The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Walter – who should have known a prostitute when he saw one, having, according to his own account at least, slept with eleven volumes’-worth of them (see note on p. 55 for my attitude to his evidence) – made it clear that identification was not straightforward. Walking one day down a muddy Regent Street, he watched a woman ‘holding her petticoats well up out of the dirt, the common habit of even respectable women...With gay ladies the habit was to hold them up just a little higher.’ (‘Gay’ at the time meant a prostitute, probably from the connection with their wearing brightly – gaily – coloured clothes; it did not gain our current meaning until the 1920s, and then originally in the USA.) But how high was ‘a little higher’? Walter was not sure. He walked ahead of her and ‘turned round, and met her eye. She looked at me, but the look was so steady, indifferent, and with so little of the gay woman in her expression, that I could not make up my mind as to whether she was accessible or not.’ He continued to follow her, and when she held up her skirts again, knowing he was behind her, he moved in, ‘saying as I came close, “Will you come with me?”’ It was only then, when she agreed, that he could be certain. The quality of women’s clothes, too, was no indicator. ‘Dress prostitutes’ were lent clothes that they could otherwise not afford, usually by brothel madams. The Yokel’s Preceptor, presented as a guidebook to young men fresh from the country, separated ‘blowens’ (prostitutes) from ‘private blowens’: respectably married women who ‘are in the habit of walking out, neatly and modestly attired’. According to the author, ‘should they be accosted by a gentleman’, the private blowens might agree to go with him to an accommodation house to make a little spare cash. It is clear that those writers who thought they saw streets full of prostitutes really just saw streets full of women.

  If prostitutes could be identified only when they were approached, then it becomes clear that women were indiscriminately importuned in the streets. That this was indeed the case emerged in a debate that played out in the pages of The Times in 1862. A gentleman calling himself ‘Paterfamilias’ wrote to the editor (letters from members of the public were often signed with a sobriquet, frequently in Latin, such as ‘Pro Bono Publico’) to complain that on a trip to London his daughters had been followed down Oxford Street by ‘scoundrels’ who stared at them and made remarks. ‘Puella’ (‘Girl’) replied two days later, saying that she frequented the same street and was never accosted; perhaps it was the girls’ fault – had their country dress or outgoing rural manners encouraged these men? ‘Paterfamilias’, by return, was indignant: his daughters were wearing mourning following the death of Prince Albert. He was backed up by ‘M’, a day-governess (one who went from one pupil’s house to another), who said she too had been accosted by ‘middle-aged and older men’. Readers joined in, on both sides of the question. The following month the Saturday Review finally suggested that if women dressed attractively, they must expect to be looked at, but added this rider: ‘the remedy is in their own hands...I f they will be seen in the well-preserved coverts, it is for them to be careful that they do not look like game...Let them dress thoroughly unbecomingly. Let them procure poke bonnets, stint their skirts to a moderate circumference, and cultivate sad-looking underclothing. Any woman thus armed, and walking on without sauntering or looking about her, is perfectly safe even from amorous glances.’ (Note that even badly dressed women still needed to keep their eyes down and walk briskly.) This was partly a satirical response, but the controversy made it clear that no one could tell a respectable woman from a prostitute by appearance alone, and barely by behaviour. The supposed signals that indicated a gay woman – slow walking, looking around, fashionable dress – were also natural behaviour on a shopping street. A lithograph of 1865, ‘Scene in Regent Street’, concurred: in it a ‘Philanthropic Divine’ attempts to hand an improving tract to a fashionably dressed woman. Perhaps she had been approached before, for in this parody she sounds remarkably tolerant as she replies, ‘Bless me, Sir...I am not a social evil, I’m only waiting for a bus.’

  The places where women were seen defined them: if women passed through certain places, they were automatically prostitutes, no matter how they behaved or dressed. It has been suggested that in Great Expectations, when Pip says the Finches of the Grove club meet at a hotel in Covent Garden, the mere words ‘hotel’ and ‘Covent Garden’ together suggested to contemporary readers that the young men were picking up women. Two decades later, when All the Year Round described a hotel down a side street between the Houses of Parliament and the Pye Street slum, where ‘pretty girls’ were ‘always to be seen’, readers would have known exactly what kind of pretty girls were meant.

