An Eighteenth Century Spectre - by Katherine Langrish

Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton

“Sir,” said Dr Johnson to his friend Dr Adams, “it is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day.” 

 

He was speaking of the mysterious circumstances attending the death of Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton, known in true Georgette Heyer fashion as ‘the wicked Lord Lyttelton’, born 30 January 1744, and died - as we shall see - on the night of the 27^th November 1779.

 

Lyttelton was educated at Eton and Oxford, a charming and talented boy; too charming and talented for his own good, perhaps, for he became a notorious rake.  He fought duels, and ‘excelled the ordinary model of young debauchery everywhere’. He married to pay his gambling debts and then ran off to Paris with a barmaid; he entered the House of Commons in 1768 as MP for Bewdley, but was unseated for bribery the following year; he disappeared again to the Continent; but when his father died in 1774 he returned and took his seat in the Lords where, to secure his support, ministers bought him over with a lucrative sinecure – something which would pay him money and for which he would have to do little or no work – the ancient post of Chief Justice of Eyre beyond the Trent. 

 

Four years later, however, on the 25^th November 1779, (possibly disappointed by his failure to obtain another sinecure and become a Keeper of the Privy Seals) Lyttelton changed sides and denounced Government and Court in a vitriolic speech. Horace Walpole comments ‘Lyttelton … has turned against the Court.'  Regarding his existing sinecure, Lyttelton said, ‘Perhaps I may not keep it long.’

 

He was correct.  By midnight on November 27^th, he was dead.

 

On the night before his speech – the night of Wednesday 24^th November – Lyttelton saw a ghost which told him he would die within three days. Between the Wednesday and the Friday, he mentioned this to various friends and acquaintances: Rowan Hamilton, and one Captain Ascough, who told a lady, who told another lady named Mrs Thrale who wrote it down in her diary on Sunday 28^th November, the morning after Lyttelton’s midnight death:

 

Yesterday a lady from Wales dropped in and said that she had been at Drury Lane on Friday night.  “How,” I asked, “were you entertained?” “Very strangely indeed!  Not with the play, though, but the discourse of a Captain Ascough, who averred that a friend of his, Lord Lyttelton, has SEEN A SPIRIT, who warned him that he will die in three days.  I have thought of nothing else since.”

 

Horace Walpole, writing to a friend on Monday November 29^th, says:

 

Lord Lyttelton is dead suddenly.  …The story is given out, that he looked ill, AND HAD SAID HE SHOULD NOT LIVE THREE DAYS; that he had gone to his house in Epsom… with a caravan of nymphs; and on Saturday had retired before supper to take rhubarb; returned, supped heartily, went into the next room and died in an instant. 

 

Within a short time, however, Walpole has picked up on the gossip around town: Lyttleton had claimed to have seen a robin – or some other bird – which changed into a woman and delivered him a death warning.  By December 11^th Walpole writes with dry humour to another friend that ghost stories are back in fashion!

 

Lord Lyttelton’s vision has revived the taste; though it seems a little odd that an APPARITION should despair of getting access to his lordship’s bed, in the shape of a young woman, without being forced to use the disguise of a robin red-breast.

 

The ‘nymphs’ to whom Walpole refers in his first letter were the three Misses Amphlett; residing with their ‘chaperon’ Mrs Flood at Lyttelton’s house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square.  A few months later, in February 1780, Lord Westcote, Lyttelton’s uncle, questioned them, and wrote:

 

On November 25^th, at breakfast in Hill Street, Lord Lyttelton told the young ladies and their chaperon that he had had an extraordinary DREAM.

 

He seemed to be in a room which a bird flew into; the bird changed to a woman in white, who told him he should die in three days.

 

He ‘did not much regard it, because he could in some measure account for it; for that a few days before he had been with Mrs Dawson, when a robin red-breast flew into her room.’  On the morning of Saturday [the 27^th] he told the same ladies that he was very well and believed he should ‘BILK THE GHOST’. On that day – Saturday – he …went to bed after eleven, ordered rolls for breakfast, and, in bed, ‘died without a groan’ as his servant was disengaging him from his waistcoat.

