The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  9

  An Introduction TO HARRIS’S LADIES

  ON 2 JUNE 1757, the readers of a short-lived satirical publication called The Centinel were in for a treat. Its savvy editor had identified his readership as the type who liked prostitutes and chose to tip them off to a new work that might be of interest to them. In keeping with the flavour of the periodical, the announcement was written in the style of an auction advertisement:

  For Sale by the Candle At the Shakespear’s Head Tavern

  Covent Garden: The Tartar and the Shark Privateers with their

  Cargo from Haddock’s, Harris, Master; Square stern’d, Dutch

  Built, with new sails and rigging. They have been lately docked

  And refitted, and are reckoned prime sailors. Catalogues with

  An account of their Cargo may be had at Mrs. D[ouglas]’s in

  The Piazza, or at the Place of Sale. To begin at twelve at night.

  The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies had made its entrée into the public domain. In the first instance it was only available for sale at Haddock’s Bagnio, the Shakespear’s Head and next door at the well-established brothel run by Mother Douglas. By the following year, the enigmatically named publisher ‘H. Ranger’ had not only assumed the printing of it but had become the primary retailer of the title. Situated in the heart of London’s literary district, H. Ranger’s outlet sold a variety of reading material churned out by Grub Street hacks, most of it smutty. In addition to publishing the Harris’s List, his back catalogues also included notable top-shelf works such as Love Feasts; or the different methods of courtship in every country, throughout the known world (two shillings and sixpence) and The Polite Road to an Estate; or Fornication one great source of wealth and pleasure (one shilling). Like a good tabloid editor, H. Ranger knew the value of a titillating read, and after spotting Derrick’s ingenious idea it was his generous advance that sprung the author out of Ferguson’s Spunging House. Who precisely H. Ranger was in these early days is unknown. He, like Jack Harris, attempted to keep a fairly low profile and regularly moved his bookstall up and down Fleet Street, from Temple Bar to Temple Exchange Passage to No.23 near St Dunstan’s church. Over the thirty-eight-year life span of the List it is likely that he was as many as four or more individuals. H. Ranger simply became a useful trading name, as Elizabeth Denlinger points out: ‘ranger’ was a term synonymous with that of ‘rake’. The ‘H’, it is believed, stood for ‘Honest’.

  For those who managed to track down the furtive bookseller (and it is claimed that approximately 8,000 did annually), the cost of purchasing the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies was two shillings and sixpence. For their cash, the reader received a six-by-four-inch volume that, like any useful guidebook, could be slipped into a waistcoat pocket. It could be put to immediate use on the streets of London or taken home secretly and consumed in private. The publication’s suitably lewd prose was undoubtedly created with the purpose of solitary sexual enjoyment very much in mind. This may explain why H. Ranger’s catalogue of stock regularly promotes Lists from earlier years, sold, interestingly, for the same price. The devoted Harris’s List collector would have relished thumbing through the pages of his various copies, comparing the entries of ladies they had sampled in bygone days and savouring the descriptions.

  The reader of the Harris’s List need never feel ashamed of his purchase, or for that matter of his love of whoring. Once he had parted the cover in his hands and pushed past the publication’s mildly arousing frontispiece of a stock-image seduction scene, Sam Derrick’s preface in celebration of fornication would have assuaged all pangs of conscience. Nearly every edition from the 1760s to the 1780s is introduced by a lengthy sermon praising the merits of prostitution. Derrick’s original essay, which appears in the 1761 re-print ‘at the request of several gentlemen and ladies’ after being ‘universally admired’, seems to have been an important feature of the List from its outset. In it, the cases of both the whore and her keeper are exalted. To Derrick, the prostitute becomes a ‘Volunteer of Venus’, wrongly persecuted and shunned by the society whom she seeks to benefit. He argues that it is through her amorous embraces that the violent natures of men are distracted and placated. To the whore we owe ‘the peace of families, of cities, nay, of kingdoms’. To her customer and her keeper equal regard is given. Referred to as ‘gracious’ and ‘venerable’, dealing out ‘comfort to the oppressed’, the male user becomes the ultimate patron, applying his coin to a good cause. Derrick concludes with a lascivious rallying cry:

  Persist, oh ye hoary seers! Persist in the cause of keeping; in that you shew yourselves friends to charity, virtue and the state; continue it cherish these gifts of heaven; still hug to your bosom the cordial, the reviving warmth communicated by youth and beauty: to the dear girl whom you shall select, be your purse strings never closed; nor let the name of prostitute deter you from your pious resolve!

