The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Evidence confirms that this was the way of things in the poorer areas. In Whitechapel there was little work available for women apart from domestic service or the local gin shops and coffee houses; in the aptly named Angel Alley, the best-paid work was providing sex for the men who brought hay and straw to Whitechapel market twice a week. Around the docks, many women had intermittent but long-term arrangements with sailors, living with them for the duration of their shore leave. One woman said she had ‘six, eight, ten, oh! more...husbands. I am not married, of course not, but they think me their wife while they are on shore.’ This was an entirely accepted way of life, barely regarded as prostitution by the women or their communities.

  Not everyone could aspire even to Mary’s existence. Most of the women around Granby Street were ‘to be had for a few shillings’ in the 1840s. Walter laid out the economics of streetwalking. Women of a ‘superior class’ charged a sovereign, but half that sum would pay for ‘as nice a one as you needed’. ‘Two good furnished rooms near the Clubs could be had by women for from fifteen to twenty shillings per week, a handsome silk dress for five or ten pounds’. Even if they couldn’t afford the pleasant room, as long as they had the handsome dress, they could charge ‘from five to ten shillings a poke’ in an accommodation house.158

  Accommodation houses were places to take a woman for a brief period of time, or overnight. These might be rooms over coffee houses, or might even resemble private houses, the only difference being that the door to the street was left open, and inside there was a ‘red or blue transparent blind’ illuminated from behind by a gaslight. The quality of the houses varied according to price and location. Walter’s first suburban accommodation house cost him 5s for a visit of ‘some hours’; and the room was well furnished, with ‘red curtains, looking-glasses, wax lights, clean linen, a huge chair, a large bed, and a cheval-glass’.159 The Cross Keys coaching inn in Gracechurch Street cost 4s a night, or, for ‘a short visit the mere calling for wine is deemed sufficient’ – that is, the mark-up on the wine covered the cost of the room. But a short visit meant short: Walter and his friend had just fallen asleep at one house when there was a knocking at the door and a voice called, ‘Shall you be long, sir, we want the room.’ As Walter, said, ‘I was having too much accommodation for my money.’

  If the guides and Walter are to be relied on, it might be swifter to demarcate the places where there were no such houses than to list where they might be found. At the beginning of the century, according to the tailor Francis Place, there were three or four brothels around Charing Cross Road, in addition to two nearby courts almost entirely populated by prostitutes; by 1815, the courts had been cleaned up; by 1824, this ‘improvement’ had spread to the entire neighbourhood, probably owing to the Strand Western Improvements. Some districts were notorious throughout the century: this was particularly true of the area between Leicester Square and the H aymarket, north of the Strand around Panton Street; and around Exeter Street, off the Strand. In fact so disreputable was this area that when Walter took a girl there, ‘the cabman insolently demanded about five times his fare’ and added, ‘Think yourself lucky a peeler don’t drop on you for taking a young gal like that’ to such an address. Up around Portland Place was another well-known red-light district: Walter used a neighbourhood house in James Street, as well as another on Titchfield Street, the ‘quietest house in London’, known for having two entrances, so an ideal place to meet a married woman. In the 1840s, The Swell’s Night Guides list a number of places, many of which were free-and-easies and supper rooms such as the Cider Cellars and Evans’s. The guidebooks make little distinction between places where prostitutes might be found and those where they were the raison d’être. Undoubtedly some of the named houses were brothels: Mother H’s was one. It was, the guide enthuses, ‘the multibona casey for the swell donnas’, and Mother H herself ‘was complete mistress of her functions’. (She is named in the drinking song on p. 360.)

  There were probably far more accommodation houses, catering to women who worked independently, than there were brothels, where women worked for an employer, were given a share of the fee or a salary, and were fed and lodged at the proprietor’s expense. The number of accommodation houses is entirely unknown; we have a better sense of how many brothels existed, because the authorities attempted to keep track of them. In 1841, the police were aware of 933, and in 1857, 410. Even so, some of these may not have been brothels but places where a few women had chosen to lodge together, sometimes pooling their income, sometimes operating independently and sharing living expenses.