 

Myself, I'm particularly taken with the juxtaposition of the caravan of nymphs and the rhubarb, and with Walpole's crack about the spirit not really needing to disguise itself as a robin to get into Lyttelton's bed... There was no inquest. 

And there's a postscript: on the fatal night, 27^th November 1779, Mr Miles Peter Andrews, a friend of Lyttelton’s who was staying at Dartford, was woken when his bed-curtains were pulled open and he was confronted by Lord Lyttelton ‘in his robe de chambre and nightcap’. Suspecting a practical joke, Andrews rang the bell for his servant, and on turning back found Lord Lyttelton gone.  The house and garden were searched in vain, and about four in the afternoon of the next day, a friend arrived with news of Lyttelton’s death. The event was recorded in the next number of the Scots Magazine, December 1779.

 

But let us return to Dr Johnson, with whom we began, speaking of the mysterious affair with his friend Dr Adams.  Johnson was famously afraid of death.  He continues, “I heard it with my own ears from his uncle Lord Westcote. I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe it.”

 

Dr Adams replies (doubtless alluding to the Scriptures), “You have evidence enough – good evidence, which needs no support.”

 

“I like to have more!” Dr Johnson growls.

 

 

Picture credit:  Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton, by Richard Brampton, circa 1775, National Portrait Gallery, London (Wikimedia Commons)

A Brief History of Writers’ Misery by Janie Hampton

Many people aspire to it, but the job of writing is not easy, and never has been. ‘The most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions,’ said the Victorian biographer John Morley of writing. 

Juvenal warned in the first century AD that ‘An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.’

William Caxton 1422-91

William Caxton's celebrated the invention of printing by publishing The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the 15th century equivalent of The Little E-Book of Text Messages. Publishers soon cottoned on that people really wanted something a bit more lively and an early best-seller was Merry Tales of the Madmen of Gotham.  Martin Luther was not keen on the opportunity given to non-religious books: ‘The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity; others for the sake of lucre and gain.’

Dr Johnson was quite clear on the matter: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’

Dr Johnson 1709-84

Even Gustave Flaubert said, ‘To practise art in order to earn money, flatter the public, spin facetious or dismal yarns for reputation or cash – that is the most ignoble of professions.’

Louis XIV didn’t like books, ‘I see no point in reading’; and Jean Jacques Rousseau agreed, ‘For they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand’. When Edward Gibbon finished writing The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, he knelt on bended knee and presented a copy to HRH the Duke of Gloucester. ‘Another damned, thick, square book!’ said The Duke. ‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh Mr. Gibbon?’

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1771-1845) was a barrister, a Whig politician and so prolific an author that Sydney Smith said of him, 'He not only overflows with learning, but stands in the slop. He is like a book in breeches. He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.’

Elizabeth Montagu 1718-1800

Mrs Elizabeth Montagu was immensely rich, well educated and loved parties – she once gave a breakfast in her feather-lined boudoir to 700 guests. After she became bored of card-playing, she only invited people who liked books, such as Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole. Rousseau was not amused by these early Book Reading Groups which encouraged women: ‘Every blue stocking will remain a spinster as long as there are sensible men on earth.’

Mary Russell Mitford  1787-1855 

Women writers have never had it easy, even from each other. Mary Russell Mitford wrote in 1815 that before her success, Jane Austen was ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly ever and was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen.’ After her success poor Jane ‘stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn, piece of wood. She is still a poker - but a poker of whom everyone is afraid.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806–1861 

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of  Omar Khayyam, wrote to a friend ‘Mrs Browning’s death is rather a relief to me. A woman of Great Genius I know, but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and the children; and perhaps the Poor. Except in such things as Little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better.’  The letter was read by Robert Browning 28 years later. Understandably upset, he wrote a poem to the now dead Fitzgerald, threatening to spit at him with the lips that had once kissed his beloved wife.

Lucile-Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, 1804–1876, was described by Nietzsche as ‘a great cow full of ink.’ 

