Talk:Elizabeth Needham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Elizabeth Needham is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do. | |||
 |
An entry from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on January 14, 2007. | |||
|
||||
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
 FA |
This article has been rated as FA-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ] | ||
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Sexology and sexuality, an attempt to build a comprehensive guide to human sexuality on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. If you are new to editing Wikipedia visit the welcome page to become familiar with the guidelines. | ||
| FA |
This article has been rated as FA-class on the quality scale. | ||
| Low | This article has been rated as low-importance on the importance scale. | ||
 |
This article is supported by the Sex work task force. (with unknown importance) | ||
|
Assessment comments
|
|||
[edit] Patches on her face
The version I have heard previously is that those patches were from advanced syphillis, not pock-marks? Amity150 06:08, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
- I think our current text is being diplomatic. Until the small pox outbreak a few years later, pock marks would have been from cankers, and Needham would have to have the disease. Given that women take longer to get visible signs, should would have a very advanced case. Geogre 11:59, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
- I merely went for the more general "pock-marked" as although it is undoubtedly syphillis (given Hogarth's exuberant use of it in his other works) I couldn't find a reliable source that actually came out and said that. What I shouldn't have done, of course, is link it to the too specific pox virus (so I've unlinked it). Yomanganitalk 01:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Duke of Wharton?
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)
- It specifically mentions Wharton as a customer (ahead of Charteris), but evasion of arrest due to his influence is only hinted at. I would have preferred another source to back it up, but the material on Needham is pretty thin. Yomanganitalk 01:48, 17 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)
- And now best evidence suggests that Wharton was a kid. He came into money and title at 18, hated his father's "piety," hated the tutors he had been braced to, who were Puritans, and so went off like a loaded spring, trying to out-rake the rakes. Dead of drink at about, what, 38? So, yes, he was almost surely a customer of Needham, and probably every other brothel in London. (Anyone who has read London Journals of Boswell, and Boswell is a proper, moral man, won't be shocked. Boswell goes through 8 prostitutes a week, it seems like. 'Got an urge? Get a prostitute' seems like his philosophy.) Geogre 12:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Pocketa pocketa
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)
