England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [21]
As the theater record books show, Jane had steady work in minor roles, often in tragedies and Shakespeare's history plays. She married William Powell, a prompter and minor actor at Drury Lane. Her advantages were her height (it helped her to be seen on the stage) and her expressiveness, but her face was not beautiful. She spent a long time working in secondary roles, striving after the tabloid celebrity so crucial to stardom. In the season of 1789-90, for example, her weekly salary was one of the lowest at £3, considering that Miss Farren earned £17 a week and Dorothy Jordan took home £10 a night. Gradually, however, Jane grew more popular.4 By 1800, in her mid-thirties, she was seen as the second tragedienne after Sarah Siddons, and she was earning a decent salary of £8 a week. She appeared onstage for the last time in 1829 before dying in London five years later.
Emma and Jane would renew their friendship when they were in their thirties. In 1777, however, stardom was a dream. They were intent only on finding fun. The lamps attached to the Budds' door cast a light that reached no farther than the middle of the street, and once they left Chatham Place, they were in the dark. In the absence of a police force, with only decrepit watchmen as guards, the local area around Chick Lane and Field Lane to Turnmill Street and Cowcross (around modern-day Farringdon tube stop, just north of the City, about half a mile from St. Paul's Cathedral), was one of London's most dangerous places and a playground for criminal gangs.5 Soldiers discharged from the war, laborers, and aristocrats used the cover of darkness to prey on maids. Dressed in makeshift finery and already a little drunk on snatched gin, the girls had to walk quickly toward the center of town. High above them, in rooms poorly lit by tallow candles, younger girls worked late, five to a room, sewing shirts, while children in other garrets counterfeited coins in bowls of green acid.
Young servants tended to mill around Covent Garden, watching the cockfighting and the magicians, buying hot meat sandwiches from the all-night food shops, and looking for young men, laborers and servants like themselves. James Parry, later a friend of Emma's, claimed he met her and Jane when they were teenage maids, giggling on the streets.
Maids loved attending fairs. Henry Fielding thundered, "What greater Temptation can there be to Voluptuousness than a Place where every Sense and Appetite of which it is compounded, are fed and delighted," and where the lowliest might dress up and pretend to be rich gentlefolk?6 One visitor decided that girls moved to London simply to attend the lord mayor's procession in early November; others complained that fairs left the young "debauch'd and corrupted." As each regional group brought different types of fairs to London, Emma had hundreds from which to choose. On May Day, dairymaids hired garlands of white damask decorated with ribbons and flowers and topped with a silver tankard to walk their cows around London. There were bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day and Oak Apple Day, which celebrated Charles IPs escape from the Parliamentarians. She was probably allowed a day or so for Bartholomew Fair, which took place in Smithfield Market, very near to Chatham Place. In the last week of August and the first week of September, the area was overrun with sideshows and stalls selling sweets. The year before Emma arrived, an edict to close the fair after three days caused riots. At Bartholomew Fair, there were wild men captured in Scotland, female wrestlers, fortunetellers, singers, early versions of fairground rides, and tents showing short plays of familiar stories from romance