  A secondary type of brothel, probably more common, was the introducing house. This did not employ resident prostitutes, but was where the women came to work. Pubs operated as introducing houses, with the women using the rooms upstairs, and The New Swell’s Night Guide listed some of the ‘ladies who are generally to be found’ at specific addresses. More introducing houses masqueraded as respectable businesses, with a brass plaque – the sign of tradesmen and the professional middle classes – on the doors, claiming the premises to be a doctor’s, or a male midwife’s, or, if entirely run by women, a milliner’s, or a stay- or corset-maker’s. An introducing house in the Wandsworth Road announced itself as ‘A Seminary for Young Ladies’, while another in Villiers Street, run by the same woman, claimed to house a ‘Professor of Pianoforte and Guitar’. Many were set up ‘in the most stylish streets’: St James’s Place, Piccadilly, Jermyn Street, around Portman Square. At Mme Matileau’s establishments for young ladies, in Dean Street and the Old Brompton Road, ‘nothing is allowed to get stale...you may have your meat dressed to your own liking...if it suit your taste, you may kill your own lamb or mutton, for her flock is in prime condition, and always ready for sticking; when any of them are fried, they are turned out to grass, and sent to the hammer or disposed of by private contract...consequently the rot, bots, glanders, and other diseases incidental to cattle, are not generally known here.’

  Some women worked on their own, and the guides printed long lists of such prostitutes, with their addresses. Sometimes these women were kept by men, named by the guides, although they also continued to be available to other male clients. The Bachelor’s Pocket Book gave detailed directions to the house with ‘Two Birds hanging in a Parlour Window’, or the one with ‘Amber Curtains to Windows’. It also listed the speciality of the women in detail: Jane Fowler, in Church Street, Soho, ‘has a peculiar method of disrobing...for the purpose of enhancing the enjoyment’, while Miss Alice Grey, New Street, Portland Road, ‘frequently performs the rites...according to the equestrian order’. Miss Walbeck, of William Street, King’s Cross, takes ‘male parts’ on stage, and in the book is shown in her chemise, wearing a top hat and trousers and holding a whip: ‘she has a piece of the termagant about her.’ Such women could be found in every part of the city. Renton Nicholson, in his autobiography, remembered that in the early 1830s many ‘dashing beaut[ies], gaily dressed’ took lodgings in the district north of Oxford Street, and ‘loud knockings late at night were frequently heard’. In general, the streets mentioned most often are around the Adelphi, south of the Strand, north of Oxford Street and south of the New Road, in most of Soho, and around Edgware Road at Marble Arch.

  These guides to the night dealt entirely with heterosexual commercial sex. That there was a homosexual commercial world is known, but the surviving details are even scantier, and even less certain, than the unreliable information we have for the heterosexual world, and much of it comes from evidence given in court.160 Of the cases that ended publicly, in the press and in court, a large proportion of offences through the century were enacted in public places: of a sample 105 cases, 22 per cent occurred in the street, 20 per cent in parks, 8 per cent in public urinals (which started to appear mid-century), 14 per cent in pubs or shops and only 3 per cent in theatres.

  In 1806, David Robertson was arrested for sodomy; he had kept what may have been a gay brothel, or perhaps an accommodation house, in Charles Stree
t, Covent Garden, although few details survive. More information can be gleaned from details of the arrest in 1810 of James Cook and his partner Yardley (whose first name does not appear to be known), the owners of the White Swan public house in Vere Street, Clare market. According to the single contemporaneous publication about the case, the pub was in part an accommodation house and in part what was described as a brothel, where ‘The upper part of the house was appropriated to youths who were constantly in waiting for casual customers’. However, it seems more likely that this was an introducing house (that is, the men probably did not live on the premises). Whatever it was, within six months of opening it was raided and the owners arrested. (For their fates, see pp. 381–2.)