  While such a preamble would have been penned with tongue firmly in cheek, it nevertheless makes a good attempt at presenting non-believers with a convincing case in favour of the trade.

  Beyond its decorative merits and its introductory epistle, the entire raison d’être of the List was to conduct the desirous to the embrace of a prostitute. However, the question of what type of prostitute has never quite been decided. Derrick saw his creation as worthy of containing the names of a wide range of Thaises, from the most celebrated women such as Kitty Fisher and Lucy Cooper, to those he called ‘low-born errant drabs’. Subsequent authors chose to employ the List as a vehicle to warn users off certain women, while others only included genteel mannered prostitutes worthy of praise. Even their prices varied, ranging from an affordable five shillings to the exclusive ‘banknotes only’. Those looking for uniformity in the publication across its thirty-eight-year print run would be hard-pressed to find any. The List’s contents and objectives continued to change with the whims of its authors, publishers and readership. It defies all attempts to categorise it as either exclusively up-market or simply middle of the road.

  Similarly, the social origins of the women who comprised the List’s roll call of names were diverse. In 1758, Saunders Welch estimated that out of a London population of 675,000, the capital was home to just over 3,000 prostitutes, most of whom were drawn from the lowest ranks of the poor. Although this figure appears to be quite a plausible one, other commentators such as German diarist Sophie von la Roche and the reformer John Colquhoun believed the number to be considerably higher. As Welch never clearly specifies who he included in his count, it is difficult to be certain about his accuracy, particularly as the era’s definition of a ‘whore’ was a broad and convoluted one. Along with visible streetwalking prostitutes and those who plied their trade in the theatres, taverns, brothels and bagnios, there existed an entire stratum of ‘invisible’ whores, from the outwardly respectable woman who conducted secret affairs to the labourer who offered sexual favours from time to time. The author of A Congratulatory Epistle from a Reformed Rake, written in the same year as Welch’s tract, attempted to break down the term ‘prostitute’ into a ‘gradation of whores’, whose hierarchical ranks included:

  Women of Fashion Who Intrigue1

  Demi-Reps2

  Good-natured girls3

  Kept mistresses4

  Ladies of pleasure5

  Whores6

  Park-walkers7

  Street-walkers8

  Bunters9

  Bulk-mongers10

  Of these ten categories, those from Demi-Rep to Street-walker were found on the pages of the Harris’s List from 1757–95. Interestingly, irrespective of where they may have found themselves along this scale, H. Ranger treated them all as equals, facetiously omitting certain vowels and consonants from their names as if they were members of polite society who sought to have their identities protected.

  In Welch’s assumption, the majority of those who resorted to prostitution entered the trade as either orphans or children of poor families. Am
ong the poor he included those of the ‘laborious poor’ with offspring ‘too numerous for their parents to maintain’. Justice Fielding also found this to be the case when he questioned a group of prostitutes arrested on the night of 1 May, 1758. While a considerable amount of full-time prostitutes came from the poorest of the poor, many of those who featured in the Harris’s Lists did not. In addition to those like Charlotte Hayes, born into financially comfortable sex-trade families who had been in the procuring or bagnio-keeping game for generations, was an entire range of often unseen, part-time prostitutes. Were Saunders Welch to have included this sub-category of ‘working girl’ in his estimate, he would have found the social pool from which they originated to be much more diverse.

