Jane and the Barque of Frailty

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CONCEIVE, IF YOU WILL, OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, Covent Garden, on an evening such as this: the celebrated Mrs. Siddons being rumoured to appear, after too many months’ absence from the stage; the play Macbeth, with all the hideous power of Shakespeare’s verse and Sarah Siddons’s art; and the Polite World of London brawling in the midst of Bow Street, in an effort to reach its place in the box before the curtain should rise.

Such a welter of chairmen, link boys, fashionable carriages, street sweeps, porters, and coachmen! Such oaths, blasted into the ears of delicately-nurtured females, carried hurriedly to the paving lest their satin slippers should be soiled in the horses’ dung! Such an array of silks and muslins, turbans and feathers, embroidered shawls and jewelled flounces! The scent of a thousand flowers on the air, the odour of tobacco and ripe oranges and fish from the markets in Covent Garden, the great theatre’s windows thrown open against the warmth of the spring night and the heat of too many bodies filling the vast hall! The flickering of wax candles, a fortune’s worth thrown up into the gleaming chandeliers; the rising pitch of conversation, the high screech of a woman’s laughter, the impropriety of a chance remark, the hand of a gentleman resting where it should not, on the person of his lady — all this, like a prodigal feast spread out for my delectation.

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