AngloFiles TGIF: Mrs. Cornelys Brings Nightclubbing to Georgian London

Helping the High-Born Get Down

It’s February 27, 1770. England is riding high in the reign of George III, and Viennese-born courtesan and entrepreneur Teresa Cornelys is teaching Londoners how to party.

Streaming between heavy drapes on the windows of Cornelys’s rented mansion in Soho Square, the light of nearly 4,000 candles drips like pearls on the streets below. Thousands of commoners have lined the roadway for a glimpse of her socially connected – but still paying – guests. Some 800 of what she airily calls the “principal nobility and gentry of this kingdom” hold tickets for a masquerade ball due to start inside at nine o’clock.

Soho Square was getting tatty when Mrs. Cornelys moved in, but the Fashionable Set would "slum" to attend her gigs.

Arriving in carriages or sedan chairs carried by footmen, these bejeweled, bewigged and elaborately costumed “subscribers” jostle their way inside. Space quickly grows scarce in reception rooms clad in mirrors, satin and gilt, filled with tables bearing sweetmeats prepared by the Prince of Wales’s chef and the music of a hundred hired musicians. Dancing, cards and gossip will last well into the night.

The monthly parties held by Cornelys at Carlisle House are hot, crowded and pricey. Given the throngs of gapers, hecklers and pickpockets outside, they’re also hard to reach and even dangerous to depart from. Complaining about them in local gossip sheets — the Gawker.com of their day — has become a new form of chic.

Still, Society can’t stay away, and tonight is no different.

Our Hostess

Mrs. Cornelys knew P.R., getting her parties written up in the 1770s versions of Gawker.com.

With its two million residents, Georgian London found itself Europe’s largest city in the 1760s, morphing from a cloistered society of coffeehouses and salons into a red-hot center of European culture. If England’s throbbing capital was a forerunner of go-go 1980s New York, then Teresa Cornelys was its Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager combined and her paid “entertainments” the Studio 54 of their day.

Like the flashy disco’s founders, she offered stodgy mercantilists a sexy new venue and stoked an obsession with exclusivity — all with similarly sensational, and scandalous, results. A master of public relations despite her poor grasp of English, Cornelys blanketed London papers with news of her musicales and supper balls and the swells who attended.

For all her successes, though, “Mrs.” Cornelys (a name she borrowed from a Dutch lover) hid precarious finances and a scandalous past behind her satin window drapes.

Though married more than once she was a single mother when she arrived in London in her late 30s, trailing a string of aliases and lovers across western Europe. (Casanova fathered one of her children.) Despite grand ambitions, she quickly failed as a concert singer, falling back on her talent for stagecraft, instead, to remake herself as a social impresario. If her parties failed, she undoubtedly feared, only dire choices stood between her and penury.

Horace Walpole: "At first, they scandalised ..."

In 1761, Cornelys leased the onetime home of the Earls of Carlisle for £180 a year, feeding the London papers with every detail of thousands of pounds she lavished on upgrades. The gambit worked: Before the decade was out, she was mistress of three dozen servants and owner of a country estate. Influential pundit Horace Walpole described her expanded townhouse as “a fairy palace,” and wrote of her parties: “At first they scandalized, but soon drew in both righteous and ungodly.”

In a pattern that looks all too familiar today, however, Cornelys was highly leveraged and prone to cash shortfalls. She soon earned her a reputation for stiffing contractors. As her career wore on, she came to know all too well the inside of London’s bankruptcy courts.

Toward her titled and affluent guests, however, she turned only her gayest, most obsequious smiles.

The Scene: Why you wish you’d been there

–18^th-c ballad on a masked ball

Former home of the Earls of Carlisle, today the site of St. Patrick's church, Teresa Cornelys's Soho Square mansion was the Studio 54 of its day.

Cornelys instructed guests to proffer their tickets in the parlour before proceeding to the “Blue-room,” then the “Red-room,” the “Tea-room,” “Stage-room,” and so on. Her main chambers, “The Gallery” and “China Room,” she lined with mirrors and Doric columns around windows swathed in blue and yellow satin bunting under a ceiling adorned with stuccoed designs.

The guests entered decorously enough for the evening’s masquerade: “Lady Waldegrave” was there with “Lady Pembroke, the Duchess of Hamilton, Mrs. Crewe, Mrs. Hodges, Lady Almeria Carpenter, &c.,” we read in the 1895 account, Soho and Its Associations, by Edward F. Rimbault.