  Above all, from the beginning of the century a woman signalled her status by her mere presence in a place of public entertainment. Life in London was completely matter-of-fact about this. In this Regency romp there is no hesitation in calling prostitution by its name. The men go to Covent Garden, where they retire to the Saloon, colloquially known as the ‘Mutton Walk’, and are immediately surrounded ‘by number of the gay Cyprians, who nightly visit this place’.155 They have calling cards, which they hand to the visitor from the country, before ‘The regular covies paired off with their covesses.’ This fictional description was a reflection of the real world: a few years later Hékékyan Bey noticed that, in the theatre, ‘Common strumpets sat near the respectable wives and daughters of the citizens of London.’ In the 1830s, a visiting American added that streetwalkers got preferential treatment, being admitted ‘at an inferior charge with season tickets’.

  In the late 1830s or early 1840s, a series of small books was published to guide the ‘swell’ to various places where prostitutes were to be found, listing brothels and accommodation houses, as well as places of public amusement. The eighteenth century developed a tradition of such catalogues: Ned Ward’s The Secret History of London Clubs (1709) listed a ‘Bawds’ Initiating Club’, while the more notorious Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies was published for at least three decades between 1764 and 1788, giving names, addresses, price and description of prostitutes. There appear to have been far fewer in the nineteenth century. The Swell’s Night Guides were probably published in the 1840s; The Bachelor’s Pocket Book for 1851 may have been aimed at the (male) visitors in London for the Great Exhibition, but it was, at least in part, a reprint of the Swell’s guides. Later in the 1850s, the Yokel’s Preceptor: or, More Sprees in London! Being a ...Show-up of All the Rigs and Doings of the Flash Cribs in This Great Metropolis delivered rather less than it promised. In its ‘Roll Call of Some Celebrated Mots [prostitutes]’, of the seven listed, two were dead, one had retired, one had the pox and another was ‘as regular a fireship as ever sailed the coast. Take care’ – which suggests she too was infected, so in reality only two women were available. Perhaps this volume was more for the young man who wanted to think himself a bit of a dog, but who had no intention of doing anything more than buying a dirty book.

  The Swell’s Night Guides, however, do seem to have contained solid information. One lists a number of theatres, presenting their advantages and their drawbacks for a man of pleasure. At Her Majesty’s, on the Haymarket, ‘An occasional trifle to the hall-keeper will get a gentleman behind the scenes.’ In the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, run by Mme Vestris (who later went on to run the Olympic as the first entirely respectable theatre), ‘The private boxes...have snug and secret retiring anti-rooms [sic], with voluptuous couches, and all things requisite for the comfort and convenience of the debauchée.’ The same could be said of Drury Lane, which boasted excellent arrangements in the rooms beside the boxes: ‘The doors fastening on the inside, the visitors are not so liable to be intruded on.’ (At almost the same date Dickens wrote that Drury Lane was no longer the ‘temple of obscenity’ it had once been, having banned prostitutes from its Grand Saloon.) The Haymarket possessed no retiring rooms, although the quality of female attractions in the Saloon was commended, while the English Opera House in the Strand was dismissed for its
inferior girls. The Adelphi ‘always contrives to have the prettiest women...There are more kept women, and open trading women of pleasure, in the female corps dramatique of the Adelphi...than in any other’, yet ‘the private boxes are ill-conditioned and enormously dear’. The Pavilion, in the East End, was ‘well conducted’, and the manager ‘is not very particular as to his privacy behind the scenes. The entrée is to be obtained on very moderate terms’. There was little change more than a decade later, when a Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Houses heard that at the Eagle Tavern’s theatrical performances, ‘No gentleman, well dressed, can promenade there without being solicited by a female to go to houses of accommodation.’ In the late 1860s, at the Alhambra theatre in Leicester Square, there were bars that charged special admission to men who wanted to mingle with the unaccompanied women who were regulars. There was another, private bar under the stage, where patrons could mix with the ballet girls from backstage.

