Weird People Of History: Samuel Derrick

Samuel Derrick has done nothing wrong, ever, in his life

Samuel Derrick¹ was born in Ireland in 1724 to a family of tradespeople. He wanted to be a writer—one of the great Anglo-Irish writers, like Jonathan Swift.

Unfortunately for Derrick, his family disagreed. Derrick’s family felt that he should be a linen draper (that is, a person who sells linen).

At the time, apprenticeships cost money: the family would have to pay for the child’s food, housing, and training. A linen draping apprenticeship was one of the most expensive apprenticeships, costing more than the average middle-class family’s yearly income. Derrick’s family was well-to-do and could afford both a linen-draping apprenticeship for Derrick and a sizable inheritance. Utterly ungrateful for his family’s attempts to set him up well in life, Derrick neglected his linen draping and spent his time reading, writing poetry, and going to the theater.

Nevertheless, he did eventually manage to graduate his apprenticeship and become a linen draper. At twenty-two, he set off to London with a shipment of linen and intentions of draping it as quickly as possible in order to set about the real business of a poet’s life. Which, to be clear, was not writing poetry. It was finding a wealthy patron who would pay your rent while you wandered London contemplating whether truth was beauty and beauty truth.

By day, Derrick was an ordinary, if lazy, linen draper. By night, he transformed into one of the kings of Covent Garden. Covent Garden was near the theater. After seeing a play, wealthy gentlemen would go to its taverns to fuck, drink, and gamble. Covent Garden was a good place for an artist to network: it had actors and authors, publishers and theatrical managers, and most of all the wealthy gentlemen who might be willing to spare some cash to fund a young artist’s career.

Derrick had failed to reckon with one important fact. He had no talent. Not a jot. Not an iota. One of his poems is available online if you don’t believe me.

Fortunately for Derrick, actually publishing poetry was the lame and boring part of being an poet. The fun part was gossiping, drinking, gambling, fucking, and arguing about literature. And that didn’t require talent—it required charm, wit, and likability, all of which he had in spades.

Derrick took up acting, which was a bit risky. Acting was a scandalous profession, and he was still claiming to his family back home that he was a respectable linen draper with only a single life to his name. If Derrick had become a successful actor, the newspapers would have reported it in Dublin and unmasked his whole scheme. Fortunately, Derrick had no talent, and this dread fate was avoided.

At the age of 27, Derrick gave up on his “linen draper”/“theoretically a poet and actor but actually just a fun guy to hang out with” double life and moved to London permanently. From now on, he would make his living by his pen!

But Derrick’s utter lack of talent screwed him over, and the only writing work he could find was as a hack. Hacks worked for booksellers, who wanted a steady supply of new books and didn’t much care what was within the covers. Hacks wrote “true” confessions, sermons, and reviews; passed off their own fiction and poetry as translations from French or the minor works of famous writers; abridged other people’s travel and history books; and when necessity required just took someone else’s book and put a new title on it.

Hack work was not very well-paid, and Derrick was bad with money. When he had money, he immediately gambled and drank most of it away and spent the rest on sex workers. He loaned everyone he knew money, gave them gifts, and bought them food and drink. He dressed in expensive, fashionable clothing. (When his money was running low, he saved money by buying an expensive, fashionable coat and wearing holey shirts and underwear, which people wouldn’t necessarily see.)

Derrick managed to draw credit from shopkeepers by claiming that he had a large inheritance coming, but eventually his bills came due. When they did, he became homeless. He slept on at the homes of his friends when he could, and on the street when he couldn’t.

Derrick was ugly and often broke, but women loved him. His friends were baffled, but the reason is pretty obvious to a modern reader. He was charming, chivalrous, and unfailingly sweet. And Derrick was noted for his profound empathy for sex workers—very striking in a time period when the standard male behavior was “I don’t understand why the woman who is financially dependent on me and whom I’m going to dump in a year is looking for a replacement for me! Oh, the fickleness of women.”

Derrick was close friends with a number of sex workers. They shared tips about which gentlemen had more money than sense, and might be persuaded to spend too much on a sex worker or on preorders for a book of poetry that would never appear. He helped them when they needed a gentleman to ward off vengeful lovers or to appear respectable to the government. When he was broke, they often had sex with him for free. His friends who had wealthy lovers financially supporting them would feed him and then hustle him outside when their lovers showed up.

