Payne of Sulby Hall was not yet twenty when he lost £21,000 in bets at Doncaster in September 1823. âIf one could suppose such a knockdown blow wd. cure him,â the society diarist Thomas Creevey wrote, âit might turn out to be money well laid out; but I fear that is hopeless.â
Unlike their male counterparts, high-bred ladies could not allay their boredom with politics and prostitutes. They could not even divert themselves, as their men-folk did, by going down to Leicester Square to take in the scandalous performances in the patent theaters, which were judged too degrading to be witnessed by decent women. The lady who found herself ennuyé to the last degree was not, however, without resources. If she were bold, she took a lover; if vain, she amused herself with the extravagancies of dress and ornament. âLady Londonderry is the great shew of the balls here in her jewels,â Creevey wrote in September 1824, âwhich are out of all question the finest I ever beheldâsuch immense amethystsand emeralds, &c. Poor Mrs. Carnac, who had a regular haystack of diamonds last night, was really nothing by the side of the other. . . .â
Other ladies of the ton âthe highest ranks of societyâfound an antidote to dullness in publicly shedding the last vestiges of feminine modesty. The spirit of Miss Chudleigh, who in the eighteenth century appeared at a masquerade âso naked,â Horace Walpole said, âthat you would have taken her for Andromeda,â was alive in Regency London, and indeed attained a new height when at a dinner party Lady Caroline Lamb served up her own flesh for dessert, springing nude from a silver tureen.
Yet however outwardly splendid it was, the life of the grandees was not without its savor of horror. Lady Caroline would herself succumb to it: the romantic heroine who in a fit of mania bedded Lord Byron in the spring of 1812 died a lunatic, in 1828, at forty-two. The destiny of another Regency magnifico, Francis Charles Seymour-Conway, third Marquess of Hertford, was as black. The model for Thackerayâs Lord Steyne and Disraeliâs Lord Monmouth, Seymour-Conway was âa sharp, cunning, luxurious, avaricious man of the worldâ given up to âundisguised debauchery.â One day, he went down to his villa in Richmond, a fat, swollen, grotesque figure, intent on another gaudy night with his trio of whores. He drank a glass of champagne and, looking up in terror, cried out that the devil had come for him. His valet rushed over to him and found him dead.
But however damnable the ways of the aristocrats, life in Londonâs lower depths was more palpably hellish. Scarcely a mile from the palaces of St. Jamesâs Square were the rookeries of St. Giles, where, a contemporary wrote, âmultitudes of the squalid and dissolute poorâ lived, and where filth, vermin, and disease throve âwith the most rank luxuriance.â While Lady Caroline danced in Devonshire House and Seymour-Conway whored in Dorchester House, unwashed children frolicked in the mire of the Seven Dials, interrupting their play only to scratch the infected pustules on their scalps, or to go into gin-palaces where they stood âon tiptoeto pay for half a glass of gin.â Nakedness in these quarters was not, as in Mayfair, exhibited on silver platters, or betwixt silken sheets; in Dyott Street, a notorious sink of poverty and vice where lodgings were to be had for as little as twopence, men and women, often strangers to one another, lay together in foul beds or in stalls strewn with soiled straw. One physician told a committee of the House of Commons that in such establishments he had come upon lodgers âwithout a single shred or piece of linen to clothe their bodies.â They were âperfectly naked,â or clothed only âwith vermin.â
* Rouge et Noir is a form of roulette in which bets are made as to which color the roulette wheel will