In Bed with the Georgians

by Rendell, Mike;

  Put simply, the writer felt that society had less to worry about with the girl in The Whore’s last shift shown as Image 9 than with the high-class prostitute in her finery, such as in Image 1 entitled A Bagnigge Wells Scene, or no resisting Temptation. The latter print was published by Carington Bowles in 1776 and shows two well-dressed prostitutes plying their trade at the popular watering hole. They are dressed in the latest fashions, they are smart and respectable – something a young girl might aspire to look like. In The Whore’s last shift published just three years later, the title is a pun on the word ‘shift’ – the whore has had her last customer of the day, and is washing her flimsy garment, i.e. shift, in a cracked chamber pot. No-one would call it an aspirational image.

  Caricaturists loved to parody the extremes, such as with the contrasting images of ‘the great impures’ of St James’s and of St Giles shown as Image 6. It was created by Thomas Rowlandson in 1794, and demonstrates the differences between the glamorous courtesans of St James and the rough and ready good-time girls from St Giles. Either way, the ‘happy hooker’ image, the ‘tart with a heart’ having a good time, was well and truly established by the eighteenth century. However, both the high-class woman and the street worker were seen as having one thing in common – they operated for money. Dividing the Spoil shown as Image 7 shows that whereas the St James’s ladies ripped off punters at the game of Faro by operating a crooked deck of cards, and then shared out the ill-gotten gains, they were no better than the whores down the road in St Giles’s, who shared out the proceeds of picking pockets and stealing watches from their foolish customers.

  Certainly if you were a household drudge, rising at five to sweep out and re-lay the fires, spending all day on your hands and knees, you must have thought ‘I’m in the wrong job’ if you saw a courtesan drive by in her phaeton drawn by four matching greys, especially once you realised that it would take you several years to earn what ‘Fanny M…y’ or ‘Lucy C…r’ could make in a couple of days simply by lying on her back thinking of England. Imagine someone in one of the needle trades, such as the humble milliner, working on a splendid head-dress made of fine silks and plumed with ostrich feathers, expecting the creation to be collected by a duchess or countess, and then discovering that it was to be worn by someone who was themselves once a milliner. William Hogarth was one of many who suggested that the ranks of prostitutes were mostly made up of recruits from the Provinces, who would come up to London and there fall prey to wily brothel keepers. Thus Hogarth’s first plate in the six-part series called The Harlot’s Progress (see Image 8) shows the notorious procuress Mother Needham ensnaring the young fresh-faced girl called Moll Hackabout. However, the temptation to ‘have a go’ was all too easy and, in practice, many entered the profession knowingly and willingly.

  It is interesting to remember that admission to what became known as the ‘Cyprian Corps’ allowed for both upward and downward movement – more usually the latter, as sickness took its inevitable toll. At the start of her career, an attractive girl could aim for the stars. Her value, as a virgin, was perhaps fifty times the amount she would command as ‘used goods’ but a clever bawd would show the girl how to ‘restore her virginity’ many times over. It was commonplace to insert a small piece of bloodied meat, or a sponge soaked with blood, inside the vagina so that a lover would mistake the signs of bleeding for the breaking of the long-ago ruptured hymen. The author Nicholas de Venette, in his 1712 book The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d gave advice to brides who were no longer chaste and who wished to deceive their husband, to the effect that they should insert lambs blood into the vagina on their wedding night. For the more adventurous, surgeons were already performing operations to ‘tidy up’ the labia by means of a labiaplasty. Simpler, non-surgical, procedures involved the application of water impregnated with alum, or other astringents.

  At the outset, a young girl might hope to catch the eye of an aristocratic gentleman. It is interesting in this context to see the images in the caricature by Richard Newton entitled Progress of a Woman of Pleasure. It appears as Image 4 and 5.

  The first picture shows the girl in country garb arriving in town, where she has been placed in ‘the house of a Great Lady in King’s Place’. King’s Place was the home of the legendary bawd Charlotte Hayes, who is featured in Chapter Three. Scene two shows the lady in question at the start of her career, under the caption ‘I see you now waiting in full dress for an introduction to a fine Gentleman with a world of money’. The third scene shows her ‘in high keeping’ accompanying her Adonis to the Masquerades. But our heroine has a character flaw – she cannot hold her drink and she loses her temper too readily.

