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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  Ideally, Harris’s List would have appealed to men with some education and at least a hint of discernment. At two shillings and sixpence, the publication would have cost more than an entire day’s wages for a journeyman tailor, or the weekly expense of renting a furnished room, buying a whole pig or paying a dentist’s bill for a tooth extraction. This was a handsome sum to the average man. But Harris’s List was not a piece of literature intended for appreciation by the street peddler, the soldier, or indeed the journeyman tailor. It was addressed to a readership that would have smirked at Derrick’s double entendres and easily grasped his cursory nods to the classical. In the eighteenth century this meant those of the middling classes and above. These were men who regarded themselves by virtue of their learning (or at least their ability to read) above the poorly fed, poorly paid rabble. It was the retention of this readership in addition to the List’s primary function as a guide which were to remain the only two constant features about it as the decades progressed. By the 1790s, the publication had strayed quite a considerable distance from Derrick’s original prototype.

  After Samuel Derrick’s death, the subsequent authors of the Harris’s List remain stubbornly elusive. Although Charlotte may have reaped the profits of the 1769 edition, there is no evidence to suggest that she had any editorial control over its content, nor that she was privy to the proceeds from following years. By the 1770s, the List seemed to take on a life of its own, and from that point it is reasonable to assume that its execution lay solely in the control of the publishers. The Harris’s List had become more of a branded product than a quirky publication with literary aspirations, and it is not surprising that from this era it begins to lose some of its endearing flavour. With the focus of the List no longer on the characters and instead more on the intriguing stories of seduction, its appeal is to a broader audience, one that might not be familiar with Covent Garden or even the topography of the West End, let alone the regular faces that plied their trade in these spots. The author of the 1773 volume, very much against the spirit of Sam Derrick’s original, took the decision to clean up the prose, to remove the base, grunting euphemisms and to adopt a more genteel tone. Gone are the bawdy descriptions of ‘squat, swarthy, round-faced’ wenches, and of breath that smells like French cheese. Instead, classical allusions and a false flourish of delicacy are employed to transform the prostitute into ‘a fourth Grace, or a breathing, animated Venus de Medicis’. The gentrification of the Lists is also reflected in the changing illustration that appears as its frontispiece. The 1761 edition features a couple locked in an uncomfortable embrace on a sofa: she struggles, he persists. By the very nature of the publication we already know what the outcome will be: the reluctant Miss becomes one of the obliging listees. By the 1770s such rococo theatricality has been abandoned in favour of a less provocative image: a gentleman stands in conversation with a well-dressed lady. Everyone is circumspect in this picture; everyone exercises a display of manners. Were it not for the exaggerated length of the sword at the gentleman’s side, the vague knowing smirk on the lady’s face or the visible colonnades of Covent Garden in the backdrop, a casual browser might miss the meaning altogether. By the 1790s there are no prostitutes to be found on the frontispiece of the Harris’s List at all, only four Arcadian nymphs frolicking nude with a garland. The image bears an unsettling resemblance to Joshua Reynolds’s well-known society portrait of The Montgomery Sisters Adorning a Term of Hymen. Surely no accident.

  Alterations to the tone of the List in later years pervaded every aspect of the publication. As the publishers moved with the fashion for gentility, the personality of the work and its buoyant sparkle begins to dim. From its outset the List was always about making money, but by the 1780s, as the seams of the publication have started to wear through, this motivation stands out more discernibly than ever. No longer troubled by maintaining accuracy or even creative verve, those who had taken on its production had simply resorted to bastardising entries from previous editions. The exploits of Miss Smith in one year were reprinted two years later as the joyous romps of Miss Jones. As long as the addresses were vaguely correct, the publishers were not concerned about names or histories. They assumed that punters weren’t either. Its last extant volume, that from 1793, is but a distant cousin of the earliest work. Containing very little originality and no character, the cyprians who appear on its pages are mere archetypes with names attached. Not much better than a cut-and-paste job of previous works, by the time the law put its boot down on the publication in 1795, the true spirit of the Harris’s List was already dead.

