Cortesia
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«Madam,
I sit down to give you an
undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders.
Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous
stages of my life, out of which I emerg’d, at length, to the enjoyment of every
blessing in the power of love, health, and fortune to bestow; whilst yet in the
flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great
ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding, naturally not a despicable
one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tost
in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world than
what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who looking on all thought or
reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can,
or destroy it without mercy.
Hating, as I mortally do, all
long unnecessary preface, I shall give you good quarter in this, and use no
farther apology, than to prepare you for seeing the loose part of my life,
wrote with the same liberty that I led it.
Truth! stark, naked truth, is the
word; and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze
wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature,
careless of violating those laws of decency that were never made for such
unreserved intimacies as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge
of the originals themselves, to sniff prudishly and out of character at the pictures
of them. The greatest men, those of the first and most leading taste, will not
scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance
with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent decorations of the
staircase, or salon.
This, and enough, premised, I go
souse into my personal history. My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at
a small village near Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor, and,
I piously believe, extremely honest.
My father, who had received a
maim on his limbs that disabled him from following the more laborious branches
of country–drudgery, got, by making of nets, a scanty subsistence, which was
not much enlarg’d by my mother’s keeping a little day–school for the girls in
her neighbourhood. They had had several children; but none lived to any age
except myself, who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy.
My education, till past fourteen,
was no better than very vulgar; reading, or rather spelling, an illegible
scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work composed the whole system of it; and
then all my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice,
and the shy timidity general to our sex, in the tender stage of life when
objects alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then,
this is a fear too often cured at the expence of innocence, when Miss, by
degrees, begins no longer to look
on a man as a creature of prey
that will eat her.
My
poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars and her
little domestic cares, that she had spared very little of it to my instruction,
having,from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of guarding me
against any». In John Cleland, Fanny Hill, 1749, Wordsworth Editions, New edition edition,
2000, ISBN 978-184-022-417-7.
Cortesia de WordsworthE/JDACT
