It’s the illustration used in the opening of this Wiki article: Double entendre - Wikipedia.
I don’t get it.
There are two ways of interpreting the word let.
The one meaning is to let the lady (to rent/prostitute the lady). The second meaning is for the lady to be let alone (to be left alone/let her be). Thus a double meaning / double intention / double entendre.
Yeah, to “let” is a mostly British word for “rent” (hence, lodgings). It’s still a rather strange example to use as an example of a double entendre, because the second meaning is the less suggestive one.
How about this: “My sweet honey, I hope you come with the house!”
“No, sir, I come alone.”
The funny part of that is 0% that terrible “pun”, 60% how much of an inappropriate douchebag the man is, and 40% how ugly the chick is.
Change the second to “No, sir, I am to be left alone” and you’re there. He’s making a rather forward approach (not so disgraceful in the pre-Victorian era, but still not very respectable) and she is shooting him down with a pun on the verb “to let”.
Her response would not be “I come alone”, it would be “Leave me alone, you big jerk, I’m not included with the furniture.”
No, it’s “I hope you come with the apartment”/“No I don’t come at all” HA! I made the American English version of the pun.
ETA, but, yeah, as others have said let=lease/rent
Yes, I think you got it right. ::bows::
Ah, got it. I’m familiar with “to let” as in “available for rent,” but wasn’t even thinking of that. Thanks!
Moved Cafe Society --> GQ.
It seems you could also interpret “No, sir, I am to be let alone” as meaning “No, you rent me separately”.
An EXCEPTIONALLY early draft of Soylent Green.
Yes - that’s the bit I think people are missing; Although her response means “leave me alone”, it also implies “You have to pay extra to get me”.
Right. Otherwise, it wouldn’t fit the article, as there would be only one meaning.
The drawing is saying she is NOT a prostitute, and the man didn’t even say she was. All the man said was that he hoped she was included (to some ambiguous extent) with the lease on the apartment. The joke is in her poor choice of the repeat use of “let” . While its clear she intended to tell the man off, what she says gives the idea the man may make a deal later on.
Yes, prostitution.
For good reason, the Library of Congress has the engraving catalogued under:
Note that the caricaturist Charles Williams was a social satirist, and that the publisher William Holland was known for his edgy publications (e.g. having been jailed for sedition by publishing Paine’s “Rights of Man”). In fact, a couple of decades earlier, Holland (who was located in an area where prostitutes were common) published Richard Newton’s engravings “Progress of a Woman of Pleasure.”
During the Regency period, prostitutes were very low on the social scale, and were pitied, but their participation in society was more or less accepted. For example, if he chose to, a tosh could have his courtesan, and if he chose to, a well heeled renter could find a landlady with whom he could have a sexual arrangement, all without being ostracised by his social group. Compare this to the Victorian period, in which prostitutes dropped so far down in public opinion that prostitution was considered The Great Evil.
How had this come about? In that period (the end of the Regency era), a propertied woman often would have few means of earning an income without either selling off the said property (and women without property had an even worse go of it – for example, about one in five women in London were prostitutesduring the Regency period), or letting out part of the property. That in turn led to the problem of some men exploiting this economic problem by expecting a sexual arrangement when renting an apartment – not just room and board, but room, board and bedding.
So here we have an engraving made toward the end of the Regency era, as the attitude toward prostitution was becoming harsher: an engraving of a woman being touched by a man who is propositioning her concerning his wish for a sexual arrangement as part of his letting of the apartment, and the woman physically pushing away from him as she insists on being left alone. A drawing illustrating a well known problem and a changing social opinion toward that problem.
Did anyone else think she was making a masturbation joke?
Or was it just me. 
What? No. Although she only means one thing, the phrase has two meanings. That’s the “double” part. The speaker doesn’t actually have to mean both. My sixth grade teacher, for example, unintentionally prefaced an important exception to her previous statement with “…and I have a big ‘but’.” She only meant one sense, but she instantly lost control of her class anyway.
It was just you.
Given Joey P’s rewording of it, that’s a valid interpretation, I think. But with just the original dialogue, I don’t think so.