Abroad and at home, Lady Delacour was two different persons. Abroad she appeared all life, spirit, and good humour-at home, listless, fretful and melancholy; she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage, over stimulated by applause and exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character. When her house was filled with well-dressed crowds, when it blazed with lights, and resounded with the music of dancing, Lady Delacour, in the character of the mistress of the revels, shone the soul and spirit of pleasure and frolic. But the moment the company retired, when the music ceased, and the lights were extinguishing, the spell was dissolved. (10-11

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Written in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble collapse of 1720, Daniel Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman (1726) associates economic survival with the concept of mastery, or "minding the shop." This concept had been explored in prostitute narratives published earlier in the dec ade, including Anodyne Tanner's The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), Charles Walker's Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), and Defoe's Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). When one reads The Complete English Tradesman in relation to these narratives, the figure of the female sex worker emerges as a model for Defoe's middle-class masculine ideal. Much like Defoe's tradesman, the protagonists of post-Bubble prostitute narratives represent an endangered masculinity that strives for mastery within a precarious economic environment. The " femaleness" of these protagonists-and consequently Defoe's tradesman-cannot be disregarded, however. Though the prostitute narratives discussed here are male-authored representations of masculine experience, they are also reflections of one of eighteenth-century England's most fascinating and powerful female figures, a figure associated, albeit loosely, with actual female sex workers. Defoe's tradesman clearly serves as a masculine ideal, but one that cannot escape its notorious " feminine" literary past. But the safe tradesman is he, that. .. keeps close within the verge of his own affairs, minds his shop or warehouse, and confining himself to what belongs to him there, goes on in the road of his business without launching into unknown oceans.