  The Swell’s Night Guide also listed eighteen actresses, with notes on where they performed, where they lived and under whose protection (that is, the identity of their lover). It included the wife of the playwright Edward Stirling, who was supposedly under the protection of a doctor in Pall Mall; and the actor John Saville Faucit’s wife, Elizabeth, who was living with the actor William Farren in Brompton. The book gave advice too on how to approach an actress. It warned the interested party not to offer her money directly, but to say he wanted to engage her as he was staging private theatricals. This throws some light on how Dickens’ friends might have viewed his relationship with Nelly Ternan, for whom Dickens left his wife in 1858: Dickens, aged forty-five, had hired the eighteen-year-old actress to perform in some private theatricals. Soon after, he encouraged one theatre manager to give her work, sending a cheque for £50, either intended for her, or to pay the manager for taking her on. It was not long, however, before she retired from the stage, unlike the ‘many’ actresses who, said The Swell’s Night Guide, ‘frequent some of the French Introducing Houses’ (see p.412–13); in those cases, it added, they could be dealt with on a commercial basis.

  According to Dickens, when theatres became more respectable they were replaced by the ‘Dancing Establishment’. He admitted that ‘Great order is observed’ in most of these venues, but few men resorted to them for anything other than what he referred to as ‘allurement’. Although he didn’t name it, the establishment he had in mind was most probably the Argyle (sometimes Argyll) Assembly Rooms in Windmill Street, near Regent Street and the Haymarket. Originally housed in a Nash-designed building that opened in the early 1820s, the Argyle was for many the epitome of a place of loose morals. In London by Night, by ‘Anonyma’, a risqué novel about a barmaid who becomes a prostitute, an illustration entitled ‘Lost’ shows her in front of the Argyle. The 1s admission charge gave entry to a dance floor downstairs; an additional 1s fee brought access to the upstairs galleries, which had private seating in alcoves. By the late 1860s, the upstairs was notable for its bright lighting and its fifty-piece band; by the bar hung panels depicting Europa and the bull, Leda and the Swan, and Bacchus and Silenus. Here the women met and sat drinking with their admirers until the Rooms closed at one.

  Similar to the Argyle, but not as exclusive, was the Casino de Venise, more commonly referred to as the Holborn Casino, or even just the Holborn. It too charged 1s, and was ‘gorgeously fitted up with immense mirrors, and velvet covered sofas and seats, handsome carpets, gilding’; it too had a separate ‘wine room’. A City clerk in London by Night lives in chambers at Furnival’s Inn, as Dickens had in the early days of his marriage, but since the clerk is unmarried, he is freer to indulge himself: ‘I call the Holborn my drawing-room. I believe I come here pretty well every night.’ Dancing saloons could be found right across the city, each attuned to its particular audience. The Ratcliffe Highway one had a single long room with a bar, offering entertainment as well as dancing: ‘a young lady in short muslin petticoats performs a ballet by herself, or with a little girl of some seven years old, dressed like a marine-store fairy’. In the intervals the child sold biscuits and cakes to the audience, before she was replaced by her father, who sang sentimental ballads.

  There also existed public places for dancing that were respectable: Caldwell’s, in Dean Street in Soho, was fequented by ‘Lots of young men, clerks & apprentices, dancing with...shopgirls & milliners – also respectable’. These ‘soirées dansantes’ were generally run by a dancing master, admission 6d; lists were readily available of the teachers and the evenings when they held assemblies. But dancing itself could make a place of doubtful propriety unless care was taken. Caldwell’s also had a reputation as an establishment where middle- and upper-class men brought working-class women they had designs on: even if the women concerned were not already on the road to ruin, just being there could all too easily set them on that path.

  After the dancing saloons closed (at 3 or 4 a.m. until mid-century; then at 1 a.m. later on), the dancers moved on to eating establishments such as the oyster houses and pastry-cooks that lined the night districts, or to the finishes, ‘low taverns or large and luxurious public houses where people go to finish off the night’. Their exterior appearance could be deceptive. In the 1830s, one finish had a dingy little entrance; inside, however, ‘the brilliance of hundreds of gas lights’ revealed a large room divided lengthways, with booths, as in an eating house, down on one side; opposite was a raised area where prostitutes sat ‘in their finest attire’. In the mid-1840s, a coffee house called the Finish, in James Street, Covent Garden, attracted a mixture of late-night revellers and early-morning market people. Many more finishes resembled Barnes’s night house, ‘an ordinary drinking-saloon’ that also sold pastries, and steak and oysters.

