublin was home to a small publishing industry, London offered far larger prospects. All forms of creative output in the eighteenth century required patronage or sponsorship, and any such meaningful financial backing was a luxury bestowed by society’s most influential. Although Ireland had its share of well-endowed aristocrats and fat merchants with social-climbing ambitions, this class of person existed in a much higher concentration in England, and especially in London. The bustling capital of the English language offered a wealth of opportunity with whichDublin simply could not compete, a message that Sam would have heard repeatedly from his friend and mentor, George Faulkner.
    As Dublin’s literary society was a close circle, it is likely that Sam’s acquaintance with George Faulkner began through the introductions of school tutors while he was still a boy. Although twenty-five years his senior, Faulkner felt a great affection for Derrick and took the young man under his wing in the hope of encouraging his career. As a friend not only to the estimable Swift but to Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, Faulkner’s was a useful name to drop in London circles. Undoubtedly, it was his letters of introduction that opened the few significant doors to Sam’s literary future in London. The rest he prised open by himself.
    At around the age of twenty-two, in 1746, Samuel Derrick undertook one of his first exploratory journeys to London. Although he would have left port with a consignment of linen, his thoughts probably did not dwell long upon its sale. Instead, his mind was occupied with the poetry he hoped to publish and the friendships he sought to renew among the travelling actors he had met in Dublin. Those he intended to visit included Francis Gentleman, now a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Army. Like Derrick, Gentleman was also passing frustrated days in his appointed profession, waiting for deliverance in the form of an inheritance which might allow him to pursue his ambitions upon the stage. Having only recently completed his apprenticeship, Sam was elated at the prospect of his newly acquired freedom and the liberties his presence in London might allow him. En route to the capital, he composed a stream of verses addressed to ‘dear Frank’, his ‘first among friends’, which lyricised his choppy sea passage and the lameness of his hired horse. Upon his arrival in London, Derrick promised Gentleman that they would enjoy ‘the gay pleasures of the town’ together but, unwilling to abstain entirely from those joys for which he already seems to have gained a taste, Derrick broke his southward journey at the Falcon Tavern. There, he not only ‘sup’d and drank some claret’, but partook of the favours