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Fanny Murray (c. 1729 in Bath – 2 April 1778 in LondonSome sources give her date of death as 1770. Nevertheless, notices of her death only appear in gazettes from 1778.), 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 (1763) 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.
While she was in London, she was noticed by Jack Harris, a famous pimp from Covent Garden and later co-author of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a list of prostitutes that Harris claimed were free of venereal disease. Harris supposedly had a surgeon examine Murray to verify her claims that she was free of disease, and made her pay a £20 deposit on the accuracy of her information. Although she had been working in London for many years, she appeared in Harris's guide as a "new face", described as "fit for high keeping with a Jew merchant".
For a long time, she was the mistress of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was so deeply enamoured of her as to hang a large nude portrait of Murray in his apartment, proudly showing it to guests. Murray often appeared as a "nun" — a female guest — at the orgies of the Hellfire Club, a secret society with satanic trappings which Sandwich regularly attended, and it is also likely that she was a member of the "harem" at the Divan Club, an Orientalism group founded by Sandwich that was exclusive to noblemen who had visited the Ottoman Empire.
Eventually she married Sir Richard Atkins, 6th Baronet. A famous anecdote about Murray tells that one night, she complained to him that she lacked money. He gave her a £20 note, Roughly equivalent to £2,000 in 2011 using the RPI. to which she declared "damn your twenty pound, what does it signify?", promptly placing the note between two pieces of bread and eating it. (The original correspondence is dated 1748) The same story was later told of Kitty Fisher — possibly due to Casanova confusing Atkins's mistressesWillard R. Trask, footnoting — and Sophia Baddeley. Her marital life appears to have been temperamental, and neither remained entirely monogamous. Atkins died suddenly in 1756 when Murray was just 27, leaving her heavily indebted.
In 1763, a pornography 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",In some versions, this line is "Awake, my Sandwich" instead. and one passage compares her to the Virgin Mary, finding that Murray is the better of the two for never having had a child.John Wilkes (c. 1760). An Essay on Woman, quoted by 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 blasphemy and obscenity. 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.
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