SOPHIA BADDELEY: DISCONNECTED FROM THE REALITIES OF SPENDING AND TOOK ON MULTIPLE LOVERS ASIDE OF LORD MELBOURNE

Missy here!  Lord Melbourne continued to be Sophia's keeper, without any legal contract, generous but not obligated, and then slowly withdrew his presence and his money.  Mrs. Steele, who would someday write the memoir for Sophia Baddeley, tried to curb her spending without effect.  Sophia's fame had become a trap, a lifestyle in which she got no rest from her fans' attentions.  She felt hunted. Other men besides Lord Melbourne continued to declare their love or keep her, including noble men and ambassadors but what she seemed to want was her independence.  

Sophia was a shopaholic, using shopping to cope with her life.  She took to buying dozens of stockings, shoes, gloves, and other items as well as things that were of questionable need or value.  She ran up serious debt.

Page 64:  Sophia now had debts of more than 3000 pounds (180,000 pounds at the time the book was published in 2003).  Although she was still besieged by her admirers,it was not obvious even to her that Melbourne's passion was cooling.  To add to her problems, she found that she was pregnant... although she miscarried soon afterwards.  Nonetheless, the frantic pursuit of pleasure continued unabated. 'Our life was such a continued scene of bustle and dissipation,' wrote Mrs. Steele, ' that I wonder how she looked so well,'

Page 66: Money was not the only temptation in Sophia's way.  She was a woman of strong appetites in every respect.  While Lord Melbourne remained her official protector during this period, there was also a continual stream of unofficial lovers - mostly young officers and undergraduates, neither rich nor well connected - to whom Sophia was attracted for her own sake.  Even Mrs. Steele's disapproval could not keep them away entirely. If anything, this evidence of Sophia's view of her own sexuality as a source of pleasure - rather than just as a commodity to be bartered - was the cause of even greater tension between the two women than were the scores of amorous old aristocrats laying siege to her. 

***

Sophia lost Lord Melbourne.  Though she had been loyal to him in turning others away, she had overspent and was deeply in debt and faced selling her diamonds to make minimal payments.  She also caught him paying attention to another Courtesan who he had been with before his neglected marriage.  She returned to the stage after three years absence.  Her reputation and status were in decline and she had still had the shopaholic's addiction to spending and acquiring things. 

Pages 74-75:  Nonetheless, Sophia's status, in some indefinable way, had declined.  Although she was still receiving an extremely handsome salary - 7 pounds per week the following season, in which she opened as Olivia in Twelfth Night - it was by no means the dizzying sum she had commanded at the height of her powers.  Her desertion by Melbourne had left her vulnerable in areas other than merely financial ones.  Imperceptibly, the grayest of grey areas, the infinitely subtle line between a courtesan, with enough glamour and fashionable status to pick and choose her protectors, and a plain woman of the town (available to more or less anyone so long as the price was right), was slowly beginning to shift."

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SOPHIA BADDELEY : HIGHLY PAID GEORGIAN COMEDIC ACTRESS : BECAME A COURTESAN AFTER MARRIAGE and A HEARTBREAK BUT BEING ON STAGE SAVED HER

Katie Hickman's book includes two of the women I featured here at Mistress Manifesto in the past: Harriet Wilson and Cora Pearl.  However this summer we'll be focusing on two other women, historical Courtesans, who lived in England.

SOPHIA BADDELEY

Sophia Snow

1745-1786

Sophia Baddeley, according to author Katie Hickman, was an actress who could not act.  Rather it seems that this gorgeous English woman made it onto the stage due to her beauty and became famous for being famous, though she did have some talent.  Her personality counted too.  She was adored by her fans and her fellow actors and the servants for she practiced a kind of trickle-down economics.  Whatever clothing and jewelry she acquired, she was sure to give it away.  In 1771, at the opening event of the Panthenon, a concert hall that did not wish to admit "undesirables" as the upper classes of society attended there, over fifty men, including nobles holding swords, threatened an uprising if she was not admitted to attend the performance.  She had only become a courtesan as well as an actress a year or so before.

