In the process of research, the most shocking pieces of evidence are sometimes presented with the least fanfare. Such was the case with the subject of this short piece: a small silver plate snuffbox tightly packed with "Hair from the Mons Veneris of a Royal Courtesan of George IV," now held at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. A carefully written note further explains the circumstances of the gifting: "His Majesty was introduced to the Sovereign and Knights of the B.B [Beggar’s Benison] when he visited Scotland and arrived at the (harbour?) of Leith for the first and last time."
George IV's famous 1822 visit to Scotland – the first by a reigning monarch in almost 200 years – is today better remembered for its romantic Highland pageantry, staged to great effect by Sir Walter Scott. This snuffbox testifies to the vastly more erotic pageantry that occurred at some point during his twenty-one day stay in Edinburgh, following his introduction to the Knights of the "most ancient and puissant Order of the Beggar's Benison and Merryland," a club described in detail in the anonymous, limited-circulation history, The Records of the Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther, and in the highly explicit Supplement to the Records.
An elite Scottish sex club established in 1739, the Records and Supplement describe the B.B.'s practices as including the “free anatomization” of “anatomy and anatomical Bible texts,” group “frigging,” and the viewing of naked 15- 18-year-old "nymphs." From 1739 to 1808 the members of this society gathered in quasi-ruinous Castle Dreel, a notorious haunt for smugglers and Jacobites, till the place finally “lost caste” and the club had to move to the “Sanctum or panelled Room of the old-fashioned hostel of the Treasurer, Andrew Johnstone.” The Edinburgh chapter delightedly discovered by the King upon his arrival in Leith had been more recently established by “Collector McNachtane” in 1766.
Amidst a variety of shockingly explicit writing and “lecherous items of vertu,” George IV's eroticized snuffbox has received relatively little attention. Certainly, the artistic quality of this dented silver plate snuffbox itself pales against that of other club arcana. However, as a PhD candidate engaged on a dissertation on snuff-taking and its European sexualization, it is this tawdry snuffbox that I have found to be one of my single most important, surprising, and indeed disturbing sources. On the one hand, George IV's gift took to a kind of conclusion a libertine tendency present in British and European-inspired snuffing from the late 17th-century onward: the equation of nasal snuff and sexual pleasure. At the same time, George IV's shocking gift gave a distinctly crude and markedly proprietorial valence even to snuff-taking’s longstanding libertine associations.
The European association between snuff-taking and sex very likely stemmed from, or at least was intensified by, the European association between the nose and the male sexual organ. This may be observed in the large noses so prominent in male Carnival masking. The association between the two parts may also be found in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-62), in which the extended joke regarding the tragicomic mutilation of the protagonist’s “nose” at birth depends upon the reader’s knowledge that an organ has been mangled of even greater sensual import. The European sexualization of the nose corresponded with the continent’s intensively sexualized perfume culture; in contrast with early modern Japanese women, who subtly perfumed their hair and kimono sleeves over the smoke of incense, the characteristic scents of early modern European perfume came from the glandular excretions of civets and male musk deer, doused liberally (alongside strong floral scents) upon the clothes, gloves and skin of human elites-on-the-prowl.
The result of the occidental association between the nose, virility, and sensory pleasure was a sexualization of nasal snuff-taking which became one of European snuffing's most defining characteristics. A remarkable array of evidence testifies to the active employment of snuffboxes and snuff in the course of seduction. Charles II himself gave his mistress Nell Gwynn a beautiful silver chinoiserie snuffbox, decorated with the scene of a couple strolling amidst the clouds. This petite snuffbox is an early example of a trend which would later spread throughout British society: the gifting of snuffboxes to sweethearts, lovers, mistresses, spouses, and spouses-to-be. It conveys, I would argue, what much subsequent heterosexual gifting conveyed – the idea that the man was committed to offering the woman not only financial support (or renumeration), but also the sensual pleasure represented by snuff. We see this, for instance, in Hogarth’s The Laughing Audience, where two acts of sexual exchange are being initiated behind a preoccupied crowd: one fop reaches to accept an orange from a smiling woman, indifferent to the competing vendor who strives for his attention (orange sellers famously sold more sensual wares than fruit, Nell Gwynn most famously of all); the other fop, leaning forward, offers another woman a pinch of snuff, and her fingers linger above the snuffbox, poised to accept.
Though clearly inviting sexual favors with the expectation of some kind of return, the kind of exchange invoked through the gifting of snuff sent a different message than that invoked by an outstretched purse –what the offer of the snuff suggested is that if the woman would “put out,” she would receive some form of sensual pleasure in return. This is not a very different message than that conveyed by one William Williams in 1722, who unsuccessfully attempted to seduce the married maid Sarah Breary with his successive offers of snuff, a snuffbox, “a Pair of Damask Pockets,” and eventually the promise of five pounds and generous maintenance. Nor, indeed, was this a very different bargain than that invoked by legendary P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins in “Rubber Duckie” in which he exclaims, “Ah - contribute a little rump to the bump cause baby — willingly!” In other words, in exchange for her putting out some “rump,” she would receive a “bump” of the twentieth-century equivalent of nasal snuff. Bootsy’s offer was in a sense quite transactional; yet in spite of this there was meant to be pleasure involved for both parties - his ultimate emphasis is on the volitional, the “willingly.”
When I first heard of it, I was somewhat agnostic regarding the import of the Beggar's Benison snuffbox, due to my knowledge of the astonishing beauty of many snuffboxes and the prevalence of such libertine scripts. This material culture, originally created to keep air out of delicate powdered snuffs, became one of the most exquisite and defining material cultures of the eighteenth century. I imagined that a king famous for his sensuality would present his mistress's sexuality in a vehicle of great luxury and elegance; such was, however, emphatically not what I found in St Andrews.
Instead, what I found was a dull, cracked and dented thing. Time had not treated this snuffbox kindly, reducing its once shining silver plate to the flat hue of tarnished metal – but even in its original state it would never have been an object of great beauty. An ugly line, jutting across the snuffbox's side, reveals two halves soldered together, giving the item a cheap appearance. It has neither the sublimity of the goldsmiths' art, nor the grace of the most humbly carved wooden snuffboxes. This could not have been a snuffbox owned by a king. The implication, therefore, is that it was never his, but rather a snuffbox obtained from someone of much lower rank, on short notice.
The tawdriness of the snuffbox underscores the tawdriness of its contents, and, paired with the above examples of libertine gifting before us, we may begin to see why George IV’s gift was so particularly grotesque. It was, in one sense, a determined exaggeration of a well-established libertine equation between snuff and sexual pleasure. However, his rendering of this ritual flipped the script. He was neither offering snuff, nor a beautiful snuffbox, to his mistress. Rather, she was the snuff being presented to his male partners in the Order. She was thereby anonymized, reduced to hair stuffed in a cheap box. What I find most disturbing about the gift of her hair in this snuffbox, however, is its implication that access to her has also been gifted. In a sense, George IV’s gift, and the Beggar’s Benison’s careful preservation of it, has ensured that such access persists even to the present. These are not human remains of the kind usually implicated in questions of museum ethics. However, the sight of this cheap snuffbox, stuffed so full of hair that I could not remove the note for fear of it spilling out, makes me wonder if some more dignified fate could not be secured for such an intimate part of this unknown woman’s being.
Anna Roberts is a third-year PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, supervised by John Marshall. She is currently writing a British-Isles focused dissertation on the global eighteenth-century infatuation for snuff-taking, and on the vast variety of containers created to house a form of powdered tobacco simultaneously rendered as polite, Amazonian, libertine and absolutist.
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