Harriette Wilson's Memoirs :: Buy from Oxfam on The UK High Street

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Harriette Wilson (February 22, 1786 - March 10, 1845) was a celebrated British Regency courtesan, whose clients included the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor and four future Prime Ministers. Harriette Dubouchet was one of the fifteen children of Swiss John James Dubouchet (or De Bouchet), who kept a small shop in Mayfair, England, and his wife Amelia, nee Cook. Her father is said to have assumed the surname of Wilson about 1801. She began her career at the age of fifteen, becoming the mistress of William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven, 7th Baron Craven. Among her other lovers with whom she had business arrangements was Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who commented "publish, and be damned" when informed of her plans to write her memoirs. Her decision to publish was partly based on the broken promises of her lovers to provide her with an income in her older age. The memoirs are still in print. Her sisters Amy, Fanny and Sophia also became courtesans. Sophia married respectably into the aristocracy, when she wed Lord Berwick at age 17. Harriette Wilson appears in the Jane Austen mystery novel, Jane and the Barque of Frailty, by Stephanie Barron. (Harriette and Jane Austen were contemporaries.) Harriette Wilson liked to insult her suitors. Early on in her career she discovered the fastest way to get a man on his knees was to show him how little he could succeed the first go around. Courtesans, of course, were famous for this. For a certain caliber of female, hardships birth wit, and to the gentleman trapped in a stratum of dull, mannered ladies, wit was an aphrodisiac. So, it seems, was cheek. Harriette's method was ridiculously simple. She laid siege to powerful men by writing queries like the one she "half in humour" dashed off to the Prince of Wales: "I am told that I am very beautiful, so perhaps you would like to see me. . ." When his reply was returned to her in the affirmative, she further wrote, This sauciness inspired the ardor of many influential men during her reign, including the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Worcester, the Duke of Argyll, and Lord Melbourne's son, the Honorable Frederick Lamb. One can scarcely leave out her first lover, the Earl of Craven. At the age of 15, Craven introduced her to the pursuits of pleasure, but she was no more enamored of him than of his cocoa trees from the West Indies. By her own account, he would amuse her by drawing pictures of his "fellows" along with the dreaded trees, a practice Harriette called a "dead bore." It didn't help that she despaired of his cotton night cap. "Surely," [she] would say, "all men do not wear those shocking nightcaps; else all women's illusions had been destroyed on the first night of their marriage." Harriette Wilson's dismal opinion of marriage was borne from early experience: ". . .my dear mother's marriage had proved to me so forcibly the miseries of two people of contrary opinions and character torturing each other to the end of their natural lives, that, before I was ten years old, I decided in my own mind to live free as air from any restraint but that of my own conscience." Although Harriette forbore blaming her parent's marriage, and indeed stressed that her dear mother did not influence her choice in profession, an unhappy home life seemed to affect the family at large. Among her sisters, three of them turned Cyprian--Amy, Sophia, and Fanny.
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