Amanda McKittrick Ros 1860–1939

Supporting the argument against women writers, the American critic George Jean Nathan believed that ‘perhaps the saddest lot than can befall mortal man is to be the husband of a lady poet.’ Sadly, Amanda McKittrick Ros, the wife of a stationmaster in County Antrim, did not help. Mark Twain considered her 1897 novel Irene Iddesleigh ‘one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.’ The novelist Barry Pain failed to notice she had no sense of humour when he reviewed it as ‘a thing that happens once in a million years’, and mockingly termed it ‘the book of the century.’Mrs Ros took such a dislike to him that in her next book the whole introduction was devoted to Pain’s appalling character and defective personality. She then made a point of tracking down her critics and loved to see if she could ‘wring from the critic-crabs their biting little bits of buggery.’

Eric Blair alias George Orwell 1903-50

Maybe writing is bad for us. 

George Orwell died only four years after announcing: 

‘Writing is a horrible, exhausting struggle, 

like a long bout of some painful illness.’




www.janiehampton.co.uk

Interview with Rebecca Mascull by Lydia Syson

It's a great pleasure to welcome Rebecca Mascull to the blog today. Her new novel, SONG OF THE SEA MAID, is out this month and tells the haunting story of Dawnay Price, an eighteenth-century anomaly. Dawnay is an educated foundling who overcomes her origins to become a natural philosopher, setting sail for Portugal to develop her scientific theories.  She discovers rather more than she anticipated, not least about herself. Tomorrow, if you're lucky, you can win a copy of the book. This interview should whet your appetite. 

Rebecca Mascull (photo by Lisa Warrener)

Like her heroine, Rebecca lives by the sea, but in the east of England, with her partner Simon and their daughter Poppy. She has worked in education and has a Masters in Writing. Her first novel THE VISITORS tells the story of a deaf-blind child in Victorian Kent and was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2014. She is currently working on her third novel for Hodder.

You weave into a single, compelling narrative a vast and fascinating array of different material: naval battles, foundling hospitals, scurvy, scientific voyages, religion, publishing, early theories of evolution and one huge and memorably described eighteenth-century event which I don’t want to give away here. I wonder where this all started for you.  Was there was a single image, or moment, or historical character that set you off?  And why did you choose that exact year?  (Dawnay Price is born in about 1732.)

The idea for this novel has been with me for years and in all that time I would just call it Science Novel! It all started with the What If scenario: what if someone in ages past had a brilliant scientific idea, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, nobody ever heard about it. As my character’s idea was linked to the theory of evolution, I thought it might be interesting to set it a good hundred years or so before Darwin, in order to explore how some groundbreaking ideas are present in the history of thought before they are brought to fruition by one seemingly isolated genius. It was just a hunch, but when I started to research the history of 17th and 18th-century science, I discovered this to be absolutely true.
Then I had to decide when in the 18th-century I wanted Dawnay to live. I knew there was going to be a naval battle, so I looked into wars in that period and it turns out that Europe were at war for almost the entire century! I also knew that the Napoleonic wars have been done quite extensively in novels, so I fancied finding an aspect of 18th-century war that was less widely known. By watching Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, (which I sought out to experience his beautiful authentic lighting – the “huddle and glow” of the 18th-century), I stumbled across the Seven Years’ War, which I then realised was also satirised in Voltaire’s Candide, which I’d also just read for research. 

Once I’d chosen that period, and started to read about science and society at that time, the rest of the ingredients just fell into place.

Research photo: rigging from the age of sail
seen on the Cutty Sark at Greenwich

The few women who did manage to engage in scientific activity during the Enlightenment – and they are hardly household names -  generally seem to have come from wealthy, privileged backgrounds, but Dawnay starts the story a nobody with nothing, entirely alone in the world.  Why was that important?