  Those to blame for the publication’s down-slide, at least in part, are two brothers, John and James Roach, and a third conspirator, the bookseller John Aitkin of Bear Street. From the late 1780s they had been running the List off on their printing presses. The work’s desirability, evidently on the wane, was squeezed one final time in the hope of yielding its last drops of profitability. The Roaches and Aitkin had no interest in reviving the work’s content or its original concept. Even the publication’s title, the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, was by this date outmoded, as almost any prostitute worth her guineas had moved west to the newer districts stretching northwards from Mayfair to Marylebone.

  There are a number of theories about who the Roach brothers were. Little exists to enlighten us about Aitkin, who it seemed had died by the time James Roach was hauled before the King’s Bench. Although the publishing pseudonym ‘H. Ranger’ predated the Roach brothers’ activity in the trade, by the time they had picked up the gauntlet the name had become a fixture on the title page, a traditionally used veil behind which otherwise respectable booksellers could hide. Indeed, the Roach brothers were deemed so respectable that they even warranted mention in that august Victorian publication, The Dictionary of National Biography, where they are described simply as booksellers and compilers. Among their mainstream credits are innocuous works such as Roach’s Beauties of the Poets of Great Britain (1794), Beautiful Extracts of Prosaic Writers, Carefully Selected for the Young and Rising Generation (1795), and Roach’s New and Complete History of the Stage (1796). It is possible that John and James Roach had fallen upon hard times and resorted to printing material which they knew to be immoral, but would assist in paying the bills. It is equally plausible that they, like the Harrisons of Covent Garden, were a family quite at home with the dealings of the criminal underworld, although they attempted as far as they could to keep this disguised. Roach is a name that appears frequently during the later half of the century in and around the Piazza. A nefarious figure known as ‘Tiger’ Roach acted as the bully for the Bedford Arms and later for the Bedford Coffee House in the 1760s and 1770s. A Miss Roach is also listed among Harris’s ladies for the year 1773. Francis Place mentions a Mrs Roach willing to show obscene prints to young people from her shop in the 1770s and ’80s. As the Roaches were known to have included ‘odd volumes and indelicate prints’ among the items on their shelves, it is possible that she may have been a relation. It is equally probable that a connection between her and the Covent Garden procuress Mrs Margaret Roach, active at the same time, may have existed. In all likelihood, they may have been one and the same. As John Harrison’s brief foray into the publication of obscene material proves, it was not unusual for those engaged in selling sex to seek other outlets for their enterprises. As J.L. Wood speculates, the seemingly respectable Roaches trading out of Vinegar Yard probably kept their ‘top-shelf’ material on Little Bridges Street at the address printed in the Harris’s List, where they traded under the name H. Ranger. Like most involved in criminal dealings, maintaining a front for less-acceptable business was of the utmost importance. Nevertheless, the effective marketing and sale of the Harris’s List posed some serious dilemmas.

  As criminals, the Roach brothers and John Aitkin cannot have been very clever. Alternatively, they may have been very much alert to the risks entailed in the publication of the List but willing to lay themselves on the line in order to r
eap the profits from its sale. In either case, the publication was invariably bound to spill the beans on its producers and retailers. The Harris’s List had been, since at least the 1760s, an annual which appeared at H. Ranger’s stall each winter. One might anticipate the arrival of an updated version around the Christmas period, as the poem that prefaces its 1788 edition reveals:

  Again the coral berry’s holly glads the eye,

  The ivy green again each window decks,

  And misteltoe, kind friend to Bassia’s cause,

  Under each merry roof invites the kiss,

  Come then my friends, ye friends to Harris come,

  And more than kisses share …

  H. Ranger’s regular customers would have recognised that the end of the year meant another discreet visit to his premises. However, the List’s circulation would never have reached its purported height of 8,000 annually without some assistance from advertising. Unabashedly, and seemingly without fear of any repercussions, the publisher would place short promotions in popular newspapers such as the one that appeared in the Daily Advertiser on 3 January: ‘This Day published, priced 2 s 6d with the original Introduction, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies; or a Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the year 1775, Containing an exact description of the most celebrated ladies of pleasure who frequent Covent Garden and other parts of the metropolis.’ The newspaper proclaimed this across a corner of its front page, next to advertisements for products promising to cure venereal disease and ‘all disorders of the genitals’. With H. Ranger’s address in the public domain and a regular date set for the publication of the List each year, it was as if the Roaches and Aitkin had turned informer on themselves.