  The fourth image shows her flinging a glass in the face of her keeper. She is turned out and her only consolation is that her hairdresser has promised to marry her, but he offers her an annuity of only £200 a year. Furious, she complains that for that money she could get the smartest Linen Drapers Man in London, and chucks him out as being a dirty rascal.

  By now she is forced to move to Marylebone, where she exhibits herself in the Promenade in Oxford Street – in other words she has slipped down the list from kept woman to street walker. The downward spiral continues – she scorns a customer who offers her a crown (five shillings), insisting that she wants five guineas (more than twenty times the amount offered). She starts knocking back the brandy to hide her disappointment with life, earning a few shillings dancing at a sleazy emporium in Queen Anne Street East. She gets involved in a brawl, earning herself a warrant and two black eyes.

  Before long, she is selling her favours to an apprentice boy who has stolen half a crown from his master’s till. She moves into a sponging house (i.e. she is confined there on account of her debts) pawns a silver thimble to pay for breakfast, and becomes a servant of a woman who was formerly her servant, only able to afford a bunch of radishes and a pint of porter for her dinner. She is drunk on cheap gin. The journey into oblivion ends up with her slumped on the doorstep of the house of ‘this female monster’ who has turned her out into the street in case she gets lumbered with the expense of a funeral.

  The whole progress is far more ‘fun’ that Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress – it doesn’t moralise or suggest that whoring was inherently immoral, merely that failing to hold your liquor and assaulting your customers is bad for business. The non-censorious viewpoint is perhaps not surprising given that the brilliant Richard Newton was aged 19 when he drew it – he died of ‘gaol fever’ two years later in 1798, and his caricatures suggest that he was well acquainted with the seedier side of life and probably knew many prostitutes personally. The images are delightfully drawn caricatures, far removed from the serious tone of the meticulously staged Hogarth scenes in ‘The Harlot’s Progress’. The modern equivalent would be the busty cartoon figure of Jessica in ‘Who framed Roger Rabbit’.

  What then was the attitude of the second oldest profession (i.e. the Law) to its senior profession? Prostitution was never illegal under Common Law and prosecutions could only be brought if the offence was linked with disorderly conduct, public indecency, or some other crime. ‘Keeping a bawdy-house’ was an indictable misdemeanour at Common Law but there were often difficulties in proving the identity of the proprietor of the premises, and the sort of evidence needed to prove the offence was generally only available from someone who had actually attended the premises, that is to say as a paying customer. Bawds simply had to factor in the cost of employing lawyers to defend them against prosecution in the charges they passed on to their customers.

  Periodically, reform societies pushed for prosecutions to be brought. The records of the ‘Societies for Promoting a Reformation of Manners’, in their thirtieth account of the Progress made in the Cities of London and Westminster, stated:

  the said Societies have in pursuance of their said design from 1 December 1723 to 1 December 1724 prosecuted divers sorts of offenders viz:

  Lewd and Disorderly Persons 1951

  Keeping
of Bawdy and Disorderly houses 29

  They also claimed to have prosecuted 600 people for breaking the Sabbath, 108 for swearing and cursing, and twelve for drunkenness, adding: ‘The total prosecuted in and near London for debauchery and profaneness for the thirty three years past was 89,333’. Various Vagrancy Acts had been passed, particularly in 1609 and 1744, but these did not make prostitution an offence. In 1752 Parliament passed an Act against the keeping of Disorderly Houses, but this did not in itself criminalise sexual solicitation e.g. by street walkers. The Act was primarily aimed at the public nuisance caused when premises were used for the illegal sale of alcohol, or as gambling dens, or for unlicensed dancing and rowdy entertainment. Unusually, the 1752 Act made it a legal requirement that publicly funded prosecutions were to be brought if two or more parishioners were prepared to act as informants. Previously, any such prosecutions would have had to have been privately funded. However, few parishioners would volunteer to give evidence that they had entered a brothel, let alone be tarred with the name of ‘informer’. The brothel owner was, after all, a neighbour and generally bawds employed bullies and other ‘enforcers’ to make sure that complaints from the public never got to court.