We have no historical record that Derrick committed rape, a fact that is not true of any other major presence in the book Covent Garden Ladies. While of course it’s impossible to prove a negative, we can legitimately hope for the best about his character.

There is no historical evidence about this but in my heart Samuel Derrick ate pussy and he ate it well.

One of Derrick’s friends was Robert Tracy, who was noted for his fortune, good looks, intelligence, and unbearable narcissism. After years of seducing sex workers and tossing them aside, Tracy got his comeuppance by falling in love with sex worker Charlotte Hayes. He was far too self-obsessed to notice that Hayes wasn’t in love with him. Hayes demanded that Tracy keep her in luxury-- fancy clothes, fine carriages, luxurious houses, excellent food, many servants-- and Tracy, besotten, agreed. Hayes would occasionally show up at Tracy's house, claim to be in a hurry, and only stay if he gave her a huge amount of money.

Hayes, of course, was in love with Samuel Derrick.

When a woman was in keeping (being supported by a wealthy lover), it was customary for her to have one or more "favorites" who might support her when her current partner left her. She was not supposed to have sex with her favorites, but everyone knew that all women in keeping did. Keepers expected fidelity, so jealousy and suspicion were common, and sometimes erupted into duels or other violence.

Fortunately for Hayes and Derrick, Tracy was so in love with Hayes that when it became common knowledge she was in love with Derrick he was like "no, couldn't be.” Indeed, in 1755, Derrick wrote a poem entitled "In Defence of Female Inconstancy" dedicated to Tracy about why it’s a good idea for women to cheat on their partners, and somehow Tracy failed to catch on. Derrick could cuck his friend in peace.

Hayes and Derrick lived together when Derrick was out of town. Hayes took Derrick to nice restaurants and presented Tracy with the bill. Derrick was Hayes's best friend and her protector. Other favorites knew that he was there, watching, and if they mistreated her he would Know. While we don’t know when they broke up, we know that they were friends afterward, and to the end of his life he called her the most beautiful woman in the world.

1756 was very possibly the worst year of Derrick’s life.

In 1756, Tracy died. To everyone’s surprise, he was enormously in debt, mostly because of gambling and Hayes. Hayes had used Tracy’s name to secure goods on credit from many shopkeepers; now, she was responsible for paying them. Even when she pawned all her luxurious goods, it wasn’t enough. She wound up in debtor’s prison. Desperate, Derrick pled with all her creditors to forgive her debts and tried to convince her former lovers to pay for her to at least have better conditions in prison. He could do nothing.²

Meanwhile, Derrick had another partner: Jane Lessingham, a sex worker who would eventually become one of London’s most famous comic actresses. Lessingham was criticized as unappreciative, amoral, indelicate, "a plump lascivious harlot", "a tasteless milksop", and "a common whore through and through."

Derrick loved her.

Derrick and Lessingham moved in together and she began calling herself Mrs. Derrick. They may have had a child together. Derrick was cut off by his middle-class friends, who thought that having a common-law marriage with a sex worker was really The Last Straw. Lessingham was very funny, and Derrick encouraged her to become an actress and financially supported her while she was looking for parts.

In 1756, Lessingham got a part in Othello, was widely acclaimed, and immediately dumped Derrick and ran off with a man who could keep her. Lessingham’s actual husband, who had been thought lost at sea, showed up alive and divorced her—a fact that was probably related to Lessingham’s new keeper being his commanding officer.

And Derrick’s family, who even to this day believed Derrick was a linen draper, sent a spy to London and discovered that Derrick was draping no linen and also in a common-law marriage with a prostitute. They disinherited him. All those debts he was going to pay off when his inheritance came? They all came due at once.

Derrick wound up in the sponging house, the prelude to debtors’ prison.

And then Derrick found his first and only source of literary success.

First, he wrote his memoirs, which he published under a pseudonym with the names of everyone involved changed. The witticisms, scandals, and love affairs chronicled in his memoirs were wildly popular. The regulars at Covent Garden wanted to figure out who’s who; everyone else loved the titillating frisson of reading about the scandals of the wealthy and powerful.

And then he wrote Harris’s List.

