The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold Read Free Book Online Page A

offered by Miss Kenea, a ‘fair lady’ whose ‘hand extends to ev’ry customer’, before returning to the road.
    At about the time Sam’s hired mount ambled into London, the city was home to roughly 650,000 people. Although Dublin bustled with apopulation near 150,000, nothing could match the breadth or confusion of the scene that awaited him. By comparison to the city of his birth, London’s streets and neighbourhoods sprawled in all directions. Its length ran to the banks of the Thames and then exceeded it, splashing into Southwark and Lambeth. It stretched backwards, pushing its expanding districts of Marylebone, Bloomsbury and Islington further north. The ferocious scent and roar of London would have met him before he so much as laid foot upon its cobbles. The traffic of those entering its limits – foot passengers, coaches, herders with flocks, carts packed with saleable goods – congested its inward-bound arteries. Once Sam had found his way into the centre of town, he would have been overwhelmed by the mêlée of faces and accents, the noise and the spectacle. The theatricality of the capital was something he would never cease to find inspirational. Dublin, George Faulkner had warned him, was a place unappreciative of either authors or actors; London, by contrast, was saturated with men of talent.
    Like Sam, men and women who believed in their abilities to perform or create arrived through London’s gateways regularly. Although he possessed the advantage of Faulkner’s letters of introduction, whatever assistance they were able to provide was likely to have been superseded by several evenings spent in lively Covent Garden conversation. While Fleet Street, the hub of London’s publishing enterprise, had its own share of convivial taverns and coffee houses, some of the more intellectual haunts were based in the nearby Piazza. Here, at the Bedford Coffee House and the Shakespear’s Head, gathered a complete cross section of noted authors, old hacks, affluent publishers and small-time booksellers. As the Piazza was also, by proximity, the principal turf of actors, theatrical managers and a variety of professions linked to the playhouses from set painters to musicians, the resulting social scene was one of the most stimulating in all of London. It was also prime hunting ground for patrons. After a night at the theatre, wealthy landowning gentleman could be found in abundance, attracted by the Garden’s bacchanalian delights and the lures of the gaming tables. The area’s watering holes also played host to a range of smaller, but equally desirable, catches. The ears of moneyed city bankers, merchants, important visitors, as well as established personalities such as David Garrick, Dr Johnson, and SamuelFoote, were all available for the cost of a mere tankard of ale or glass of claret. Covent Garden was a networker’s dream, a honeypot of promise for those hoping to earn distinction by their art. Not surprisingly, it was on the itinerary of every literary visitor to town; it was the first stop of the dramatist or the poet who had leapt off the London-bound wagon.
    When not tending to the business of linen trading, Sam Derrick was passing most of his time in the Piazza. Increasingly, over the course of his visits, the time devoted to spending his living began to outweigh the hours dedicated to earning it. A good deal of Sam’s days and nights were passed at the Bedford Coffee House, brushing elbows with the literati and the leading lights of the London stage. At the Bedford, wrote the Connoisseur magazine, ‘Almost everyone you meet is a polite scholar and a wit. Jokes and bon mots are echoed from box to box; every branch of literature is critically examined, and the merits of every production of the press or performance of the theatres weighed and determined’. Even more so than at the Shakespear’s Head, those who filled the rooms at the Bedford represented a type of London ‘in-crowd’, by whose glamour