  Most prostitutes, however, did not while away their time rolling from the Argyle via the finishes to bijou villas paid for by their lovers. Most were streetwalkers, spending long hours in the wet and the cold. The areas in the West End where prostitutes were mostly to be found varied over the decades. In 1818, according to one guide, prostitutes could be seen walking from Aldgate Pump to St James’s Street, that is, a two-and-a-half-mile stretch from where the Bank tube station is now, along Fleet Street, the Strand and Pall Mall to St James’s. ‘Another line extends along Newgate Street, into Lincoln’s Inn-fields, across Covent Garden’, and then to Piccadilly. The Strand, Holborn and Fleet Street were popular venues for streetwalkers in the 1820s, as were Leicester Square and Regent Street in the 1830s, and the Haymarket at almost all dates.156 Mayfair was another favourite haunt; in Dombey and Son (written in the 1840s, set in the 1830s) Edith Dombey sees ‘faded’ women ‘wander...past’ outside the upper-class house in Brook Street, by Grosvenor Square.

  Many streetwalkers, however, stayed in their own neighbourhoods, servicing the men who lived and worked near by. The areas by the dockyards supported a large population of prostitutes, and Granby Street, parallel to Lower Marsh Street, beside Waterloo station, was notorious. When Flora Tristan saw it in 1839, she found ‘women were looking out of windows or seated on their doorsteps...half-dressed; several were bare to the waist’.157 Walter agreed: on a Saturday night, the street was ‘full of women who used to sit at the windows half naked’, with more soliciting in the doorways. In the 1841 census, twenty-four houses on this street were occupied by fifty-seven young single women running their own households; their age and the absence of men suggests that prostitution may have been their primary source of income. Twenty years later nearly two-thirds of the single women were in their twenties, and a dozen in their teens. (The street was purchased in its entirety by the railway at the end of the 1860s, for company housing; when Waterloo station was extended it was built over, and no longer exists.)

  Many of these women serviced clients at home, but just as many walked over the bridge to the West End each evening at about nine o’clock, reversing the trend of commuting, before heading back south over the river at eight the next morning. Haymarket prostitutes gen
erally walked the streets from eleven at night until one in the morning: in other words, from the time the theatres closed to the opening of the finishes. According to Walter, in the daytime, ‘Exceedingly nice women were...to be met...from eleven to one in the morning, and three till five in the afternoon’ in Regent Street. The pattern varied from district to district. In the late 1830s, out at the western edge of suburban London – where the new, unlit roads were extending for the first time into what had recently been country and market gardens – ‘Gay women of a poor class were then...about the darkest parts, or they used to walk there with those who met them where the roads were lighter.’

  For the most part, notions of upper-class cads twiddling their moustaches and seducing working girls were fiction, not fact. Police returns suggest that ‘a substantial majority’ of working women serviced men of their own class and economic background, and their lives were far from novelistically glamorous. When Walter went looking for women towards the end of the 1840s, he ‘began to walk through streets inhabited by very poor gay women’, who stood at their doors from about two o’clock ‘to catch passers by’. One of them, Mary, lived in a room, ‘about twelve feet square’, with a bed taking up a third of the space, a table, two chairs, a cupboard, a chest of drawers, a looking-glass, a coal cuttle and a slop pail. It was fairly well furnished by the standards of impoverished districts, yet so cold that Walter kept all of his clothes on (this was unusual for him, and he mentions it specifically). This despite the fact that Mary did relatively well for herself. Walter began to visit her regularly, paying her £2 a week, although sometimes ‘I left off for a while, and gave Mary a chance of keeping her other friends...mostly poor clerks...and married men better off, who gave her a pound.’ If Walter’s figures are accurate, Mary earned approximately £80 or £100 a year, the income of a minor clerk.