  What made prosecutions even harder was that a brothel owner had the legal right to transfer the case to the Court of Kings Bench. Doing so meant that the prosecutor lost all chance of recovering legal fees from the Crown. Faced with the expense, few prosecutions were made and as the ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’ noted in 1803: ‘as the law now stands, the punishment for the offence of keeping a brothel, one of the most heinous and mischievous that can occur in society, is attended with such difficulty as almost entirely to deter from prosecution’.

  It was not until the 1818 Disorderly Houses Act was passed that the ‘King’s Bench escape route’ was blocked. It also removed the problem of having to identify the proprietor – the offence was committed by ‘any person … who shall appear, act or behave him or herself as master or mistress, or as the person having the care, government, or management of any such house’.

  Whereas running a brothel could give rise to legal penalties, prostitution remained lawful. Nevertheless the crusading Justice of the Peace Sir John Fielding tried to use Common Law to prosecute prostitutes simply on the grounds that they were a public nuisance. Various cases against prostitutes appear in the petty sessions records of the City of London and Fielding urged constables that it was their duty to bring charges against ‘night walkers’. It therefore made sense for brothel keepers and whores to ‘look after’ the constable, the night watchman and the beadle, either by offering financial bribes to leave them alone, or by rewarding them ‘in kind’ for their protection. Clearly these benefits were regarded as perks of the job. A wealthy prostitute had nothing to fear, because she paid her protector to look the other way. The impoverished whore at the bottom of the pile needed to watch out ‘lest she be carried to Bridewell, where, instead of being reclaim’d, she is harden’d by her indelible Shame in her miserable State of Wickedness’ (from Satan’s Harvest Home, 1749).

  In 1828 a case was heard against Samuel Hall, charged with indecent assault on a street-walker. The Times of 13 June 1828 reported:

  that the watchmen, as a body, were a worthless and depraved set of fellows. Not only did they levy contributions on the pockets of the unfortunate women who walked the streets at night, but it was a fact they reduced them to such a state of terror, that they durst not refuse them any favour they might demand.

  Petty crime was closely linked with prostitution; an assignation with a prostitute often led to an accusation of theft of personal belongings such as silk handkerchiefs, pocket watches, snuff boxes and so on. But theft of an item exceeding one shilling in value was classed as ‘grand larceny’ (a criminal offence carrying the death penalty). In 1820 the distinction between petty larceny (involving goods worth less than one shilling) and grand larceny was abolished and replaced with a single offence of simple larceny. Avoiding the death penalty could still leave a convicted felon at risk of being whipped or sentenced to a spell in the pillory (especially in the first half of the Georgian era) and deportation, initially to the American colonies (between 1720 and 1776) or, after 1787, to Australia. Throughout the Georgian period convicted felons could expect to be sent to a house of correction – called the Bridewell – where beating hemp was a common penalty for women.

  By the turn of the century public pressure to end the nuisance of noise, drunkenness and petty thieving that was linked to prostitution led to a spate of prosecutions. On 27 January 1816, The Times reported that ‘fifteen more of those wretched females whom the Lord Mayor has determined to expel from the streets’ were arrested. They were found guilty of causing a public nuisance and were sentenced to a month in Bridewell. Pending trial, these unfortunates would have been incarcerated in appalling conditions, either in watch-houses where they could expect to have to pay exorbitant fees to their gaoler for basic food, or in the city prisons known as the Poultry Compter and the Wood Street Compter. Arguably, conditions there were better than at the Roundhouse prison in St Martin’s Lane, Westminster, where, in 1742, the keeper William Bird was convicted of murder when four women prisoners died. Horace Walpole described the incident in a letter to Sir Horace Mann:

  There has lately been the most shocking scene of murder imaginable; a parcel of drunken constables took it into their heads to put the laws in execution against disorderly persons, and so took up every woman they met, till they had collected five and six or twenty, all of whom they thrust into St. Martin’s roundhouse, where they kept them all night, with doors and windows closed. The poor creatures, who could not stir or breathe, screamed as long as they had any breath left, begging at least for water … in the morning four were found stifled to death, two died soon after, and a dozen more are in a shocking way. In short, it is horrid to think what the poor creatures suffered: several of them were beggars, who, from having no lodging, were necessarily found in the street, and others honest labouring women.

