England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [15]
The Budds were probably the first or second couple to make Emma an offer. Every girl knew that the standard of proposals would decrease as she waited. They all craved positions in aristocratic homes, where the work was less arduous because the family was often away and it was easy to pick up dresses, candles, and tips, but they hoped in vain. Aristocrats recruited servants by personal recommendation. Girls arriving from the country were crammed into the homes of the middling classes. Doctors, tradesmen, and merchants considered country girls less corrupt and more willing to accept low pay than Londoners. They and their wives met the wagons when they arrived in the inns to pick their own servant and to avoid paying commission to an employment agency. Emma was young, healthy, and had worked as a maid before, and the Budds had no teenage sons, so perhaps they did not mind employing such a pretty girl. They packed Emma into their carriage and headed for their newly built home in Chatham Place, Blackfriars.
After passing through Temple Bar, one of the two remaining gateways to the City (until four years previously, the heads of traitors were pinned up on the gates), Emma saw her first sight of her new home: the City. The Budds' cart bumped past shops, slaughterhouses, slums, and vertiginous, toppling houses flanked by great stacks of refuse. Wagons, coaches, and rubbish carts jostled to overtake herds of animals driven by farmers toward the market at Smithfield or the abattoir at Tower Hill. Errand boys wove through swarms of shoppers and servants. Tradesmen headed through for the markets: Billingsgate for fish and coal; Mark Lane, Bear Quay, and Queenhithe for grain; Blackwell Hall for cloth; and Leadenall for leather and poultry. The air hung heavy with the sticky, astringent smell of the sugar-processing plants and coal fumes from factories working from dawn to dusk to make the luxury goods that adorned the West End and were exported all over the world. Bricklayers and laborers were everywhere, carrying materials, clambering over rubble and foundations, and assembling in groups to be recruited for work. Thousands of houses were built in London between 1762 and 1779. Many more were abandoned when the money ran out, to be looted for timber by children. Crowded into the slums or "rookeries" in the alleyways were the workers who built houses for the wealthy and wove the material for their clothes.
Although London was the world's largest city, it was small by modern standards.1 Even by the 1760s, a lady could have traversed it on foot in half a day. Knightsbridge marked one limit, Bloomsbury the other. Aristocrats hunted in the surrounding areas, and stray hounds and deer hurtled through the areas now occupied by Harrods and the British Library. Kensington was market gardens, Belgravia was mostly rural, while families visited the pretty village of Paddington on summer evenings to watch farmers bringing in the hay. The compact nature of the city created particular concentrations within certain limits: shops in Cheapside and the Strand, brothels and theaters in Covent Garden, palaces in St. James, wealth in Mayfair, and poverty in St. Giles. Visitors marveled at the difference between gracious west London, with its elegant, newly built stucco mansions and straight open streets, and the narrow dark streets, overhung by signs, in the eastern part of the city.
One-eighth of the British population, 850,000 men, women, and children, lived crowded into the seven