We all know money talks. It’s easier to be heard when you’ve got a bit of capital and position behind you. Being heard and recorded by history often requires a certain set of fortunate circumstances for the speaker. Those who are disenfranchised at any point in history usually don’t get heard. In Dawnay’s era, that list would include the poor and women, particularly poor women. In my 20s, it occurred to me that there were very few women in the history of great endeavours and I knew instinctively that this could not be because of their capabilities. I assumed it was because of their lack of education and that such ambitions would have been discouraged for females. What I’ve realised now is that there were women doing and thinking extraordinary things, it’s just that no one bothered to record them. Even wealthy female scientists were not taken seriously by many, were banned from attending and certainly speaking at scientific events, and some even had their work attributed to male colleagues or relations. If you were poor and had no position in society, those problems were compounded hugely. Thinking this through, I’ve come to believe that many great ideas may have been lost in the history of thought because the thinkers did not have the right credentials.

And from a narrative point of view, I like my protagonists to have something to fight against! How dull it would be if everything came easily to Dawnay…

Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749),
French mathematician & physicist

You’ve written a first person present tense narrative, which takes Dawnay from very early childhood to her mid-twenties. . .was this structure and point of view a very obvious choice for you, and how did you go about establishing Dawnay’s distinctive voice?  Did you find it a struggle to get the right balance between readability, authenticity and pastiche? (It certainly doesn’t read as a struggle, I hasten to add.)

I did experiment with different voices when I started writing the first draft. I tried third person and past tense, but I just had this image of the little girl in the street with her brother stealing pies, and it felt like an urgent situation, in which the past tense third person didn’t seem to fit. Once I changed it to first person present tense, it just took on a life of its own and then I was off.  Also, that idea of hidden histories and silenced voices being heard meant that it felt imperative that Dawnay tell her own story.

I read a lot of fiction and non-fiction written in the C18th and made notes on the conventions of prose in that era. I decided that to include them all would probably alienate a modern reader; for example, some of them are very distracting, such as the use of capitalising the initial letter e.g. Thus my Pride, not my Principle, my Money, not my Virtue, kept me Honest. In the end, I chose to give a flavour of 18th-century prose through Dawnay’s choice of vocabulary and sentence structure, rather than bash the reader over the head too much authenticity.

Why the title?  Was it your first choice?  (I wondered afterwards if you’d considered calling it ‘The Orphan Myth’, the title of Dawnay’s unpublishable paper on her theories of the origins of humankind, an idea before its time.)

The history of this novel’s title is quite a chequered one! Whilst writing, it was called The Edge of the Map and was submitted to the publisher with that title. It’s mentioned in the novel a couple of times and sums up many of the themes. But it was felt that it didn’t have the right appeal for the audience, so then we had to think up another. The Orphan Myth was indeed an early possibility – well spotted! But again it was generally felt that it had a mournful sound to it and therefore didn’t really suit the narrative – and had those awkward ph/th sounds! We went through many ideas, with just about everyone in the know chipping in different suggestions, mostly revolving around mermaids and caves. Then I corresponded with Dr Jane McKay – who lectured on mermaids – and she suggested I look at T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, which includes ‘”sea-girls” and the “mermaids singing each to each”. I also consulted my trusty Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs and found a line from Shakespeare: the “sea-maid’s music” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). It was such an evocative and archaic word for mermaids and avoided, I felt, the negative connotations of them i.e. luring men to their death, yet also being rather girly and, of course, fairy tale-like. So, sea maid it was – and then I realized that it would fit rather beautifully if the cave painting could be seen as a song about our past, and that Dawnay too was a kind of sea maid (swimming and discovering) and that the whole novel was her song. Lastly, I think it just sounds lovely too!

How did the process of writing and research affect your understanding of the role played by imagination in scientific discovery?

That’s a tremendously interesting question! I don’t have a scientific mind myself, though I have always been fascinated by science and wished I had the brain to understand it! Yes, I do wonder if scientists and artists have that one thing in common - that they have to imagine truths before they necessarily find the evidence to support them. My brother David (who has that scientific brain I lack) has always told me a lot about theoretical physics and such things, and it’s caught my imagination many times, with the part played by theories and ideas, for which the finding of evidence is incredibly difficult. So, I do think some areas of science require a creative way of thinking to come up with the ideas in the first place.

