2024/135: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock — Imogen Hermes Gowar

‘How was the play?’ asks Mrs Frost. ‘Did you take in even a line of it?’
‘Oh! I regret I watched a great deal too much of it, knowing I was only invited there for one night. I should have looked more about myself; I believe I missed some gossip. I must find a gentleman who has a good box, Eliza, and who will let me sit in it every night; that way I need pay no mind to the play unless there is really nothing else to see.’ [loc. 863]

Mr Hancock is a successful merchant, a childless widower who shares his Deptford house with his niece Sukie and Bridget the maid. He is a philanthropist and a thoroughly decent fellow. Mrs Angelica Neal is a successful courtesan, beautiful and profligate, sharing an apartment on Dean Street with her companion Mrs Frost. She is exuberant and likeable. They are brought together by spectacle: for one night, one of Mr Hancock's sea-captains returns from a long voyage to tell his employer that he has sold the ship he captained, and purchased with the proceeds a mermaid.

The mermaid (to modern eyes, I suspect, an obvious fake) is exhibited around London, restoring Mr Hancock's fortunes. He meets Angelica at one such exhibition staged by Angelica's former bawd, the redoubtable Mrs Chappell. Angelica is in the market for a new 'protector', her old duke having died: but then she meets the young and handsome Rockingham, and thinks no more of Mr Hancock. Will he bring her a mermaid? she asks, laughing.

This is very much a book of two halves, and at the midpoint it pivots into something darker and stranger and altogether less explicable. If the first half of the novel is represented by the orgiastic whores' dance that accompanies the first mermaid's exhibition -- and Mr Hancock's disgust at the licentiousness of that dance -- then the second half could be the brief exchange between Captain Jones and Mr Hancock: ‘I got you what you want ... I found her. But I think – I think perhaps you should not have her.’

Gowar's prose is measured and balanced, full of the rhythms of Georgian speech -- I was reminded at times of Pope -- and of fascinating period details (Angelica curling her hair in papers torn from a Wesleyan tract; a shell-lined grotto at a Blackheath mansion; the elaborate sea-nymph costumes, and sea-green pubes, of the dancing prostitutes; the condoms soaked in milk). The characters, even the minor ones, have aims and issues that enrich the atmosphere of the novel rather than simply furthering the plot. (Poor Polly, dark-skinned prostitute, escaping Mrs Chappell's luxurious tyranny to discover that life on the street is much, much worse.)

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (a thoroughly misleading title) explores freedom and oppression, commerce and love: and shows us how these can shade into one another. It was a splendid read, with delectable prose, and I look forward to rereading it.

I bought this in October 2019, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.