  Much to the frustration of dedicated moral reformers, identifying all of London’s harlots was not as easy as simply taking a stroll down the ill-lit Strand. Not every prostitute in London was engaged in openly plying her trade and not every woman that society considered a prostitute was immediately identifiable. As women of the lower classes were generally believed to have a looser sense of morality, it was assumed that their sexual services were also available for sale if the right price was offered. This particularly applied to female market traders and street peddlers. Contemporary accounts, as well as ballads and engravings, suggest that these women frequently sold more than their baskets of fruit and nosegays. At times the street seller and the prostitute were considered so closely related that little distinction was made between those legitimately attempting to make a living and those using the trade of merchandise as a front for their more lucrative sexual activities. Female workers toiling indoors also found themselves the objects of similar suspicion, and not without some cause. An absence of well-paid employment for women made it necessary for those who laboured in traditional female occupations, trades dedicated to the laundering, mending or creation of clothing, to occasionally supplement their earnings by offering access to their bodies. No one profession was considered more notorious than the milliner’s trade, which it was believed imparted the value of vanity to its many impressionable practitioners. The same was said of other female-dominated and fashion-oriented fields such as haberdashery, glovemaking, and dressmaking, all of which bore the stigma of being ‘seminaries of prostitution’.

  Had Welch probed his sample further he would also have discovered that prostitution for many women was a seasonal occupation to which they turned as a stopgap between periods of employment. Notable among this type were entertainers, namely London’s aspiring and established actresses, singers and dancers. The end of the annual theatrical season meant a period without income for many of the faces who earned their bread by treading the boards. Entertainers were always on the look-out for generous patrons who might ensure their comfort during ‘resting’ spells. But for those less fortunate, the brothels of Covent Garden and the Haymarket proved to be useful refuges. Not unlike entertainers, domestic servants were particularly prone to stints on the town. Even with the high demand for domestic help in London, the turnover of household servants could be quite rapid among families and individuals with ever-changing needs and places of residence. Out-of-work female servants with no alternative and immediate means of earning their keep might find it expedient to fall back on the one sure source of work available for women. As Daniel Defoe observed in 1725, resorting to such measures was quite common, causing servants to move frequently from ‘Bawdy-House to Service and from Service to Bawdy-House’ time and time again. In all of these cases, incidental periods of prostitution which may have lasted several weeks, months or years were integrated into life when the need to defray expenses and make ends meet arose. According to the eighteenth-century model, these women wore the label of ‘whore’ as much as those who practised the profession full time. Certainly, the authors of the Harris’s Lists made no distinction between them.

  The occupation of prostitution was not the exclusive preserve of the poor. Middle-class women also make an appearance in the Lists, or at least this is the impression that the publications’ authors wanted to impart. The daughters of the ‘precarious middle classes’ – those who perched on the middle to lower end of London’s burgeoning and diversifying bourgeoisie, the petty shop-keepers, the master craftsmen, the sometimes-successful artists, whose fortunes rose and swelled and occasionally fell – were the prime candidates for lives of high-class prostitution. Just how many girls from this level of society were responsible for expanding the legions of Venus is entirely unknown, although there is evidence to suggest that their numbers were strong. Certainly, the many young ladies trained as haberdashers and dressmakers would have come from families sufficiently well endowed to pay for their apprenticeships, a luxury that the poorest classes could not afford. Even Francis Place’s own apprentice-master in the 1780s, a breeches-maker by the name of Mr French, had three daughters actively earning their livelihoods as whores. ‘His eldest daughter was and had been for several years a common prostitute. His youngest daughter, who was about seventeen years of age, had genteel lodgings where she was visited by gentlemen; and the second daughter … was kept by a captain of an East India ship’, Place explained. Similarly, James Grant, a friend of William Hickey, kept a mistress called Miss Brown who was the daughter of a successful tailor with his own shop on Ludgate Hill. Far from disapproving of her lifestyle, Tailor Brown profited greatly by his daughter’s position, as she kept ‘the interest of her father in view by recommending all … Mr. Grant’s friends to employ him in this business’. Slightly further up the middle-class ladder, even the lawyer and author Thomas Vaughan, lumbered with the misfortune of having fathered six pretty daughters, confided to Hickey that lack of funds meant his girls might ‘have to turn out whores’. As the Lists suggest, there was a healthy market for attractive, educated girls without suitable marriage portions. In fact, they made the best courtesans.