The same is true of palaeontology - the evidence is so scant and hard to find, that many theories have come into being over the years based on little evidence other than our own imagination of what these bones may represent. What I discovered in my research, is that this reliance on imagination can sometimes lead to a terrible bias towards the discoverer e.g. in researching early humans and, in particular, cave paintings, I found a distinct bias towards males as artists, and males in general as the leaders of evolution. This really pissed me off!!

 Very recent studies have suggested that females may have been responsible for much cave art that we see – one very sensible suggestion is that, even if males may have been responsible for much of the animal hunting, it is likely that females may have been responsible for butchery, and therefore had an intimate knowledge of animal physiology that would make them the ideal artists of the animals we see in cave paintings. This is all theoretical, of course, but then much of what we know about early humans is based on assumptions and theory, rather than hard fact. I just think we need to redress the bias a little bit… For example, you may have noticed I don’t use the term early Man and instead refer to early humans – don’t even get me started on THAT one…

Hand print at Pech Merle

Were you able to travel to the settings of the book yourself, and how did you come up with the idea of Dawnay’s cave (which has intriguing echoes of King Solomon’s Mines…)?

In terms of London, I did visit the Coram orphanage Museum and also Dr Johnson’s house, to get a feel for 18th-century London. Further afield, I have spent time in both Spain and Portugal - I travelled to both countries as an 18-year-old and again spent time in Spain when I studied Spanish as part of my degree. I am a total Hispanophile - I love Spanish literature, film, music and art, as well as its history (and I know we share a love of the Spanish Civil War, Lydia!), so it was a delight to set parts of the novel in this region.
Dawnay’s cave itself is a product of my imagination. However, I did visit ancient cave art in northern Spain as a student and saw the handprints of early humans in red paint on the cave walls and was so moved. It has always stayed with me. I researched the many forms of cave art and found examples of mermaids from different cultures on the walls of caves, as well as examples of seals and fish from cultures living close to the sea. So, it is my own invention but it is grounded in existing cave art. And new caves are being discovered, so who knows what else is out there waiting for us to find…?

Berlenga Island

Your debut novel was set in the late nineteenth century, this a century earlier.  Can we expect a seventeenth-century setting for your next book?

Ah, well, I have to say I’m not as organised as that! My brain doesn’t work very chronologically - I’d say I have a butterfly mind that flits from subject to subject. I’m currently working on Book 3 and it’s actually set in the early 20th century, beginning in 1909 and I plan to end it in 1919. I have a title, setting and an idea in mind for Book 4, but I’m really not sure when that one is going to be set - possibly 19th-century, possibly World War II… who knows! It’ll all come out in the wash.

Don't forget the competition tomorrow.  You can find out more about Rebecca and her work, and read interviews with other authors about the craft of novel writing, at her website: http://rebeccamascull.tumblr.com/ 

The Death of a Peer, or, Lord Lyttelton's Ghost - by Katherine Langrish

Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton

“Sir,” said Dr Johnson to his friend Dr Adams, “it is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day.”

He was speaking of the mysterious circumstances attending the death of Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton, known - in true Georgette Heyer fashion - as ‘the wicked Lord Lyttelton’, born 30 January 1744, and died, as we shall see, on the night of the 27^th November 1779.

Born with every advantage, Lyttelton was educated at Eton and Oxford, a charming and talented boy: too charming and talented for his own good, perhaps, for he became a notorious rake.  He fought duels, and ‘excelled the ordinary model of young debauchery everywhere’. He married to pay his gambling debts and then ran off to Paris with a barmaid; he entered the House of Commons in 1768 as MP for Bewdley, but was unseated for bribery the following year; he disappeared again to the Continent; but when his father died in 1774 he returned and took his seat in the Lords where, to secure his support, ministers bought him over with a lucrative sinecure – something which would pay him money and for which he would have to do little or no work – the ancient post of Chief Justice of Eyre beyond the Trent.

