London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The sexual ambience of nineteenth-century London, despite the cliché of “the Victorian age” as one of upright family values, was no less lascivious than its eighteenth-century counterpart. In her London Journal Flora Tristan wrote in 1840 that “in London all classes are deeply corrupted. Vice comes to them early.” She had been shocked by an “orgy” in a tavern where English aristocrats and Members of Parliament disported themselves with drunken women until daybreak. In quite a different sphere Henry Mayhew noted of London street children that “their most remarkable characteristic … is their extraordinary licentiousness.” As a result of his observations he guessed that the age of puberty came much earlier than most people believed; he declined to give, however, “the details of filthiness and of all uncleanness.” Even in the areas where the more respectable working class lived, it was customary for couples as young as thirteen and fourteen to live and procreate without the need for marriage vows; there was a church in Bethnal Green, for example, where these “Cockney marriages” could be performed and where “you might be married for sevenpence if you were fourteen years old.” One curate of the East End recalled a Christmas morning when he “stood marrying blaspheming youths and girls to one another … ghastly mockery.” Here sexual profligacy is associated with a general irreligion or atheism which is another characteristic emblem of London life.

  Yet the major concern of nineteenth-century urban observers lay with the extent and nature of prostitution. Surveys-by Mayhew, by Booth, by Acton and others-suggest that it became something of an obsession. There were books entitled Prostitution in London, or, more elaborately, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social amp; Sanitary Aspects. There were tables and statistics about where prostitutes were kept, lodged or resorted, with divisions and subdivisions: “Well-dressed living in Brothels,” “Well-dressed living in Private Lodgings,” “In Low Neighbourhoods,” “Introducing Houses” and “Accommodation Houses.” There were detailed observations on “Bent and Character of Mind,” “Manner of Passing Their Leisure Hours,” “Moral Defects” (spiritous liquor) and “Good Qualities” (strong sympathy for one another). Prostitution seems to have been the overwhelming consideration of Victorian social reformers, complementary to the efforts of other workers in matters of sanitation and housing; in that sense all were concerned with the inheritance of a thousand years of unchecked urban living, with a strong effort to cleanse or purify it.

  The connection of sexuality and disease was also explicitly made. William Acton, in Prostitution in London, revealed that these “rouged and whitewashed creatures, with painted lips and eyebrows, and false hair, accustomed to haunt Langham Place, portions of the New Road, the Quadrant … the City Road, and the purlieus of the Lyceum” were on investigation more often than not found to be “a mass of syphilis.” The characteristic metaphor of waste or refuse was also adduced. “As a heap of rubbish will ferment, so surely will a number of unvirtuous women.” The prostitute then becomes a symbol of contagion, both moral and physical. Of the eighty thousand in London in the 1830s, it was said that eight thousand would die each year. In the London hospitals 2,700 cases of syphilis occurred each year “in children from eleven to sixteen years of age.” The actual number of female prostitutes was a subject of endless speculation and invention-seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, or higher, and in the mid-nineteenth century it was computed that “£8,000,000 are expended annually on this vice in London alone.” In that sense prostitution itself becomes a token of London’s commercial rapacity, as well as of the fears attendant upon the overwhelming growth of both vice and the city itself.

  The degradation of civilisation, in the very centre of London, can take many different forms. Some of them were recorded in Ryan’s Prostitution in London, published in 1839. “Maria Scoggins, aged fifteen, held a situation as a stay-maker. On her way to her father’s house in the evening she was decoyed to a brothel kept by Rosetta Davis, alias Abrahams, and turned upon the streets.” Another girl, aged fifteen “was actually sold by her stepmother to the keeper of one of these houses in the eastern part of London.” Unwary children of both sexes were merchandise. Leah Davis was an elderly female, the mother of thirteen daughters, “all either prostitutes or brothel-keepers.” The metaphor of youth being sacrificed is redolent of barbaric rituals at the altars of Troy or Gomorrah, while the image of girls “thrown,” “turned,” or “decoyed” upon the streets suggests a vision of a dark and labyrinthine city where innocence is quickly scented and destroyed. Three girls of fifteen were despatched to lure many youths together “so as to make their united payments considerable”; “they were admitted to the scene of depravity which the establishment unfolded … These houses were used as lodging houses for thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and others of the lowest grade … it was well known that the most diabolical practices were constantly perpetrated within them … in the midst of a dense and ignorant population … Men, women and children, of all ages, were there associated for the vilest and basest purposes … spreading a moral miasma around.” This is a record of what was considered to be the shadow of pagan darkness not in the suburbs, or in well-localised stews, but in the very heart of the city.