  It was not until Parliament passed The Vagrancy Act of 1824 that prostitution was targeted -– and then only if the offence involved ‘behaving in a riotous or indecent manner.’ A conviction was only possible if the behaviour was truly outrageous, and therefore it was not prostitution per se which Parliament was seeking to control, merely riotous or indecent behaviour.

  Women were faced with few choices: one was to engage in a life of prostitution with all the risks of legal harassment and disease; another was marriage with its resulting loss of independence. Few poor women could hit the jackpot of marriage to a wealthy husband, but it occasionally happened as evidenced by two anecdotes told by that inveterate old gossip-monger, Horace Walpole. Writing to George Montagu on 3 September 1748, he tells the tale of a smitten young man, forced to marry a girl way below his social class before she would let him have her between the sheets:

  Did you not know a young fellow that was called Handsome Tracy? He was walking in the Park with some of his acquaintance, and overtook three girls; one was very pretty: they followed them; but the girls ran away, and the company grew tired of pursuing them, all but Tracy. He followed to Whitehall gate, where he gave a porter a crown to dog them: the porter hunted them – he, the porter. The girls ran all round Westminster, and back to the Haymarket, where the porter came up with them. He told the pretty one she must go with him, and kept her talking till Tracy arrived, quite out of breath, and exceedingly in love. He insisted on knowing where she lived, which she refused to tell him; and after much disputing, went to the house of one of her companions, and Tracy with them. He there made her discover her family, a butter-woman in Craven Street, and engaged her to meet him the next morning in the Park; but before night he wrote her four love-letters, and in the last offered two hundred pounds a-year to her, and a hundred a-year to Signora la Madre [i.e. her mother]. Griselda made a confidence to a stay-maker’s wife, who told her that the swain was certainly in love enough to marry her
, if she could determine to be virtuous and refuse his offers. “Ay,” says she, “but if I should, and should lose him by it.” However, the measures of the cabinet council were decided for virtue: and when she met Tracy the next morning in the park, she was convoyed by her sister and brother-in-law, and stuck close to the letter of her reputation. She would do nothing, she would go nowhere.

  At last, as an instance of prodigious compliance, she told him, that if he would accept such a dinner as a butter-woman’s daughter could give him, he should be welcome. Away they walked to Craven Street: the mother borrowed some silver to buy a leg of mutton, and they kept the eager lover drinking till twelve at night, when a chosen committee waited on the faithful pair to the minister of May-fair. The doctor was in bed, and swore he would not get up to marry the King, but that he had a brother over the way who perhaps would, and who did. The mother borrowed a pair of sheets, and they consummated at her house; and the next day they went to their own place. In two or three days the scene grew gloomy; and the husband coming home one night, swore he could bear it no longer. “Bear! bear what?” – “Why, to be teased by all my acquaintance for marrying a butter-woman’s daughter. I am determined to go to France, and will leave you a handsome allowance.” – “Leave me! why you don’t fancy you shall leave me? I will go with you.” – “What, you love me then?” – “No matter whether I love you or not, but you shan’t go without me.” And they are gone! If you know any body that proposes marrying and travelling, I think they cannot do it in a more commodious method.

  On another occasion Walpole writes to say:

  Lord Marchmont had married a second wife, a Miss Crampton. The circumstances attending this marriage are thus related by David Hume, in a letter to Mr. Oswald, dated January 29, 1748:- “Lord Marchmont has had the most extraordinary adventure in the world. About three weeks ago he was at the play, when he espied in one of the boxes a fair virgin, whose looks, airs, and manners had such a wonderful effect upon him, as was visible by every bystander. His raptures were so undisguised, his looks so expressive of passion, his inquiries so earnest, that every person took notice of it. He soon was told that her name was Crampton, a linen-draper’s daughter, who had been bankrupt last year. He wrote next morning to her father, desiring to visit his daughter on honourable terms, and in a few days she will be the Countess of Marchmont. Could you ever suspect the ambitious, the severe, the bustling, the impetuous, the violent Marchmont of becoming so tender and gentle a swain …!”