  However, not every woman in the Harris’s List originated from the respectable background the authors claimed. As Sam Derrick saw himself as a chronicler of Covent Garden characters, he preferred truth to embellishment. Unlike the authors of succeeding editions, honesty and the recounting of gossip and amusing stories were his principle aims. In later years, as eighteenth-century society became increasingly obsessed with gentility and politeness, its authors attempted to ‘prettify’ not only the prose used in descriptions but the stories of the ladies themselves. Editions from the 1770s through the 1790s feature more daughters of lawyers, clergymen, half-pay officers, schoolmasters, physicians and shop-keepers. The List’s publishers had learned that, like modern celebrities, part of a prostitute’s allure was her persona: her name, tales of her escapades and, most importantly for Georgian society, her background or ‘breeding’. After all, where was the glamour in bedding a streetwise orphan from Shoreditch? As a motherless and disowned daughter of a country parson, her attraction was much greater.

  The eighteenth-century middle classes loved to be scandalised by what they read. They were enthralled by suggestions that the dissolute women who lived under the roofs of disorderly houses were in fact the daughters and sisters of people they might have known, people just like them. The unsure footing of many on the margins of the middle classes meant that the line between maintaining a respectable appearance and slipping down in society’s estimation was a genuine fear. As the heroine of Fanny Burney’s Evelina learned, little distinction was made between a virtuous young lady and a sexually available one, when one’s address was ‘an hosiers in High Holborn’. The era’s print media was more than pleased to cash in on this sense of social insecurity, and the literate public, in turn, lapped it up. Novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela, tales of seduction and rape, became instant bestsellers, while all of London thrilled to reports of the trial of Elizabeth Canning, a girl purported to have been abducted and imprisoned in a bawdy house. The era seemed unable to get enough of tales of ‘virtue in peril’. Understandably, the producers of the Harris’s Lists recognised this and made it
a noted feature of later editions.

  Mixed in with the standard stories of seduction and betrayal, by women claiming to be illegitimate daughters of the nobility and legitimate daughters of wealthy city merchants, are genuine tales detailing the paths women took to their present situations. Love and youthful innocence are most regularly cited as the root of their misfortunes. Numerous girls are recorded as having ‘absconded’ from their villages with recruiting officers and soldiers who then abandoned them in London. Wilful deception and broken promises of marriage are also recounted. Many of these tales include the woes of rejection by one’s parents and friends, adding a tragic but often fictitious postscript to their falls from grace. Rape, unfortunately, also figures prominently, although it is frequently veiled in the use of the term ‘seduction’. Like the era’s favourite protagonist, Clarissa Harlowe, many of Harris’s listees were ‘seduced against their will’.

  While the romantic tendencies of teenage girls make these stories entirely plausible, few of the Lists’ authors after Sam Derrick are willing to acknowledge the more mundane routes often taken to prostitution. The search for employment in rural areas led a significant number to the capital, where prospects were better. Alone in the metropolis and left to their own devices, women fell prey to lecherous employers, gave in to the advances of admirers, and were ‘inveigled’ by the sex trade. The old urban legend as illustrated in Hogarth’s series The Harlot’s Progress, where country bumpkin Moll Hackabout is astutely picked from the London wagon by the insidious Mother Needham, has more than a resonance of reality. The tricks of the procuring trade were well known to Saunders Welch and his reforming companions. ‘Agents are constantly employed by bawds to attend the coming and going of wagons and other carriages’, he wrote in 1758. They also lurked at the register offices and deceived the unsuspecting into hiring lodgings from them or taking sham positions as servants. It was then that, by use of ‘persuasion or force’, they were made ‘one of the family’.