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A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
January 14, 2007. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that renowned
brothel-keeper
Elizabeth Needham, depicted in
William Hogarth's
A Harlot's Progress (pictured), was pelted so severely in the
pillory that she died 3 days later? |
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The version I have heard previously is that those patches were from advanced syphillis, not pock-marks? Amity150 06:08, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
One thing to bear in mind, here, is that Wharton was a very, very strident Jacobite (see the article on Nathaniel Mist). Charteris, no doubt, was a rapist, panderer, and john, but I've never encountered solid links between Wharton and that business before. The sentence that mentions Charteris and Wharton has a note and reference: does the reference specifically nail down Wharton, or does it just suggest that Wharton is a reason Charteris can evade arrest for a long time? Geogre 12:03, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
That's interesting. You see, the infamous "Whig history" of the 18th century liked to paint with a broad brush when it came to Tories. Wharton was not just a Tory: he was a pain in the rear Jacobite. Therefore, for the people who wrote the history of the 18th century in the 19th, and chiefly Thomas Babbington Macaulay, he was no doubt a rake as well as a syphilitic madman. These are the people who gave us the "proof" that Swift was insane all his life because of his "undoubted" misanthropy, etc. That might seem quaint, except that the influence of that Whig history is everywhere. It took major researches to undo that stuff, and anywhere a source relies on old sources, you're likely to get it without independent verification. This is not to clear Wharton. For all I know he was a rapist every bit as bad as Charteris. It's just that it pays to ask questions with 18th c. history. (Seriously: the "Tale of a Tub was by Thomas Swift" surfaces as late as 1910. The "John Gay was a bitter hack" shows up as late as the 1890's. It took work to undo that Macaulay shadow.) Geogre 03:38, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Probably worthwhile mentioning that the patches and pock marks are due to syphilis, not smallpox? Just today, I re-read Swift's "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" (1733, a follow up to "The Lady's Dressing Room"), and it's all about those syphilitic sores. The same is true of the other plates in Hogarth's series, and "the dangers of syphilis" might well be the subtitle of the whole thing (and Rake's, for that matter, as Hogarth seemed to use the vice-borne disease as a great fear...as it was in an age before antibiotics and uncertain mercury cures). Now, we gentlemen of the world know what the pockmarks are, but perhaps, for a wider audience, it's worth mentioning in the first body paragraph what they would have signified. (One wonders about any medical archeology on the period and how frequently they discover spirochetic damage on the bones, but, then again, one wonders many things.) Geogre 02:56, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
We don't have an exact quotation here so it is hard to assess exactly what is meant. However, the term "patches" was not usually used to mean "pock" or "scab" or "sore". A patch was a little piece of black stuff that was stuck on like a "beauty mark". Of course, it generally masked something quite nasty. That is the reason why the "patches" in the picture look very black and obvious. If they were lesions of some sort on the skin, they would be unlikely to be quite so apparent as the artist has made them. Amandajm ( talk) 10:10, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
The two red wikilinks (
Mother Wisebourne and
Coronation Epistle have been speedily and
boldly removed delinked. It's not very fitting for a
feature article to have broken links.
Truthanado (
talk)
17:38, 28 December 2008 (UTC)