  Pubs, despite the low number of arrests mentioned above, were an obvious place for like-minded men to meet. In 1825, the Barley Mow pub in the Strand was raided after information was received that it held gay free-and-easies twice weekly. The parks and the streets were also favoured gay cruising areas, particularly those near barracks. An 1813 publication reported that the author had attended a court case where a soldier on duty in the park ‘under the wall of Marlborough-gardens’ was approached by a man who, after speaking to him briefly, ‘put his hand in his breeches’. And according to The Times in 1825, ‘scarcely a week passes’ without magistrates courts hearing cases of ‘indecent assaults on the sentries in the park’. These men were generally arrested under the Vagrancy Act (1822), which required people to give ‘a satisfactory account of themselves’ and their reason for being in the street, making it a useful catch-all way to remove both beggars and sex-workers.

  There are a few transient glimpses, however, of happy relationships formed from encounters in the streets that did not come within the purview of the magistrates. Edward Leeves was an Englishman living in Venice, who returned for a time to London in the late 1840s, socializing with the upper classes and cruising, from what we can tell from his heavily redacted diary: ‘Fine. Tried my luck once more. I sat in the Park; but so shy that I cd make [illegible] nothing.’ A few weeks later, ‘Fun & Folly seems the order there for those who have money. Saw J.B. We went up to Albany St.’ Later Leeves filled in the scanty details of his first meeting with a trooper named Jack Brand: ‘This day year, Dear Boy, about this hour, I saw you in all your beauty, smiling as your gallant charger reared & pranced...And then in the [sentry] Box I spoke to you, & after Parade we met for five minutes, & you told me your name.’ That evening, ‘at the Arch at Hyde Park Corner met my poor Boy. We went together in a cab to Albany St, or one just by’, presumably to an accommodation house, since the address was far from Leeves’s own lodgings. The brief and sad story then continued:

  I saw J.B. on 3rd & 5th August, & on the 9th & 10th I think but not sure.

  12 AUGUST: ‘J.B. Gravesend.’

  14 AUGUST: ‘D[itt]o. and back to Town. [Inserted later: ‘& now on the 6th Septr what regrets & what recollections!!!’, for on 5 September, Jack Brand died of cholera, aged twenty-two.]

  18 DECEMBER: ‘About this hour [fifteen weeks ago] I was arriving in London and anticipating our meeting...And I am alive – & He is gone & forgotten save by me – and nothing remains to tell of him save the cold stone which I have had placed by his Grave!’

  28 DECEMBER: ‘If it were not [for] the intense cold I think that I should make an escapade, & try to drown thought & grief...There would be found scope enough for even my appetite, I believe.’

  26 JANUARY 1850: ‘Twenty six weeks...since I first saw you in Hyde Park!’

  6 FEBRUARY: ‘Had a pleasant half hour after [military] parade & made some new, rollicking acquaintance.’

  7 FEBRUARY: ‘Rather a pleasant evening with my yesterday lads – or rather with two of them – rare boys, by God! & no mistake; but for gentleness & simpatia nothing like my own poor boy, who has no equal left.’

  8 FEBRUARY: ‘Repetition of evening party: two prime swells in their way; but the fun is expensive, & yet there is no grudging the blunt [cash] to such roaring boys.’

  In the 1850s, the Yokel’s Preceptor claimed that male prostitutes could be found on Regent Street, Fleet Street, Holborn and the Strand, looking into shop windows to give cover to their slow strolls, and also in coffee houses, dancing saloons and theatres – in effect, in the same places where women carried out the same business. But it is a matter of debate as to how reliable the book is: it speaks of ‘the beasts...commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, &c.’ and appears to define male prostitutes exactly as Acton and his colleagues defined female ones – by assessing whether or not they visually conformed to the author’s preconceptions.

  In 1864, Arthur Munby had attended a commercial dance in Camberwell, ostensibly like those run by dancing masters, but one where the women dressed as men, and the men as women. Munby – who was sexually excited by masculine-looking, working-class women, especially dirty ones – found this ‘simply disgusting’. But the event was not secret and, he admitted, ‘only a lark’. Indeed, ten years earlier, at the Druid’s Hall, Turnagain Lane, off Fleet Street, dances attended by cross-dressers were held over an eighteen-month period at least, untroubled by the police or anyone else.

