She Was the Best Stand-Up Comic in 18th Century London
Just a quick note: I’m publishing my first novel for adults since 2019! Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out this August — it’s about a young witch who teaches her mom how to do magic. It’s gotten starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, and I’m so grateful for the love it’s gotten from random readers. You can pre-order it from Green Apple and I’ll sign, personalize and doodle-ize your copy. If you pre-order anywhere and send me a receipt, I’ll send you a PDF of All the Birds in the Sky bonus material including a hefty chunk of the sequel in progress. Details here.
Laetitia Pilkington Lived By Her Wits. Literally.
I've gotten obsessed with Laetitia Pilkington, and I'm sad that I wasn't able to include more about her in Lessons in Magic and Disaster. While I was researching that book, I got drawn into reading about women writers of the 1730s and 1740s, and was absolutely gobsmacked to discover Pilkington, a renowned poet who survived by doing comedy and also wrote a bestselling (and scandalous) memoir.
The daughter of a Dublin physician, Laetitia came from money. Against her family's wishes, she married a clergyman and aspiring poet named Matthew Pilkington, who lacked her writing talent and was unfortunately aware of this fact. Laetitia and Matthew became part of Jonathan Swift's intimate social circle — Swift seems to have treated them like secretaries and flunkies, and also delighted in making fun of them in front of guests. (They were both very short, Laetitia especially, and Swift liked pushing her head down with his hand to emphasize how much he towered over her, as if she were a Lilliputian. Honestly, Swift was a dick.) Matthew and Laetitia both competed for Swift's approval, and Swift enjoyed playing them off against each other.
Matthew, at a certain point, had struck up an affair with an actress and decided he didn't want to be married to Laetitia anymore. (In her memoirs, Laetitia tells a sad story in which, alone with her husband at home, she pricked her breast and briefly pulled down her dress to see if she was hurt. Matthew, seeing her bare breast, reacted with revulsion instead of interest.)
Matthew couldn't divorce Laetitia unless he caught her in an affair, so he kept trying to get his male friends to sleep with her. At one point, Matthew sent Laetitia for a weekend in Windsor with a lecherous painter, and Laetitia spent a long carriage ride fending off the painter’s advances. After a few horrible attempted seductions, Laetitia finally did get caught in bed with a physician named Robert Adair — she claimed Adair had lent her a book and insisted on sitting with her as she read it, because he wanted his copy back. Matthew showed up with no fewer than twelve night-watchmen as witnesses, to catch her alone with Adair.
Laetitia writes in her memoir about the sexual double standard: "Is it not monstrous that our seducers should become our accusers?"
Laetitia, whose family had given plenty of money to Matthew, found herself disgraced and penniless, without a roof over her head. Swift, meanwhile, denounced her publicly as the worst whore in either Ireland or England.
Somehow she made her way to London, where she managed to rent a room across the window from White's Chocolate Shop, a gentlemen's club where "wits" gathered for clever conversation. Laetitia's lodgings were directly across from the club, and she leaned out the window, telling jokes to the men coming and going. Soon she had a reputation as a great wit herself, and men would pay her to ghostwrite their poems and letters. She gained patrons, including the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber (who had cut off his own daughter Charlotte Charke, whom we'll talk about another time.) Laetitia also got financial support from Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa.
I spent way too much on a book of Richardson's correspondence, which includes the letters he received from Laetitia Pilkington. Pretty much every letter is Laetitia begging for more money, and recounting the latest misfortunes she's endured. Her maid robbed her. She started a small business without enough capital, and it failed. Her teenage daughter showed up pregnant at her lodging house, and her landlady kicked both of them out onto the street. She had a horrible fever and felt near to death. It's horrible reading, but it's also a picture of what it was like to be a woman without a husband in Georgian England.
Laetitia Pilkington was always in demand as a poet, ghostwriter, and, essentially, a stand-up comic. She survived in circumstances that would have, and did, ruin plenty of others, but she also endured plenty of hard times.
Eventually, she went back to Ireland — where she published her bestselling, tell-all memoirs. Drawing somewhat on the tradition of "scandal chronicles" by authors like Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she spills all of the tea. She exposes Jonathan Swift as the sadistic piece of shit he was (and apparently, she's the main source for Swift's biographers about what he was like, to this day.) And she spares absolute zero fucks for showing the nastiness of her ex-husband. Her memoirs became a huge sensation, being excerpted in popular magazines and reprinted in several editions.
The best part? She wrote her memoirs in two volumes, and took up subscriptions for the second volume before it was published. (It was kind of like Kickstarter: you could pay in advance to support the publication of a book, and eventually you’d get a copy, plus other rewards.) A lot of people chose to give her money to support the publication of Volume Two of her memoirs, in return for her not talking about their business.
She writes toward the end of the first volume of her memoirs:
I cannot, like a certain Female Writer, say, I hope if I have done nothing to please, [at least] I have done nothing to offend; for truly I mean to give both Pleasure and Offence: Lemon and Sugar is very pretty. I should be sorry to write a Satire which did not sting, nor will I ever write a Panegyrick on an Undeserver: If a Rogue should happen to be mine honest Friend, I owe him Silence: but that is the most he can expect.
And then she goes on to say, pretty explicitly, that if you don't want to find your dirty business in volume two, you'd better buy a fucking subscription. (A third volume was also published posthumously, thanks to her son, the opera singer John Carteret Pilkington.)
So yeah, I'm obsessed with Laetitia Pilkington, a woman who fell afoul of the sexual double standard and was forced, literally, to live by her wits. She survived thanks to the generosity of men like Cibber and Richardson — but also by being funnier, cleverer, and a better writer than shitheads like her ex-husband. And by being willing to be shameless in prose, even as she insisted that she'd never been a sinner in other ways.
If you want to know more about Laetitia, I highly recommend the book Queen of the Wits by Norma Clarke — it's a quick read, and highly entertaining. Clarke also writes a lot about her in The Rise and Fall of the Women of Letters, and there's a good section on her in A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789 by Susan Staves. There’s also a book I haven’t read yet called The Scandalous Memoirists by Lynda M. Thompson that deals with her a lot.
Music I Love Right Now
Back when clipping. had just released its incredible new cyberpunk album Dead Channel Sky, I went to see them in concert. One of their opening acts was a woman named Sharon Udoh who goes by Counterfeit Madison, and she also joined clipping. on stage in the middle of their set. Counterfeit Madison did an incredible set, playing keyboards and singing with no accompaniment, so of course I got everything on her Bandcamp page afterward. And… wow.
Her voice and her keyboard playing are incredible, but I'm also in awe of her songwriting chops. She’s done cover albums of Nina Simone and Sade, who are both clearly influences on her work, but she’s also worked with Tune-Yards, and her music reminds me a lot of Tune-Yards’ impossible-to-categorize blend of experimental music, jazz, pop. I’m still luxuriating in the wealth of material Counterfeit Madison has released (though sadly no new releases since 2019 WTF!) but currently my favorite is her 2017 album Opposable Thumbs, which features her on solo keyboards, but also in a trio like the one you can see in the video above. It’s chock full of soaring melodies and catchy arrangements that catch you off guard with moments of strangeness. Sort of reminds me a bit of This Temporary Ensemble by 9m88, a teeny bit. Anyway, please go check out Counterfeit Madison and give her all your money.