RAKE

Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take;
But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.

Alexander Pope, Epistle II: To a Lady, Of The Characters of Women (1743)

Why Do The Good Girls…

It is one of the principal views of this publication: to occasionally venture outside the female sphere and see what the chaps are doing. DASTARDLY DEEDS would seem to be the answer in many cases focused around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word rake first came into being.

A spot of rakish gardening: the 'Temple and Chamber of Venus', in the grounds of West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. Photo par Hodge.

I am frequently asked, with a wry smile, ‘So, was your dissertation on garden implements?’, to which I invariably respond, with a smug one, ‘Well, yes.’ You see, rake as ‘a dissolute man of fashion’ derives first from rake as ‘an implement consisting of a pole with a crossbar toothed like a comb at the end’ for ‘drawing together hay etc. or smoothing loose soil or gravel’… you know, a ‘rake’. In this form, the word is (at least) Old English (raca) from the proto-Germanic rak- (‘to gather or heap up’), and rake in its many applications to people springs first and foremost from the compound term rakehell (c.1560). This, in turn, comes from the (apparently common) phrase ‘to rake out hell’ (first cited around 1542), meaning ‘to search’ or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘comb’ out the infernal regions. A rakehell, then (= ‘an immoral person’ or ‘a scoundrel’) is someone than whom there is no-one worse, even should you ‘comb through Hell’. Tut tut.

Oh, what an odious Creature is a Rake!

In this early incarnation, the rakehell is a broadly classless figure who basically spends most of his time making a nuisance of himself. By 1687, he had lost his suffix, and, in the form rake, became defined as ‘an aristocratic man of dissolute and promiscuous habits’. Historically, these ‘habits’ boil down to drinking, swearing, whoring, and causing public disturbances (‘rioting’). Ever a sensualist (and sworn enemy to marriage), his iniquities always involve sexual depravity, often grotesquely extreme: Shadwell’s Don Juan feels ‘forced to commit a rape to pass the time’. Dr Johnson was less than impressed with such goings-on, and he defined a rake in his 1755 Dictionary as ‘A loose, disorderly, vitious, wild, gay, thoughtless fellow; a man addicted to pleasure’. Nevertheless, the true rake is protected from proto-ASBO consequences by his pedigree, which is the only difference between him and a ‘common’ criminal / rakehell.

It is in this ‘hellish’ yet aristocratic form that the rake first becomes defined as that archetype hanging out in the gangs….sorry, ‘clubs’ that the ever-hysterical Victorians dubbed ‘Hellfire Clubs‘. These were either groups of aristocrats dressing up as monks and nuns to commit acts of bestial iniquity, or sedate philosophical and political discussion groups, depending on the fruitiness of the historian. The overlap is more overlapp-y than you might think, and it relates to rake‘s satellite term, and secondary meaning, ‘libertine’. As libértin, this word is all over c18th French literature, which has no real cognate for rake as a distinct term, and it is in this form that rake gives us the Libertines (Pete Doherty) and The Libertine (Swoony Depp). Relating, as you might think, to our word liberty via Latin’s liberta, libertine can mean anything from ‘free translation’ and ‘free thinking’ (the revolutionary ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ among other things) to the sexual excess and decadence (‘freedom’, or indeed ‘free love‘) associated with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and perhaps even Doherty himself (depending on whether or not you think celebrity is the twenty-first century’s aristocracy).

Never trust a man in a pastel pink two-piece. Robert Lovelace prepares to abduct Clarissa Harlowe, by Francis Hayman.

Set Me Free.

Given this libertine background, it is unsurprising that, in its second wave as ‘The Order of the Monks of Medmenham’, the rakish ‘Hellfire Club’ was associated not only with Sir Francis Dashwood (defined by Wikipedia as ‘an English rake and politician’, and responsible for the horticulture displayed above, left), but also with notables like William Hogarth, the liberty-obsessed Benjamin Franklin and even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a close friend of Mary Astell, the ‘first feminist’).

Perhaps, then, this sexual excess could be connected with burgeoning ideas about general freedom, and here we must ask the obvious question: female rake, yes or no? The dictionary says ‘yes’, but cites as proof Pope’s line that ‘every woman is at heart a rake’, closer to an eighteenth-century “‘cor, she’s askin’ for it'” than acknowledged sexual equality. So, institutionally at least, the female rake always risks sliding into the Other Category, as the harlot, which must be at least partially because women were less likely to espouse rakishness as part of a broader public life. The closest we seem to get to an actual love’em’-and-leave’em she-rake is the upper-middle-class lesbian: Anne Lister‘s diaries record her pursuit of local girls, her habit of dressing in male garb, and her nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’. And of course a particularly saucy woman is always free to wear her hat at a ‘rakish‘ angle (where rakish = ‘dashing, jaunty or slightly disreputable’) as modelled by the celebrity adulteress Georgiana ‘Keira Knightley’ Cavendish , Duchess of Devonshire (who was getting it on with THE Earl Grey: libertea, geddit?!!).

What Women Want.

Meanwhile, middle-class intellectuals were determined to shelter poor Woman from such degenerates. They had to: for even the most virtuous young ladies are dangerously susceptible to rakish charm! What is more, they always believe (poor souls) that their chaste beauty and noble virtue can save a rake from himself! (…Katy Perry, anyone?) Samuel Richardson in particular seems to have lived in perpetual horror of just such folly, endlessly repeating his fear of the ‘dangerous but too commonly received notion that a reformed rake makes the best husband‘ and crying ‘But MADAM!’ to those young ladies who wrote to him describing the seductive appeal of his own rake, Clarissa‘s Robert Lovelace. To this, Mary Wollstonecraft:

It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their LIKINGS, and still to deny them the uncontroled use of reason. When do men FALL IN LOVE with sense? When do they, with their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, who are only taught to observe behaviour, and acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have been all their lives labouring to attain?

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Well, quite. Excuse me, I have to rearrange my hat.

Further Rakish Adventures:

• Jane Austen’s Mr Willoughby (A Rake Determined To Marry Well).
• The Dastardly Mr Wickham (A Lazy Lower Class Rake)
• William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress
• The West Wycombe Caves and West Wycombe Park – A rakish sort of National Trust day out.

NEXT WEEK: S is for Ship