  But if one image of the London prostitute was of disease and contagion, embodying in striking form all the anxieties and fears which the city itself may provoke, the other was of isolation and alienation. De Quincey’s account of Ann, daughter of stony-hearted Oxford Street, is one of the first examples of that urban vision which sees in the plight of the young prostitute the very condition of living in the city; she had become a prey to all its merciless commercial forces as well as to its underlying indifference and forgetfulness.

  Dostoevsky, when wandering down the Haymarket, noticed how “mothers brought their little daughters to make them ply the same trade.” He observed one girl “not older than six, all in rags, dirty, bare-foot and hollow cheeked; she had been severely beaten and her body, which showed through the rags, was covered with bruises … Nobody was paying any attention to her.” Here we have an image of suffering in London, amid the endlessly hurrying and passing crowd who would no more pause to consider a bruised child than a maimed dog. What struck Dostoevsky, who himself was used to terror and hopelessness in his own country, was “the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face … She kept on shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands and then suddenly clasped them together and pressed them to her little bare breast.” These are the sights and pictures of London. On another evening a woman dressed all in black passed him and hurriedly thrust a piece of paper in his hand. He looked at it and saw that it contained the Christian message “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” But how could anyone believe the precepts of the New Testament, when they had witnessed the pain and loneliness of a six-year-old girl? When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.

  Yet perhaps the true gods of the city are of a different nature. When the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, otherwise known as Eros, was unveiled in 1893 at Piccadilly Circus, it was only a few yards from the infamous Haymarket where mothers had brought their young daughters for sale. Eros was the first statue ever made of aluminium, and in that conflation of ancient passion and new-minted metal, we have an emblem of desire as old and as new as the city itself. Eros has been drawing people ever since. In a twentieth-century novel by Sam Selvon, entitled The Lonely Londoners, one of the protagonists, a Trinidadian, notices that the “circus have magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and ending of the world.”

  Throughout this century Piccadilly Circus has been the site of nightly sexual encounters, and an area where young people drift in search of adventure. It is a place where all the roads seem to meet, in endless disarray, and it exudes an atmosphere both energetic and impersonal. That is perhaps also why it has been fo
r many decades a centre of prostitution and easy pick-ups, both male and female. It has always been the part of London most identified with casual sex. “There were regular places they haunted,” Theodore Dreiser wrote of London prostitutes at the beginning of the twentieth century, “Piccadilly being the best,” and that sentiment has been echoed in a thousand novels and documentary reports. The statue of Eros has, after all, commanded a strange power. The city itself is a form of promiscuous desire, with its endless display of other streets and other people affording the opportunity of a thousand encounters and a thousand departures. The very strangeness of London, its multifarious areas remaining unknown even to its inhabitants, includes the possibility of chance and sudden meetings. To be alone or solitary, a characteristic symptom of city life, is to become an adventurer in search of brief companionship; it also is the mark of the predator. The anonymity or impersonality of London life is itself the source of sexual desire, where the appetite can be satisfied without the usual constraints of a smaller society. So the actual vastness of London encourages fantasy and illimitable desire.

  That is why the general sexual condition of London has always remained the same, in its voraciousness and insatiability. Today, there are strip bars and clubs where lap dancers perform; a thousand pubs and nightclubs cater for every kind of sexual perversity; there are streets known for prostitutes and parks used at night for cruising. Whole areas of London at night assume a different face, so that the city is like some endlessly fecund source which can offer alternative realities and different experiences. That is why it is in itself “sexy,” displaying its secret places and tempting the unwary. To turn just one more corner, or walk down one more path, may bring … who knows what? The telephone booths are littered with advertisements for sadistic or transsexual prostitutes, some of them claiming to be “new in town” or “new to London.” They are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century prostitute in Covent Garden, “newly come upon the Town.” But nothing is ever new in London, where the young still offer up their bodies for sale.

  CHAPTER 42

  A Turn of the Dice

  Drink, sex and gambling once always consorted together. They were the trinity of London vice and weakness, an unholy threesome which disported happily across the city. They represented recklessness and defiance, in the face of an uncertain life in a city bedevilled by insecurity.

