Odd this day
On this day 262 years ago, the 22-year-old James Boswell had his way with Louisa, “a handsome actress of Covent Garden Theatre” after a month of wooing. So, obviously, he quickly went off her, and blamed her for giving him the clap, even though he was a notorious shagger.
It all started in December 1762, when he called on her “several times”, and charmingly told his diary:
I engaged in this amour just with a view of convenient pleasure but the god of pleasing anguish now seriously seized my breast. I felt the fine delirium of love.
On 22nd, he “beseeched her”. On Boxing Day,
I told her my passion in the warmest terms. I told her that my happiness absolutely depended upon her
…but she “said that we should take time to consider of it”. So, he gave it (almost) a week, and was back on New Year’s Day, and
began to take some liberties … a sweet elevation of the charming petticoat.
Louisa, though — “Good heaven, Sir!” — was worried about her landlady interrupting. The next day, with the landlady at church, disaster befell young Boswell:
I was not inspired by Venus … The time of church was almost elapsed when I began to feel that I was still a man.
Two days later, he begged again, and on the 4th, she agreed to an assignation, if he would find somewhere safe. So the sneaky bastard…
went to my good friend Hayward’s at the Black Lion, told him that I had married, and that I and my wife, who was to be in town on Saturday, would sleep in his house till I got a lodging for her.
But it wasn’t until the 12th that she met him “in the Piazzas of Covent Garden”, and he felt himself
able and undaunted to engage in the wars of the Paphian Queen.
This may need some explanation — it did for me. Paphos is the mythical birthplace of the goddess of love on the island of Cyprus, apparently — and if you think that’s flowery…
I came softly into the room, and in a sweet delirium slipped into bed and was immediately clasped in her snowy arms and pressed to her milk-white bosom. Good heavens, what a loose did we give to amorous dalliance! The friendly curtain of darkness concealed our blushes. In a moment I felt myself animated with the strongest powers of love, and, from my dearest creature’s kindness, had a most luscious feast. Proud of my godlike vigour, I soon resumed the noble game. I was in full glow of health. Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness, and my bounding blood beat quick and high alarms. A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture.
Gordon Bennett, Jimbo. (Also, “Five times” there reminds me of the Alan Bennett sketch, Men’s Talk: “Three hours? You could have been in Leeds in that time”
…but I digress.)
Of course, by 16 January
I felt my passion for Louisa much gone.
Apparently, he saw
an affectation about her which disgusted me
…which didn’t appear to put him off on Monday 17th…
I this day again had full fruition of her charms. I still, though, found that the warm enthusiasm of love was over.
Or the following day, when he
began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil: a little heat in the members of my body sacred to Cupid
…but he put such thoughts aside, and
most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure as I enjoyed her
Yes, I should have put a content warning at the top, I think: caution — unfiltered thoughts of a randy, 18th century, old goat. Anyway, the day after that,
By the 20th, he was
very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. I could scarcely credit my own senses. What! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled?
Because, obviously, it was her fault. Even though this was the third time he’d had it (by his own admission). As the Guardian points out:
His diary records regular sexual encounters with numerous prostitutes, and the ensuing bouts of painful venereal infections … between the ages of 20 and 29, he slept with three married gentlewomen, four actresses, managed a fling with Rousseau’s mistress, kept three mistresses and had connections with at least 60 streetwalkers. His sexual appetite was uncommonly large and his friends tended to regard his frequent infections as something of a joke.
So of course he asks:
Can corruption lodge beneath so fair a form?
…and goes to see his friend Douglas, a doctor,
who upon examining the parts, declared I had got an evident infection and that the woman who gave it me could not but know of it.
Definitely her fault, then. A doctor said so. And Boswell told his diary he hadn’t been with any other woman for two entire months. Absolutely conclusive — so he went to tell Louisa (real name probably Anne Lewis):
I have for some days observed the symptoms of disease, but was unwilling to believe you so very ungenerous. But now, Madam, I am thoroughly convinced.
He really was terribly hard done by, the poor lamb. Not only had he
expected at least a winter’s safe copulation
…but his experience of the clap was, of course, so much worse than anyone else’s:
A distemper of this kind is more dreadful to me than most people. I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison more deeply.
So, clearly
I thought the treacherous Louisa deserved to suffer for her depravity.
…and — because he now faced a doctor’s bill for five guineas (for prescribing mercury) — that meant writing to Louisa to ask her to return the two guineas he’d lent her. He said he felt bad about this, but then he
had been very bad all night, I lay in direful apprehension that my testicle, which formerly was ill, was again swelled.
Exactly: clearly well within his rights. Finally, at the end of February, the great man of letters was able to write in his journal that
My disorder is over now. Nothing but a gleet remained, which gave me no pain and which could be removed in three days.
…and a ‘gleet’ doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Let’s just look it up to be sure…
(Boswell himself writes of “damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter”. Yes, let’s move on.)
He must have been feeling better by 10 May, because:
At the bottom of the Haymarket I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was sated, I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low wretch.
Mind you, “in armour complete” means wearing a condom (which would have been linen or ‘skin’ — animal bladder or intestine “softened by treatment with sulphur and lye”) so he may have learnt something, even if it was not a lesson of which his contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft might have wholeheartedly approved.
On 19th, he
sallied forth to the Piazzas in rich flow of animal spirits and burning with fierce desire. I met two very pretty little girls who asked me to take them with me.
The following morning,
My blood still thrilled with pleasure.
Dirty sod. You can read more in his London Journal 1762-1763 or:
(which is a bit shorter), but you may feel you’ve got the gist by now.