  However carefully they may have endeavoured to conduct their business, James Roach and John Aitkin were rumbled in 1795. Since 1787, a band of moral reformers headed by the Bishop of London and comprising ‘A great number of Gentlemen of the Highest Rank and Estimation’ had committed themselves to pursuing malefactors such as the Roaches to justice. Their primary intent had been to carry forth the wishes expressed by George III as outlined in his ‘Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness, and Immorality’. In the course of stamping out ‘loose and immoral publications’, they had determined on quashing the nearly forty-year-old institution of the Harris’s List. By early 1794 they had hunted down John Roach and brought him successfully to trial for libel. Undaunted by this, James rather foolishly decided to continue publishing. The 1795 edition, which had arrived on H. Ranger’s shelves around December or January, inevitably led the Society straight to his back door. In February, Roach appeared before Lord Chief Justice Kenyon and Justice Ashurst, also on charges of libel. Cowering under the prospect of incarceration, Roach repented of his folly and lied remorselessly. He claimed to be unaware of the illegality of such a publication and to hold no knowledge of anyone else prosecuted for printing a work that ‘had been published regularly every year like a Court Calendar’. On this point, Judge Kenyon reminded him that only recently ‘a defendant of the name of John Roach was formerly convicted of this very offence’. Chagrined, James Roach replied simply that the said John Roach was not him.

  In spite of the pleadings of Roach’s legal counsel that the defendant had atoned for his sins by withdrawing the book from public sale, and that he had severed all ties with Aitkin and with their printer, Justice Ashurst was not moved. In a final bid for sympathy, Roach’s lawyer begged the court to consider the defendant’s wife and six children, as well as his poor state of health, worsened by the onset of asthma ‘since this prosecution has been commenced against him’. Unfortunately, none of these factors assisted in mitigating his punishment. According to Ashurst, James Roach, by publishing the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, was guilty of a grave lapse in judgement: ‘An offence of greater enormity could hardly have been committed’. Ashurst continued that, ‘A care of the growing morals of the present generation ought to be uppermost in every man’s heart’. He evidently felt that this was not the case with James Roach. As a result, Roach was sentenced to a year in Newgate Prison, but to ensure that upon his release he would not be tempted to publish scurrilous filth like the Harris’s List again, he was required ‘to give security for his good behaviour for three years’ through the payment of £100. The severity of Roach’s punishment for printing a little book that by the 1790s wasn’t even well written or entirely accurate sent a clear warning to those who lived by the proceeds of sex. On the eve of the new century, a more righteous society would have little sympathy for the purveyors of vice.

  20

  LADIES OF THE List

  THE END OF the production of the Harris’s List is by no means the end of our story, but rather a punctuation of it. The ancient profession of prostitution was far too well established to be hindered by the passing of a mere trade publication, irrespective of how useful the Harris’s List had proven to be during the course of its thirty-eight-year life span. In truth, eighteenth-century London’s Thaises, nymphs, votaries of Venus, or whatever title they might have been given, required little advertising beyond the flashing of a stocking-clad lower leg or a glimpse of a silk-apparelled figure in a theatre box. Demand for their services almost always outstripped supply. Year upon year, decade upon decade, the acclaimed beauties of their day grew old and were replaced by further fresh faces. Their experiences have been the subject of much fascination by modern authors and historians who have speculated upon their existences, seeking to answer the vexing questions of who these women were and how it was that they came to do what they did. There are so many yet untold histories of women from the labouring and middle classes who earned their livelihoods by sharing their bodies with men; Charlotte Hayes’s tale is only one of these. Of all of the Harris’s Lists published between 1757 and 1795, only volumes from nine years (1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789, 1790, 1793) have evaded the wear and the censure of time to be retained in public collections. Contained within this handful of editions, over 1,000 names and short biographies of women active in the trade of prostitution are recorded for posterity. What happened to them? What were their stories? The revelations are bittersweet; both hopeful and tragic, touching and horrifying.

