Historian Kate Williams
Historian Kate Williams has an MA from Queen Mary, University of London and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her articles and essays have been published in a wide range of books and journals and she is a lecturer and TV consultant, appearing regularly on BBC and Channel 4 to discuss her work. She lives in London.
Historian Kate Williams
From her very earliest childhood, Emma Hamilton was desperate to live in London. Travellers poured in to the biggest and most exciting city in the eighteenth-century world, attracted by its raw vibrancy and the sheer energy given off by nearly a million men, women and children from all over the globe living and working together. Those in other parts of England pined to visit – and the young Amy Lyon, as she was back then, was one of the most passionately hopeful. As a child in a poverty-stricken village in north Wales, she became notorious for standing at the side of the road, trying to catch a glimpse of the fine coaches speeding past on their way to the capital. Feature continues
As soon as she could leave home, Amy was on a coach to London. Alone at the tender age of 12, she had to endure a terrifying seven-day journey through unfamiliar countryside populated by highwaymen and travelling salesmen looking for girls to rob. By strength of will and luck, she arrived in the capital and found a job as a scullery maid to a doctor in the recently gentrified area of Blackfriars. When dusk fell, she threw herself into the city’s pleasures, hanging around Covent Garden’s bars and pubs with her fellow maid. London was a city for the young and for the hundreds of teenage maids, apprentices, labourers, and shop workers, the city was one big funfair. Amy had too much fun. Within two months of starting work, she was dismissed for staying out all night.
Amy gave up on respectability and set off to try to become an actress in the great Drury Lane. She gained a job as an assistant to the wardrobe mistress, but before long she was fired again. Unemployed and desperate, she moved to work in what was the biggest and most famous sex resort in the world: Covent Garden. She was a 13-year-old streetwalker in a piazza buzzing with tourists, rakes, performers and pickpockets. Then began her adventures in the darker side of London: as a barmaid and prostitute, a dancer in the city’s most popular and ridiculous sex show, Dr James Graham’s Temple of Health, and a courtesan in one of St James’s finest brothels…
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