While a servant in London for the Budd's, the thirteen year old Emma Hamilton met another servant - Jane Powell - who wanted to be an actress and would eventually succeed as one; the surname Powell came to her in marriage. Jane had also been fatherless and the two became best friends. Jane's big break in the theatre came after she attracted a rich patron who arranged for her to graduate from the minor roles she had accomplished on her own. Therefor, she, like Mary Lyon, Emma's mother, had the benefit of being a Mistress. The servant girls enjoyed free events such as parades and fairs and the parties that emerged and they were both fired from the Budd's after staying out all night. There was no security at all in being a servant girl. Meanwhile it is likely that Emma had to grow up fast and had probably lost her virginity as a twelve year old.
Excerpt page 39: Thirteen year old Emma already had the energy, beauty, and self-confidence that would carry her far, but such qualities had a darker underside - an addiction to glamour, a hot temper, and a desire to please by winning attention. There was no way that her life of drudgery could continue: she was too pretty and ambitious. On leaving the Budds, equipped only with a few dresses and one or two trinkets from admirers, Emma headed straight for the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden, the most sensational spectacle in London.
Emma didn't start as an actress at Drury Lane. She was a dresser, a maid, carried props - a servant for an actress, though she might have been used in a crowd scene or two.
In the eighteenth century in London, it's estimated one woman in eight worked as a prostitute. Prostitutes were part of the party around the theater scene. The price range for sexual services ranged from a few 18th century cents to thousands of dollars. Emma could not have been innocent of this fact. Author Kate William's description of the prostitution scene is one of street and tavern. It's implied that Emma may have been one of them as a teenager.
Painters also went looking for models and as it turned out, she was considered a perfect English beauty.
Excerpt page 52: ... She was snatched up by the two greatest portrait painters of the time: bitter rivals George Romney and Joshua Reynolds. Sir Joshua, foremost portrait painter of the age and president of the Royal Academy from 1768 to 1782, was well known for hunting in the brothels of Covent Garden for models, and it seems that he found Emma, perhaps before Romney. His Cupid Unfastening the Girdle of Venus shows a dark-haired, pale-skinned model who looks very much like Emma, her bosom exposed, wearing an almost transparent dress, languishing in bed while Cupid unties her sash... .... Emma appears to have modeled for one of Reynold's greatest paintings, Thais.... Thais being the Mistress of Alexander the Great...
The painting was such a sensation that the public demanded to know who the model was and was identified as "Miss Emily"... Emily hardly the typical name for a prostitute, the name implied a higher status. There is a possibility that already she was a Mistress, to Honorable Charles Greville. It was said that she had sat for the painting at his request.
At the time, according to author Kate Williams, modeling was undesirable work and possibly paid worse than prostitution. Artists were not especially kind to models and there were other painters and paintings which looked a lot like Emma.
As a result of her new found fame of sorts, Emma got a new gig. James Graham, a London entrepreneur, sex therapist, and showman, who believed in "the power of electricity" hired her for his Temple of Health. The spectacle at his townhouse, where people went for a cure, included electrical shocks, fireworks and explosions, music, and, also glamour girls in flimsy white dresses who danced around the treatment bed. Dancing at the temple is something Emma never denied as she did other suggestions once she was a Mistress to aristocratic men. The Temple featured a cure for infertility and Graham is credited with suggesting that a woman needed to orgasm to become pregnant at a time when many women saw sex as dutiful and only for procreation.
The Temple of Health itself attracted not just husbands and wives, but men and their mistresses. It might have become one more place of low paid prostitution. Emma quickly moved on to a brothel, Madame Kelly's, which was London's most exclusive.
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