  For a number of women, a life of prostitution held many rewards and delivered to them an existence far more comfortable and exciting than anything they might have otherwise experienced. The thin strata of the most successful ladies of the town was made up largely of women pulled from poverty. Fanny Murray, Emily Warren, Betsy Cox and Nancy Dawson are only a few who came straight from the street into the company of some of the wealthiest men in the country, a feat difficult for other professions to perform at the best of times. A pretty face was enough to catapult a young girl to riches and to secure her future, if she played her cards correctly. The Harris’s Lists record numerous examples of this. Among the celebrated names that fill its pages are those of women who never quite attained the stellar heights of Kitty Fisher and Emma Hamilton, but whose lives were nevertheless prosperous and comfortable. The Lists also chart the fortunes of women such as Becky LeFevre (later known as Mrs Clapereau or Clappero), a lady who made a somewhat successful debut upon the stage after rising from the rank of a streetwalker. Becky’s notoriety landed her a wealthy keeper, who subsidised her accommodation on Frith Street. The savvy Miss LeFevre took advantage of her commodious lodgings to let unused rooms to ladies of the town and by the age of twenty-eight had established a profitable enterprise which she eventually moved to King’s Place. By 1789, a Mr Clapereau, described as ‘a remarkably handsome youth’ and a companion of the Prince of Wales, fell under her spell and insisted that she retire from procuring to live solely as his mistress in lodgings on Gerrard Street. So exclusive in her services that she only received payment in banknotes and never took ‘any messages or mandates from Bagnios’, ‘Mrs’ Clapereau, by the age of thirty-eight, had lifted herself from the status of common whore to woman of
wealth. The same happy fate awaited Miss Marshall, mentioned in 1779 and 1793, and Miss Becky Child (1788, 1789 and 1793). Miss Marshall, who in later years became Mrs Marshall, is described as ‘a genteel person’ who was ‘prudent enough to be saving so as to enable herself to appear in an elegant manner and to be provided in case of an imergecy’. Unlike many of the sisterhood, prudence had allowed the now grand ‘Mrs Marshall’ to remain well provided for, fashionably dressed and still in high-keeping fourteen years later in 1793. Miss Becky Child, who also eventually changed her mode of address to that of ‘Mrs’, prospered for at least ten years under the protection of a wealthy ‘citizen’ of London (quite probably a member of the Child family of bankers). In 1789 she was comfortable enough to ‘never admit any one home with her’ after visits to the playhouses and assembly rooms. By 1793, her generous lover had feathered her nest so well that she was now described as ‘plump and fair’ and as the keeper of her own house on Newman Street.

  A large number of the names that appear in the Harris’s Lists are also mentioned by that inveterate womaniser, William Hickey. One of these is that of Fanny Temple (also known as Fanny Hartford), who is featured in the 1764 edition. Like so many, Fanny began her career as an actress at Drury Lane and came to supplement her income through honouring the attentions of her admirers. At the time her entry was written, she was living in Spring Gardens and was described as having a fair complexion and ‘black eyes’ from which ‘love shoots his golden darts’. When Hickey had made her acquaintance roughly two years later, her prospects were on the rise. She had moved to ‘an excellent house in Queen Ann Street and had … neat lodgings in the country, pleasantly situated near the waterside just above Hammersmith, and kept her own chariot, with suitable establishment of servants’. The bill for this lavish lifestyle was not footed by Hickey, but rather by ‘a gentleman of rank and fashion, possessed of a splendid fortune’. Although Hickey further supplemented her income, his relationship with Fanny was more than a simple business arrangement. He and Fanny shared a genuine affection, which caused Hickey in later years to make attempts at re-establishing contact. Unluckily for him but quite happily for her, it appeared that Fanny by the 1780s ‘had married a gentleman of fortune’ and now ‘resided entirely in the country’.