Such was their poverty, that when they were presented at Dublin Castle, Mrs. Peg Woffington, the actress, lent them dresses in which to appear. They made their début at the English Court in 1751, and from that time crowds used to come daily to the Park to have a sight of them. They were mobbed wherever they went; in fact, at the Drawing-Room when the younger one, Elizabeth, was presented on her marriage with the Duke of Hamilton, the ladies clambered on to chairs and tables to see her. Walpole writes:
“As you talk of our beauties, I shall tell you a new story of the Gunnings, who make more noise than any of their predecessors since the days of Helen, though neither of them, nor anything about them, has yet been teterrima belli causa. They went the other day to see Hampton Court; as they were going into the Beauty-room, another company arrived; the housekeeper said, ‘This way, ladies, here are the beauties.’ The Gunnings flew into a passion, and asked her what she meant; they came to see the palace, not to be shown as a sight themselves.”
They were fêted and feasted by everybody, and their own heads evidently became turned as well as other people’s. It was at Chesterfield House that the younger sister met the Duke of Hamilton, who fell in love at first sight, but the story of their romantic marriage with the curtain ring is well known. The elder one married Lord Coventry about a fortnight later. Both romances were a godsend to the gossiping habitués of Hyde Park, who, however, were plenteously supplied with dainty morsels such as they loved, in the form of secret marriages. It was the heyday of the Keith marriages at Mayfair Chapel, and at the Fleet. Tit-bits from the gaming-tables were told and passed from one another, until Mrs. Montagu, disgusted with the scandal in these meetings and the gambling that went on at parties, made a new departure in Society.
She was resolved to institute réunions where conversion and literature should entertain, and cards and gambling should never be seen. The result was that quite a new intellectual element appeared in Society. She brought such minds into contact as Mrs. Vesey, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Barbauld, Hannah More, Lucy Aikin, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, Johnson, Pulteney, Earl of Bath, the first Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Dr. Burney, Garrick, and Reynolds, and the force of such gatherings was bound to influence both men and women.
MARIA, COUNTESS OF COVENTRY, née GUNNING.
In Jane Austen and Her Times (G. E. Mitton), a delightful volume recently published, there is an interesting picture of the habits of the day:
“The epoch was one of change and enlargement in other than geographical directions. In the thirty years before Jane Austen’s birth an immense improvement had taken place in the position of women. Mrs. Montagu, in 1750, had made bold strokes for the freedom and recognition of her sex. The epithet ‘blue stocking,’ which has survived with such extraordinary tenacity, was at first given, not to the clever women who attended Mrs. Montagu’s informal receptions, but to her men friends, who were allowed to come in the grey or blue worsted stockings of daily life, instead of the black silk considered de rigueur for parties. Up to this time, personal appearance and cards had been the sole resources for a leisured dame of the upper classes, and the language of gallantry was the only one considered fitting for her to hear. By Mrs. Montagu’s efforts it was gradually recognised that a woman might not only have sense herself, but might prefer it should be spoken to her; and that because the minds of women had long been uncultivated they were not on that account unworthy of cultivation. Hannah More describes Mrs. Montagu as ‘not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw ... her form (for she has no body) is delicate even to fragility; her countenance the most animated in the world; the sprightly vivacity of fifteen, with the judgment and experience of a Nestor.’”
It is amusing to find that the struggles of a century and a half ago are still unsolved to-day, half the pleasure of visiting being knocked on the head by the uncertainty of the rightful proportion of the tips to follow. Jane Austen herself alludes to her difficulties:
“I am in great distress whether I shall give Richis half a guinea or only five shillings when I go away.”