Jack Harris was a famous pimp known as the “Pimp General of England.” Derrick cut a deal with him: if Derrick paid him, Harris would agree to allow Derrick to write a book claiming to be Harris’s personal list of sex workers that he sent people to. Harris’s List gave a description of every sex worker Derrick knew about: the names they worked under, their addresses, their sexual specialties, their personalities, gossip about them. Using his encyclopedic knowledge of Covent Garden, Derrick made sure every detail was as accurate as possible. When Derrick wrote it, Harris’s List was funny, erudite, and horny as hell; it felt like he was at your elbow guiding you through the seedy side of London. For the non-London reader, it was a source of masturbatory fantasies; for the London reader, it was a guidebook.

The advance on Harris’s List, plus the profits from his memoirs, paid enough that Derrick could get out of debtors’ prison. Did Derrick learn his lesson and spend money more responsibly going forward?

Of course not. He bought the fanciest clothes, rented a house in the most fashionable location, gambled, hired sex workers, and bought everyone drinks, and a year later was back to hunting for patrons and free sex.

But Harris’s List improved Derrick’s financial position in one key way, which is that it needed to be kept up to date. Some sex workers joined the industry; other sex workers died or married; new gossip happened and had to be recorded. Derrick’s most successful book had a new edition every year, and so his income managed to keep more closely to his spending.

With his higher level of income, Derrick was able to spend more time among the upper classes, pursuing patrons. He didn’t produce any notable literary works, but he nevetheless managed to persuade people that they should give him money. Derrick was as delightful to the women of the gentry as he was to sex workers. His reputation was flawless among women and the less socially aware men: charming, poetic, fashionably dressed, polite, a gentleman. One earl was so endeared by him that he decided Derrick was a fine upstanding noble gentleman who should be given a position in the church. (Derrick said no.)

Bath was a resort town beloved of the upper classes. Its Master of Ceremonies, elected by the wealthy habitues of Bath, made eight hundred pounds a year to lead the first dance every night, enforce etiquette rules, and reprimand inappropriately dressed women. After Bath’s former Master of Ceremonies died in 1761, the politics about who to replace him with were so frustrating that one man nominated Samuel Derrick as a joke.

The women thought this is a great idea! Samuel Derrick was a wonderful person!

There was no good way to explain to the women that the man who wrote poems in praise of the beauty of their daughters had done the same thing about fallen women. Or that he used to sleep on the street. Or that he was still writing Harris’s List, when women weren’t even supposed to know that sex workers existed. Derrick also got key support from the Irish aristocracy (because he was Irish) and from his rakish friends (because this was the funniest thing ever).

And so, for the last eight years of his life, Samuel Derrick was Bath’s Master of Ceremonies. By all accounts, he was very good at it.

Between the Master of Ceremonies job and Harris’s List, Derrick had about two thousand pounds a year, as much money as a low-end Austen character. Surely, you would think, he would now be able to exercise financial responsibility. Surely he would not be in horrible debt.

Absolutely not. Instead he hired a footman and then superfluously crossed the street while other people were watching so that they could see that the footman had to follow him.

In 1769, at the age of 45, Samuel Derrick died. While the cause isn’t known, it’s probably because of complications related to STIs, alcoholism, and a history of homelessness. He died in debt, unable to even pay for a funeral.

Those who loved him honored his memory in the way he would have wanted: dirty jokes. Gossip went around Covent Garden and Bath that he’d died of an aphrodisiac overdose he’d taken to keep up with his much younger girlfriend. A collection of his best dirty jokes, Derrick's Jokes, was published.

In his will, he left all his unfinished writing to Charlotte Hayes. His creditors, knowing he had no talent whatsoever, assumed that this gift had no value but the sentimental. But among his unfinished writing was the latest draft of Harris’s List—a gift of more than a thousand pounds to the woman he loved.

The Covent Garden Ladies. By Hallie Rubenhold. Published 2020. 360 pages. $17.

1. My source for this book is Covent Garden Ladies, written by historian Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold has a bad habit of saying “it must have been…” or “we can suppose that…” for claims about historical figures’ thought processes that we have no way of knowing. I have in this blog post attempted to stick to information that we have historical documentation for, but it’s possible that some “we can suppose that….”s slipped through my notes and made it into the blog post.

2. While Hayes departs our story at this juncture, she did get out of prison. She married, founded one of the first high-class brothels in London, became wealthy, and made a serious effort towards joining the gentry. Unfortunately, after the death of her only daughter, she became a severely depressed recluse.