Word: hickey
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This merry memoir by a hard-shirking 18th century wrongdoer proves that the wicked and slothful do not always suffer for their sins. William Hickey, the son of a prosperous London attorney, gathered rosebuds by the armload for the greater part of his life, suffered no ill effects except those that could be cured by doses of mercury, and showed no inclination either to repent or boast when cooling blood gave him the leisure to write it all down...
...Hickey's blood heated early. A naughty servant, Nanny Harris, played bed games with him when he was still a child, and a year or so later, when a family friend gave him his first guinea, young William had no doubt about what to do with it. He hurried to the Covent Garden lodging of Nanny, who by this time conducted her bed games professionally. "I told her the strength of my purse," Hickey recalls, "and proposed going to the play, which she consenting to, there was I a hopeful sprig of 13, stuck up in a green...
...spend his days clerking in his father's law firm, he spent his nights charming London's nobs and snobs and captivating its kept women. His companions ranged from "Blasted Bet" Wilkinson, a "sad profligate girl" who was an ornament of Wetherby's, an inn where Hickey watched a battle between two half-naked women (he did not approve), to "Silver Tail," whore-in-residence at a sporting tavern, and Fanny Temple, the jeweled mistress of an elderly townsman...
Although most of his wenching was on the house, Hickey's capers nevertheless cost money. The young man's solution was embezzlement. In 1768, when William was 19, Father Hickey discovered that his son had boodled ?500 from the firm. After that, William behaved well for a time, but soon let himself be led back to Wetherby's, where false friends doped him and picked his pocket of nearly ?70 in company funds. The next morning, "I passed some minutes in a state little short of despair; I rung a bell for the purpose of ascertaining where...
Back to Silver Tail. This time Father Hickey was past placating; he followed the customary course for desperate, rich parents, and bought his son a cadet's place with the East India Company. William was delighted; not knowing which regiment he would serve with, he bought one uniform of each, and paraded them alternately in the weeks before his departure. But when he got to Madras, he found the humours of the place unhealthy and climbed back aboard the same boat that had brought him. In London again, he misbehaved as before, and was packed off again, this time...