England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [48]
Greville wished to keep Emma all to himself. As he threatened, "I will never give up my peace, nor continue my connexion one moment after my confidence is again betray'd."3 But he desired more than her fidelity. As his letters to her and Sir William show, he tried to school the self-confessed "gay wild Emily" to be a completely new woman: submissive and penitent for her earlier hectic life. Every aspect of her existence was to be different: her occupation, dress, food, friends, hobbies, and even speech. A spendthrift with a wandering eye, he wanted Emma to behave like a mouse.
In styling his mistress as his pupil, Greville was at the forefront of fashion. After the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau'sjw/ie, which pivoted on the sexualized relationship between the heroine and her teacher, novelists, playwrights, and artists were keen to show how a relationship in which a man taught a woman to behave correctly could be gratifying for both parties. Jane Austen joined the craze in Nonhanger Abbey, probably written in the 1780s, in which giddy Catherine Morland falls in love with Henry Tilney as he schools her in proper judgment. One man even took two poor washer maids and devoted himself to training them to be modest, intending to marry the one he preferred—he was somewhat piqued when both rebelled and ran away. In France at about the same time as Mrs. Hart was practicing her deportment in Edgware Row, the husband of the sixteen-year-old future Josephine Bonaparte was haranguing her to improve her writing, education, carriage, and behavior. Emma, always desperate to please, tried very much harder than Josephine. More was asked of her than simply writing good letters. Greville had a role in mind for her.
The Magdalen hospital for penitent prostitutes was established in 1758. Girls who showed a desire to reform were taught to eschew vanity and love of finery and to embrace meek behavior. Dressed in uniforms of thick brown cloth (men thought that women turned to vice because they loved fine clothes), the inmates or "Magdalens" ate plain fare (it was also thought that a simple diet cured venereal disease) and passed the day sewing. They soon became national obsessions featured in magazines, plays, and novels. So many wanted to sit in the public gallery overlooking the ranks of girls at chapel on Sunday mornings that the authorities had to issue tickets. Greville was titillated by the idea of his own Magdalen, and he fell hook, line, and sinker for the myth: regulation, sober dress and diet, industry, and housework could make a flighty girl virtuous and submissive.
At Edgware Row, Emma had to live in “a line of prudence and plainness,” as Greville reported to friends. Later, he declared he had reformed her “pride and vanity” and taught her to be “totally clear from all the society & habits of kept women,” so she did “not wish for much society” and “has avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person & of the good order of her house.” Greville visited daily and often stayed there, supervising every aspect of his mistress's life. Emma dressed in new modest outfits in subdued colors, wearing less makeup and styling her hair plainly. George Romney's son claimed that she dressed always in her penitential maid's outfit while with Greville, and when Henry Angelo happened to see her, he declared she was dressed so drearily that she might as well have been a nun. Instead of her Uppark feasts of game and sugary puddings, she ate small portions of meat, bread, and vegetables. Her diet was very similar to those Graham had recommended, and his praise of apples as the ideal slimming food may have remained in Emma's mind, for the receipts show she bought plenty of apples, even in January. Greville also trained her to enunciate more elegantly. She worried when she saw her child again that little Emma “speaks countryfied,” but she promised her lover