I have written before about the press speculation that followed the shocking and widely publicised suicide of Macintosh’s son, William, in December 1784. Amid the various causes on which the London press speculated, one that had escaped my attention until this week was the possibility that William had been spurned by a lover. According to a report in the London Chronicle (30 December 1784–1 January 1785), William had—on his return from India, where he had acquired a sum of money—”entered into all the fashionable vices of the times”. “During his race of folly,” the Chronicle continued, William “formed a connexion with a Miss Robertson, of the Cyprian order, who no sooner found his circumstances were in the wane, than she bid him adieu for one who was more likely to support her in style”. “This infidelity of his mistress,” the Chronicle concluded, “in great measure led him to commit this rash act; young and inexperienced, he had set his affections upon her, and foolishly concluded he should have a continuance of pleasure and happiness in the arms of a prostitute”.

Framed here as a gendered morality tale, William’s sad fate is seen to be the combined outcome of naivety and deception. It is a story, in the Chronicle‘s telling, that seems to combine the characteristic elements of a morality play: temptation, in the form of alcohol, gambling, and the company of women; a fall, in the form of debt and betrayal; and redemption, of a sort, in the form of a final “fatal act [designed] to save himself from shame, remorse, and upbraidings”. Accurate or not, it was an account that sought to give some logic to what otherwise seemed a tragic and illogical event.

The Miss Robertson, whom the Chronicle casts as the femme fatale in its account, would doubtless have been familiar to contemporary readers of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a catalogue or directory of London’s female sex workers, published annually in the second half of the eighteenth century. Given its ephemeral nature, not all editions of the List have survived, although new copies continue to come to light. Neither the 1784 nor 1785 editions of the List exist in publicly accessible collections, so I may never be able to learn more about the Miss Robertson on whom William “fixed his love, and lavished his fortune”. At the time of his death, the 1785 edition of the List was readying for publication on New Year’s day. Indeed, the day before William was buried at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, the Morning Herald carried an advertisement for the new List, copies of which could be had at no. 9 Little Bridges Street, a two-minute walk away on the other side of the piazza.