  The Boulton and Park case, in 1870, was an extension of this cross-dressing and was also a case of non-commercial sex, yet the stage it was performed on was still the street. That spring, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park – the sons of, respectively, a wine merchant and a judge – were arrested as they left the Strand theatre dressed as women. It soon emerged that over the previous three years they had regularly appeared dressed as women, in the streets as well as at theatres, restaurants, even at the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race. It seemed to have been fairly clear to everyone who saw them that Boulton and Park were male, yet their ejections from various places of entertainment were rare.161

  Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park were arrested in 1870 for appearing in public dressed as women. ‘Stella’ and ‘Fanny’ even made their first court appearance in female dress, to the great amusement of the crowds who waited to see them.

  The two men initially seemed not to take the prosecution seriously. On his first court appearance Boulton wore ‘a cherry-coloured evening dress rimmed with white lace’ together with a wig giving him a demure chignon, while Park’s gown was ‘dark green satin...low-necked, trimmed in black lace’, and covered by a shawl; he wore his hair in flaxen curls. (Both disappointed their followers by afterwards dressing as men and, apparently on legal advice, sporting moustaches and whiskers.) There was no public outrage: the crowds waiting by the police vans waved their hats and shouted encouragement; when the men’s letters were read out in court, ‘the audience in the body of the court appeared to be exceedingly amused’. There was little sense that Boulton and Park were in any way a public danger or disgrace: this was just one more instance of street theatre. It shows a substantial shift in attitudes from 1835, when in his ‘Visit to Newgate’ in Sketches by Boz, Dickens reported on seeing the last two men to be executed for ‘unnatural acts’, or homosexual, consensual sex. They were unnamed by Dickens but have since been identified as John Smith and John Pratt. At the time, ‘the nature of [their] offence rendered it necessary to separate them’ from the prison’s other convicted men.

  The assumption in literature, and in all good books, was that women who transgressed the moral code by becoming sex-workers were sure to meet an untimely death. Flora Tristan was certain that ‘Many die in hospitals from shameful diseases’, or in neglect and poverty ‘in their frightful hovels’. Dr Ryan wrote that up to 10 per cent of these women killed themselves, ‘or become insane, or idiotic’ through moral turpitude. William Tait agreed that prostitutes fell into a decline and rapidly died: this was a ‘general law’. Acton, in contradiction, compiled figures to show that prostitutes did not commit suicide more often than any other group, but fiction supported the views of his colleagues. In London by Night, the barmaid Louisa, who was ‘Lost’ on entering the Argyle Rooms, was ‘Found’ at the end of the story, when h
er body was pulled from the river, where she had ended her life.

  The Romantic notion of suicide was that it respresented the act of a rash and impetuous free (male) spirit. While few young men may have killed themselves for love, as Romantic literature had it, it was the case then, as now, that far more men than women committed suicide – up to four times as many. Despite these statistics, between the end of the eighteenth century and the coming of Victoria, there was a perceptual shift. From the late 1830s it was thought that it was women who killed themselves more frequently, and that they did so for love. This change is illustrated in the series of engravings of an eighteenth-century pond, known as Rosamond’s Pond, in St James’s Park, which was filled in in 1770. In 1780, an etching of it in its former state was captioned: ‘This spot was often the receptacle of many unhappy Persons, who in the stillness of an Evening Plung’d themselves into Eternity.’ In 1825, the etching was reissued and the caption altered: ‘The South West corner of St. James’s Park was enriched with this romantic scene...its melancholy situation seems to have tempted more persons, (especially young women) to suicide by drowning than any other place about town.’ In 1859, Sala claimed that Rosamond’s Pond had been the Waterloo Bridge of its day, for it was there that ‘forsaken women’ went to drown themselves.