ABSTRACT
This chapter covers Hickey’s young adulthood and focuses on his libertine behavior. Hickey serves as a privileged guide to Georgian London, exposing it as a city of extremes, of arch decorum and profligate lewdness, of staggering wealth and pitiless poverty. Throughout this phase of Hickey’s life, the author repeatedly bemoans the fact that, despite his good intentions and love for his father, he repeatedly succumbs to dissolute behavior. He embezzles funds from his father’s law firm, and he frequents the brothels and taverns of Covent Garden (many of which he specifically identifies). He drinks to excess, engages in sexual promiscuity, contracts venereal disease, but through it all, he presents himself as ultimately redeemable and that beneath the dissolute behavior rests a good and kind person.
