Викториялық Лондонның әйгілі әйел қалыңдығы: Кэтрин Уолтерс

English courtesan

Catherine Walters (13 June 1839 – 5 August 1920), also known as "Skittles", was a fashion trendsetter and one of the last of the great courtesans of Victorian London. Walters' benefactors are rumoured to have included intellectuals, leaders of political parties, aristocrats and a member of the British Royal Family.

In 1864, a London publisher, George Vickers, brought out three fictionalised biographies: Anonyma: or, Fair but Frail; Skittles: the Biography of a Fascinating Woman; and Skittles in Paris. The author was possibly William Stephens Hayward, or Bracebridge Hemyng. The open sale (and commercial success) of the biographies caused expressions of moral concern in contemporary newspapers and magazines. In 1861, Alfred Austin, a future Poet Laureate, referred to 'Skittles' by name in The Season: a Satire, his poem satirising mid Victorian social mores. He described her dramatic appearance in Rotten Row, and the covert and jealous interest society ladies felt for her. He also suggested that Skittles and other celebrity prostitutes were attractive not merely because they offered sex, but because they were more natural, less repressed and less boring than the well bred girls who came to London for the marriage 'season'. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's poetic sequence The Love Sonnets of Proteus and his later work Esther are thought to be based on his early affair and later friendship with Walters. The painter Edwin Henry Landseer submitted a picture called The Shrew Tamed for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1861. It showed a beautiful girl in riding habit reclining against the neck of a horse which is on its knees among the straw. It was ostensibly not a portrait of Walters, but the alleged model, the noted horsewoman Annie Gilbert, resembles her, and the juxtaposition of horse, beautiful woman and prevailing mood of languor troubled contemporary critics; some clearly assumed Walters herself had been the subject. The picture gained the alternative title of The Pretty Horsebreaker. The artist George Finch Mason provided the photograph of her taken in Paris in her mid twenties that appears in the book Annals of the Billesdon Hunt.