Four years later, however, on the 25^th November 1779, (possibly disappointed by his failure to obtain another sinecure and become a Keeper of the Privy Seals) Lyttelton changed sides and denounced Government and Court in a vitriolic speech. Horace Walpole comments ‘Lyttelton … has turned against the Court.'  Regarding his existing sinecure, Lyttelton said, ‘Perhaps I may not keep it long.’

He was correct.  By midnight on November 27^th, he was dead.

On the night before his speech – the night of Wednesday 24^th November – Lyttelton saw a ghost which told him he would die within three days. Between the Wednesday and the Friday, he mentioned this to various friends and acquaintances: Rowan Hamilton, and one Captain Ascough, who told a lady, who told another lady named Mrs Thrale who wrote it down in her diary on Sunday 28^th November, the morning after Lyttelton’s midnight death:

Yesterday a lady from Wales dropped in and said that she had been at Drury Lane on Friday night.  “How,” I asked, “were you entertained?” “Very strangely indeed!  Not with the play, though, but the discourse of a Captain Ascough, who averred that a friend of his, Lord Lyttelton, has SEEN A SPIRIT, who warned him that he will die in three days.  I have thought of nothing else since.”

Horace Walpole, writing to a friend on Monday November 29^th, says:

Lord Lyttelton is dead suddenly.  …The story is given out, that he looked ill, AND HAD SAID HE SHOULD NOT LIVE THREE DAYS; that he had gone to his house in Epsom… with a caravan of nymphs; and on Saturday had retired before supper to take rhubarb; returned, supped heartily, went into the next room and died in an instant.

Within a short time, however, Walpole has picked up on the gossip around town: Lyttleton had claimed to have seen a robin – or some other bird – which changed into a woman and delivered him a death warning.  By December 11^th Walpole writes with dry humour to another friend that ghost stories are back in fashion!

Lord Lyttelton’s vision has revived the taste; though it seems a little odd that an APPARITION should despair of getting access to his lordship’s bed, in the shape of a young woman, without being forced to use the disguise of a robin red-breast.

The ‘nymphs’ to whom Walpole refers in his first letter were the three Misses Amphlett; residing with their ‘chaperon’ Mrs Flood at Lyttelton’s house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square.  A few months later, in February 1780, Lord Westcote, Lyttelton’s uncle, questioned them, and wrote:

On November 25^th, at breakfast in Hill Street, Lord Lyttelton told the young ladies and their chaperon that he had had an extraordinary DREAM.

He seemed to be in a room which a bird flew into; the bird changed to a woman in white, who told him he should die in three days.

He ‘did not much regard it, because he could in some measure account for it; for that a few days before he had been with Mrs Dawson, when a robin red-breast flew into her room.’  On the morning of Saturday [the 27^th] he told the same ladies that he was very well and believed he should ‘BILK THE GHOST’. On that day – Saturday – he …went to bed after eleven, ordered rolls for breakfast, and, in bed, ‘died without a groan’ as his servant was disengaging him from his waistcoat.

There was no inquest.

And there's a postscript: on the fatal night, 27^th November 1779, Mr Miles Peter Andrews, a friend of Lyttelton’s who was staying at Dartford, was woken when his bed-curtains were pulled open and he was confronted by Lord Lyttelton ‘in his robe de chambre and nightcap’. Suspecting a practical joke, Andrews rang the bell for his servant, and on turning back found Lord Lyttelton gone.  The house and garden were searched in vain, and about four in the afternoon of the next day, a friend arrived with news of Lyttelton’s death. The event was recorded in the next number of the Scots Magazine, December 1779.

But let us return to Dr Johnson, with whom we began, speaking of the mysterious affair with his friend Dr Adams.  Johnson was famously afraid of death.  He continues, “I heard it with my own ears from his uncle Lord Westcote. I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe it.”

Dr Adams replies (doubtless alluding to the Scriptures), “You have evidence enough – good evidence, which needs no support.”

“I like to have more!” Dr Johnson growls.

Picture credit:  Thomas, Second Baron Lyttelton, by Richard Brampton, circa 1775, National Portrait Gallery, London (Wikimedia Commons)