CHAPTER XII
LADY HAMILTON
PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES
She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione, the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or otherwise—probably otherwise—of all their authors. Because, at a period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose from nursemaid to title.
Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose momentarily as a lady's maid.
Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me work up by degrees to the happening itself.
She was a Lancashire lass, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why. Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact, she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with the legal right to one.
Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs. Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen. She had already learned to read—a rare accomplishment in those days for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as quickly as a Chinaman.
There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in sex-problem fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.