Nell was now an orange-girl, holding her basket of fruit covered with vine-leaves in the pit of the King's Theatre, and taking her stand with her fellow fruit-women in the front-row of the pit, with her back to the stage.[1] The cry of the fruit-women, which Shadwell has preserved, "Oranges! will you have any oranges?"[2] must have come clear and invitingly from the lips of Nell Gwyn.
She was ten years of age at the restoration of King Charles II., in 1660. She was old enough, therefore, to have noticed the extraordinary change which the return of royalty effected in the manners, customs, feelings, and even conversation of the bulk of the people. The strict observance of the Sabbath was no longer rigidly enforced. Sir Charles Sedley and the Duke of Buckingham rode in their coaches on a Sunday, and the barber and the shoe-black shaved beards and cleaned boots on the same day, without the overseers of the poor of the parish inflicting fines on them for such (as they were then thought) unseemly breaches of the Sabbath. Maypoles were once more erected on spots endeared by old associations, and the
