page_title: Fanny Murray
section_title: An Essay on Woman and later life
hierarchical_section_title: Fanny Murray / An Essay on Woman and later life
caption_attribution_description: English: John Wilkes Esq; before the Court of King's Bench, engraving from The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1768.
context_page_description: Fanny Murray, née Fanny Rudman and later Fanny Ross, was an 18th-century English courtesan, mistress to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and dedicatee of the fateful Essay on Woman that led to the downfall of John Wilkes. A contemporary of Kitty Fisher and Charlotte Hayes, the "celebrated Fanny Murray" was one of the most prominent courtesans of her day; a celebrity and fashion leader who rose from destitution to wealth and fame, before settling down into a life of "respectable prosperity". The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray are one of the first examples of the "whore's memoir" genre of writing, although they are unlikely to have been actually written by Murray.
context_section_description: Unable to pay her debts, Murray was sent to a sponging-house. There, she learned that John Spencer, 1st Earl Spencer, son of the John Spencer who had seduced her, was getting married. She sent him a begging letter informing him of his father's deeds, and manipulated the couple into paying her a £200 per year stipend. Spencer also introduced her to the actor David Ross, whom she married some time around 1757. A biography, purportedly a memoir although written in the third person, appeared in 1759, alongside the similar Uncommon Adventures of Miss Kitty F****r, a thinly disguised roman à clef about Kitty Fisher in which Murray appears as the Spanish prostitute "Miss Murrio".
  In 1763, a pornographic poem supposedly composed by John Wilkes surfaced. The poem, a parody of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man called An Essay on Woman, was dedicated to Murray and featured her extensively: the very first line of the poem reads "Awake, my Fanny", and one passage compares her to the Virgin Mary, finding that Murray is the better of the two for never having had a child. The poem was likely around a decade old, having been composed at the height of Murray's fame. Wilkes was only in his late teens at that time, and it is possible the poem was written by Thomas Potter, his friend and fellow Hellfire member, rather than Wilkes himself. Despite having been her lover, Sandwich seized on the chance to shame Wilkes, against whom he had borne a grudge ever since Wilkes had leapt out and scared Sandwich during a drunken séance at the Hellfire Club.
  Sections of the poem were read out in the House of Lords, which found it blasphemous and obscene. Already accused of seditious libel for criticising the king in The North Briton, Wilkes fled the country and was expelled in absentia from the House and branded an outlaw. Although Murray was not the target of the poem — one biography of Wilkes described her presence in the poem as "little more than a matter of literary convention" — the event caused considerable distress to Murray, and strained her marriage with Ross. It was public knowledge that Sandwich had been Fanny Murray's lover, and the hypocrisy of his actions were not lost on the public. Records from the era suggest that the very next night, Sandwich went to see The Beggar's Opera, which featured a similar act of betrayal by the character "Jemmy Twitcher". Quickly, the name Twitcher became associated with him.
  Despite the turmoil of her later years, Murray's marriage to Ross appears to have been a happy, monogamous one. When an anonymous poem besmirching Ross as an actor appeared, Murray offered twenty guineas (£21) of her own savings to anyone who could find the author. Records from the day universally praise Murray as faithful: a biography of Ross remarks that "whatever her former indiscretions had been, [Murray] conducted herself as a wife with exemplary prudence and discretion". The couple remained married until her death in 1778.
caption: John Wilkes before the Court of King's Bench, accused of obscene libel for writing An Essay on Woman
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