Sir W.W. Wynne came as a Druid, and Sir R. Phillips disguised himself as a chimney sweep. A more daring guest dressed as Adam, “in flesh-coloured silk, with an apron of fig-leaves.” Miss Monckton, “daughter to Lord Galloway, appeared in the character of an Indian Sultana … The seams of her habit were embroidered with precious stones.” There was a Friar, a Quack Doctor and a Vestal Virgin. The Duke of Devonshire, for all that, came as Himself.

Things heated up with the arrival the French “mechanician” Joseph Merlin, servant to the Spanish Ambassador residing across the square. He arrived bearing a fiddle and his latest invention, a “pair of skaites, contrived to run on wheels.”

The technology was still in beta, however: “Not having provided the means of retarding his velocity” — i.e. brakes — “he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely,” Rimbault phlegmatically recounts.

The Scene: Why you’re glad you missed it

–from the ballad

Future novelist Fanny Burney, still a wide-eyed ingénue, had expected much of her first evening at Carlisle House, given all she’d heard about the exalted company and “splendour of the illuminations and embellishments.” But alas, she lamented, “The rooms were so full and so hot that nobody attempted to dance.”

Worse than the heat may have been the smell. Bathing was still viewed as an indulgence, if not an outright risk, in 18th-century England. Yet the slew of powders and potions used to mask the body’s natural bouquet may have hurt more than they helped.

A letter to the Public Advertiser described a miasma at Carlisle House combining “the Effluvia of Essence Bottles, perfumed Heads and Handkerchiefs, together with all the natural and acquired odors issuing in warm Weather and a great Crowd from fine Ladies and Gentlemen who fare sumptuously every day.”

For those who nevertheless retained an appetite, Cornelys banquet tables sometimes failed to satisfy. “The feast of the night was calculated rather to gratify the eye than the stomach,” griped one attendee.

If the crush of humanity indoors failed to quash partygoers’ enthusiasm, the gauntlet in the streets outside might have. Ogling the rich was a pasttime of poor teenaged servant girls and their swains — nearly 10 percent of the city’s populace — who were prone to wandering the streets at night looking for excitement. Gawkers would shine  lanterns directly into coaches, sometimes even breaking the window glass, to get a better look at those inside. Political agitators weren’t above chalking their slogans on carriage sides.

In classified ads, Cornelys practically begged the drivers of hackney cabs to use a side gate so ladies in their carried chairs could go directly to her entrance and descend unmolested. Meanwhile, “pickpockets appear to have been very busy,” Rimbault records, with “Ladies’ pockets cut off their dresses in great numbers” and rifled gentlemen’s purses piling up in corners.

Not everyone visited Carlisle House twice, even with free admission. “We hear that two Great Personages were complimented with two tickets for Monday night’s masquerade, which they very politely returned,” one newspaper sniggered.

The Aftermath

As Limelight followed Studio 54, Cornelys’s showy success gave rise to competition. Business rivals blew the whistle on her for hosting operas without an official license, while contractors hauled her into court over unpaid bills. But it was the potent weapon of Moralism that finally brought her down. In 1772, writes Rimbault,

Mrs. Cornelys had to appear before the magistrate’s bench at Bow Street to answer the charge, ‘That she does keep and maintain a common disorderly house, and did permit and suffer divrse loose, idle, and disorderly persons, as well men as women, to be, and remain during the whole night, rioting and otherwise misbehaving themselves…

In other words, the posh parties were getting out of hand. Walpole gleefully reported the verdict:  â€œ[T]he Bench of Justices, less soothable by music than Orpheus’s beasts, have pronounced against her.” Mrs. Cornelys declared the first of several bankruptcies in 1772. When the contents of Carlisle House were auctioned off later that year, admission was sold.

In the years that followed, Cornelys tried to revive her party business, but she had lost the froth of novelty. Subscriptions dwindled as her fashionable patrons drifted to fresher, more of-the-moment clubs, like Almack’s (pictured at top). In what seems to have been a last-ditch inspiration, in 1795, Cornelys opened a tea house featuring “asses’ milk.” The results were all that you’d expect of such a venture.

She died at 74, alone, in debtors’ prison.

SOURCES

FOR MORE on Georgian lifestyles

Not-So-Nice Work: Prostitution in 18th-Century London, at AngloFiles.

London Debating Societies, 1776-1799, Donna T. Andrew