LEGAL AGREEMENTS BETWEEN COURTESANS and THE MEN WHO PROVIDED RICHES

Missy here:  As I read these passages,  I thought how it seems to me so few women today realize their worth and are willing and able to negotiate to get what they want with any particular man.  Speak up my dear readers.  Be true to yourself. If you want a commitment, say so. If you want an open relationship, say so. It is respectful to another person to be honest and well, we know that honesty does not require you carelessly hurt someone's feelings.

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Page 51:  "Sophia must have been very sure of her hold over Lord Melbourne at this point, for her arrangement with him was - for her - a dangerously informal one.  By the eighteenth century it was a common practice for a man to make a formal financial offer to the actress or courtesan he wanted to keep, together with any other terms and conditions the couple might mutually agree on.  These were legal documents, drawn up and witnessed by lawyers.  When Lord Molyneaux, one of Sophia's first admirers, had approached her, he was so anxious to expedite their arrangement that he had actually brought his attorney - the 'dissector of his patrimony' - and the deeds of settlement drawn up by him to her house....  No one amongst the middling and upper classes would have thought of getting married without making a similar financial settlement, so these transactions did nor perhaps seem quite so baldly mercenary as they do today."

The eighteenth century was intensely interested in details of this kind..."

Missy here!  Sophia's Memoirs apparently give some interesting financial transaction details.

And they have been republished as "culturally significant."

So Sophia had no legal agreement to be in the Lord's keep.

Page 52 : ... "Melbourne was lavish to the point of recklessness in his largesse to her.  Although he probably did intend to formalise their arrangement .... somehow he never got round to it.  Instead, he was in the habit if dropping great wedges of banknotes - sometimes as much as 500 pounds at a time - carelessly on the table after one of his visits.  It was more than most men could afford to give her in a year; but for how long would it go on? As her friends had pointed out to Sophia before, only a settlement would 'outlive the constancy of the donor', and provide a comfortable resource on which to fall back when age came on.

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