  All the commercial and financial institutions of London were established upon a giant gamble, so why not participate in the same perilous but enthralling game? Your encounter with a prostitute might lead to a fatal disease, but a turn of the dice might make you wealthy; then, in the face of all these hazards and difficulties, you might drink to forget. The social historian of eighteenth-century London, M. Dorothy George, noted that the “temptations to drink and gamble were interwoven with the fabric of society to an astonishing extent, and they did undoubtedly combine with the uncertainties of life and trade to produce that sense of instability, of liability to sudden ruin.” Many men of business were ruined by dissipation and gambling-Industry and Idleness, charting the decline of a London apprentice through drink, dice and women to eventual hanging at Tyburn, was a characteristic London story.

  · · ·

  The first evidence of gambling in London can be adduced from the Roman period, with the excavation of dice carved out of bone or jet. The unexpected turns of life, as then experienced, are also revealed in the elaborate equipment of a fortune-teller found beneath Newgate Street. In the early medieval period Hazard was played in taverns and other low houses, together with another dice game known as Tables. In medieval brothels, too, gambling and drinking were part of the service. Quarrels over a game were sometimes fatal and, after one round of Tables, “the loser fatally stabbed the winner on the way home.” There was plentiful scope for fraud, also, and there are reports of the gaming boards being marked and the dice loaded. Yet the passion for gaming was everywhere. An excavation in Duke’s Place revealed “a piece of medieval roof-tile shaped into a gaming counter,” according to a report in The London Archaeologist, and as early as the thirteenth century there were rules in Westminster for the punishment of any schoolboy found with dice in his possession. A stroke of the rod was delivered for every “pip” on the dice.

  Playing cards were imported into London in the fifteenth century, and their use became so widespread that in 1495 Henry VII “forebad their use to servants and apprentices except during the Christmas holidays.” Stow records that “From All hallows Eve to the day following Candlemas-day there was, among other sports, playing at cards, for counters, nails and points, in every house.” They were found in every tavern, too: packs of cards had the names of various inns imprinted upon them. Their merits were widely advertised. “Spanish cards lately brought from Vigo. Being pleasant to the eye by their curious colours and quite different from ours may be had at 1/- [one shilling] a pack at Mrs. Baldwin’s in Warwick Lane.” The business in cards became so brisk that the tax upon their sale is estimated to have furnished in the mid-seventeenth century an annual income of five thousand pounds which meant that “some 4.8 million packs of cards” must have been traded.

  Fulham earned a reputation as early as the sixteenth century for its dubious traffic in dice and counters; it is evoked by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where

  For gourd and fullam holds

  And “high” and “low” beguile the rich and poor.

  A fullam in this context was a loaded die. Another recognised centre for gambling was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here boys “gambled for farthings and oranges”; one popular game was the Wheel of Fortune with a movable hand spinning within a circle of figures, “the prize being gingerbread nuts the size of a farthing.” These gaming fields of course attracted dissolute Londoners. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the recognised harbour for “idle and vicious vagrants” known collectively as its Mummers. Among them were Dicers and Chetors and Foists who specialised in gambling. Dice were carved out of true so that they seemed “good and square, yet in the forehead longer on the cater and tray than the other.”

  “What shifts have they to bring this false die in and out?”

  “A jolly fine shift that properly is called foisting.”

  So went a dialogue in a pamphlet entitled Manifest Detection, which outlined a score of other tricks used by the fraternity of the Shifters. Another pamphlet, Look on me, London, warned against the city’s tricks and devices to gull the innocent or the unwary; strangers and visitors were liable to be duped or defrauded by “the Picker-Up, the Kid, the Cap and the Flat,” nicknames which seem to span the generations. And, once more, the language used to describe London’s principal vices is one of corruption and contagion. Dice and cards “were the Green Pathway to hell, whereby followed a hundred gowtie, dropsy diseases.” In a city terrified of sickness and epidemic plague the metaphors for any type of excess, or pleasure, become insistent.

  The fever ran unabated. When the floor of the Middle Temple Hall was taken up in 1764 “no less than a hundred pair” of dice were found to have slipped through its boards during the play of previous generations. In the mid-seventeenth century Pepys observed of the players in one gaming house, “how ceremonious they are as to call for new dice, to shift their places, to alter their manner of throwing” and he noticed “how some old gamesters that have no money now to spend as formerly do come and sit and look on as among others.” These places became known in London as “hells,” and in them Pepys heard the cries of the damned. So “one man being to throw a seven if he could, and failing to do it after a great many throws cried he would be damned if ever he flung seven more while he lived.” Another player, who had won, shouted out, “A pox on it, that it should come so early upon me, for this fortune two hours hence would be worth something to me but then, God damn me, I shall have no such luck.”