"Hers was an erotic beauty which had the power to bewitch both men and women, and which exerted that kind of charisma which, unless tempered with unusual reserves of moral strength and level-headedness, can hopelessly distort lives, and even unhinge the rational mind. ....Sophia Baddeley had neither the moral strength nor level-headedness.  She was vain, spoilt, impetuous, lazy, spendthrift, only moderately intelligent, and possessed a great deal of sexual energy.  She was also warm-hearted, affectionate, funny, mercurial, and generous to a fault.... it was impossible not to love Sophia.  It is also clear that she was much beloved by many others, not just by her aristocratic admirers --- the majority of whom hunted her quite ruthlessly both for sex and for her fashionable cachet --- but by the ordinary people who came across her: her servants, her fellow actors, the everyday public who came to hear her act and sing, and who so relished the stories of her scandalous life and loves." (page 33)

Unlike some of the other courtesan's I've included here at Mistress Manifesto, who were born in poverty or who renamed themselves aristocratic names to suggest they had been born into a higher class, Sophia was born into a 'respectable' family.  Her father, Valentine Snow, once worked as a musician for King George II and one of her grandfathers had been a Royal Musician. She and her brother were also trained in music, with the idea that she might play the harpsichord - clearly a genteel instrument.  She could have married well enough and not lived through the life she did but her divergent path began with her marriage.

At eighteen, in 1864, she eloped with Robert Baddeley, an actor almost twice her age, but in 1770 they agreed to legal separation and then never filed for divorce. Robert was promiscuous and it would seem he never did have any expectation that the beautiful Sophia would be faithful to him. It was Robert who insisted that Sophia be given an acting part for a production at the Drury theater where he was well known. She went on as a stand in and then continued to appear in the theater's productions, including taking leading lady roles in Shakespeare's plays As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Five years into their marriage, Sophia was best known for 'genteel comedy.' Management hated to admit it, but she had draw and attracted audiences, never mind her acting. She could sing. She was hired to sing at other venues and paid the highest wage of any actress at the time!  

While they apparently did not maintain attraction for each other, both Sophia and Robert had a variety of dalliances. When one, a Mr. Mendez, began to woo her, Robert pimped his wife out to the man and encouraged her towards him. Very slowly Sophia got what is thought of as a courtesan's attitude; she decided that she would accept the patronage or a rich man who would provide for her a lavish lifestyle while being sexual with him and it would be she who chose among the men who wanted her. She finally lost her heart though - perhaps for the first time - to a man who was a member of the Irish peerage - but poor - and then switched to his brother.  This brother spent money on her.  When he ran out of money, she took over paying their shared expenses. Then it was all too much and the debtors were after them. He said he had to leave her.  She tried suicide by overdose and lived for the rest of her life with stomach ailments. She was not a person with strong health.

Sophia Baddeley, when first pursued as a Courtesan, was both protected in a sense by her marriage, her status, her career as an actress, and her ability to make her own good money, which was rare for any woman in Georgian England. However, when the main man who made all things possible, Lord Melbourne, lost interest, she quickly lost her status.  A shopaholic, she had spent the fortune she was given rather than invest, was deeply in debt, and risked sinking into common prostitution.  Unwisely, perhaps because the married Melbourne had been exceedingly generous, she had never had a legal contract with him for support that would last past his interest in her.

Sophia was a shopaholic, a person who dealt with the psychological and emotional stresses in her life though compulsive acquisition of things she really did not need.

Though she lived through falling in love with men who were opportunists and users, being betrayed and deserted by them, Sophia was able to survive without becoming a prostitute. She was able to support herself and her family which included three extramarital children she had with two other men, as an actress, far from London, in northern England, and especially Edinburgh, Scotland. In the end it was her fans who did not desert her and the career her husband had instigated for her was allowed her to persevere.  Her health declined steadily and she died in 1786 at forty-one with consumption - TB - which she no doubt had for some time.

This month we will follow the courtesan career of Sophia Baddeley, and learn more about what life of a Courtesan was in the late 18th century, Georgian period England.  Author Katie Hickman's book is the primary reference for these posts.

See you next post!

Missy

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Check my archives!   You can also bring up posts by using the search feature embedded on the sidebar of the Google Blogger.

April 2013             

HARRIETTE WILSON : One of Four Mistress Sisters of Regency England 

July 2012       

CORA PEARL

Brought Out Naked on a Silver Dish, Lined With Violets

P.S.  The Image on the book cover is not Sophia!  I'll be posting a lithograph of her and you'll probably not think of her as beautiful by today's standards.  Which, I think, proves that personality counts!