M&D - Chapter 18 - A City Preparing For Night

[Johnny Marr]

Dixon has departed for a quiet life, but there's no such respite for Mason.
He remains in London, daunted by the prospect of seeing his sons again,
"whom he cannot help missing, yet at the same time he dreads the Re-Union"?
His foreboding is presumably primarily because of his Sisters, but are
there other factors? Does he feel privately that he has dishonoured his
Sons somehow, through his dalliance (however unwilling on his part) with
Austra? Does he feel distanced from them without Rebekah, or guilty at
having left them for so long as he ventured to the other side of the world?

In town Mason pays his Devoirs (French for 'duty'; his respects), and finds
himself tapped up by all sorts of interested parties on all sorts of
matters: "by Agents of the Navy, the East India Company, the Royal Society,
and the Parliamentary Curious, from King's Men to Rockingham Whigs [a
political faction backed by Edmund Burke, which would seek a more
conciliatory stance than that initiall adopted by the British government
during the American War of Independence}, as to Vegetable Supply,
Road-Widths, Shore-Batteries, Civilian Morale, Slave Discontent and the
like". Mason is now a man in demand - but for what he can provide in the
immediate terms rather than for his own intrinsic merits.

By the time the questioning relents London is caped in dusk; TRP offers
just a further hint of why Mason might feel guilty about his Sons when he
describes Mason "descending into Faith ... as once, early in his Grief for
Rebekah, he descended into Sin".

Georgian London was rife with prostitution. The Economist's recent claims
that up to one in five young London women may have ben prostitutes seems
unverifiable, but it was unquestionably a major trade and significant
social issue of the time, with plays such as The Beggar's Opera and
Hogarth's art offering satirical comment.

http://www.economist.com/node/14636924

There even appears to have been a directory for Covent Garden Ladies around
the time of M&D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris%27s_List_of_Covent_Garden_Ladies

Insalubrious material, I must apologise for it, but TRP has subtly referred
to it, as a chornicler of Georgian London must. We don't want to linger on
Mason's indiscretions - we recognise many of his faults and tribulations,
his indecision, his otherworldiness, his high-strung temperament and his
burdensome grief for Rebekah. Yet he is a likeable protagonist, one we
support and don't want to view as ignoble or squalid. Yet such is the
duality of man; in a lonely and permissive city, even Mason can fall to the
temptations of Night time.
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