England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [20]
We can reconstruct Jane's life by reading contemporary accounts of the theater, playbills, newspaper gossip, and the collections of biographies of the stars of the Drury Lane, Haymarket, and Covent Garden theaters, Authentic Memoirs of the Green Room and Secret History of the Green Room. The authors of these early gossip magazines were usually struggling playwrights who knew the theater well, and since their sources were the actors, their friends and agents, or even the theater management, the pieces were fairly reliable. The Green Room books were reprinted frequently, and Jane never changed her entry, which suggests that she was reasonably satisfied with the contents.
According to her biographers, Jane's father was an army sergeant. After her mother died in childbirth, Jane, her siblings, and the new baby moved from their home in Kent to his London barracks in Blackfriars.2 By the age of eleven or so, she had become the toast of the company, no doubt by acting in camp plays. Her father cut short her fun by sending her to work for Dr. Budd at Chatham Place, probably, like Emma, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Of "a romantic turn," Jane detested her work. As the writer puts it:
We find her in a menial capacity with a family in the vicinity of Chatham-square, an enthusiastic Spouter, and unable to attend her business, from a desire of seeing Plays, and studying Speeches. The confinement and slavery of her place did not agree with her temper.
Emma surely joined her in rehearsing tragic parts while they scrubbed the floor, spouting Ophelia when the cook was out of earshot. It seems as if Emma was dismissed first and Jane, perhaps finding the job unbearably dreary without her, "decamped her servitude," as her biographer put it, and fled the Budds' with a soldier called Farmer to Coxheath Camp. Private Farmer soon decided to be rid of her. Vainly pretending to herself that he had loved her, Jane called herself Mrs. Farmer, but she soon fell into "every distress and disgrace that can befall her sex." She first became the company laundress, and then a serial mistress-cum-prostitute or "conspicuous Character in the Camp." Finally, "despising a subaltern when she could charm his Commander, she eloped with the Captain to London, where they lived together in a style she had not been used to." When he deserted her, she was left at the age of fourteen to "forage for herself." She could not return to domestic service, for "she was now unfit, as well as from the habits she had lately been used to, as from a want of character [i.e., a reference], so necessary to persons of that description." No support came from her family, and Jane found herself bereft of "present subsistence, or even of a favourable prospect." She had no choice but to work as a streetwalker, probably in the Covent Garden area. As her biographer put it, "we need not wonder at or explain the remedy she adopted to relieve her from embarrassment; —a remedy which, when embraced from necessity, deserves forgiveness, but when embraced from inclination deserves the severest reproach."
Jane never lost her ambition to act. She raved about plays and the theater so enthusiastically with her clients that she was "distinguished from others of the frail sisterhood by the appellation of the Spouter." Her fortunes improved when she gained an influential client, presumably a rich aristocrat with theatrical connections. After she left