Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (18 page)

The Victorian attitude to prostitution was profoundly ambivalent. Though the age of the great matriarch Queen Victoria is synonymous with prudery, the droves of prostitutes – many of them children – and the openness with which they plied their trade in every city struck the visitor as an affront to a civilised nation. Yet there were as many attitudes to prostitutes as there were commentators. The reforming journalist, W. T. Stead, expressed the most kitsch attitude, predating the current official view of prostitutes as victims. Stead told his readers, ‘Never do I walk the streets but I see wretched ruins of humanity, women trampled and crushed into devils by society and my heart has been wracked with anguish for these victims of our juggernaut.’ This view of prostitutes as Mary Magdalene figures, waiting only for the opportunity to repent, was spread through popular art such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Found and William Holman Hunt’s
The Awakening Conscience
.

A less sentimental attitude held that prostitutes were idle wretches who rejected honest labour and made a conscious decision to live by selling their bodies. All the evidence suggests that this view was nearer the reality. For most respectable Victorians, chastity, like pregnancy, was absolute: just as a woman was either pregnant or not pregnant, she was either chaste or impure. It followed that a woman who had surrendered to a single seducer was morally indistinguishable from a whore who slept with ten different men every night. Chastity was highly valued in all women. An impure woman could not expect to find a respectable man prepared to marry her.

For many commentators (like Josephine Butler, for instance – after Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale the most famous woman of her age, who believed prostitution was the greatest of all social evils), the solution to all society’s wrongs was to strengthen the family. Sexual immorality, she maintained, corrodes family life, the basis of a healthy society and the antidote to all social evils. Nothing is more destructive of the family than the unfaithfulness represented by prostitution. Thus nothing was more destructive of society than prostitution. It corroded true married love, virtue and every principle of morality.

But the threat of prostitution was physical as well as moral. The government was concerned to restrict the spread of venereal disease, especially among the armed forces where it was endemic. Where there were soldiers, there were prostitutes. The Providence Street area of Salford was known as the ‘She Battery’ because of the many prostitutes who worked the streets, most of whose clients came from the nearby barracks. Similarly Hulme barracks attracted droves of prostitutes. However, soldiers generally had little money and resorted to the so called ‘park women’ who came out at dusk. These women had grown old in their profession. Army regulations, which made no proper provision for families and often kept men away from home for long periods, made marriage difficult. The result was that only about six per cent of enlisted men were married. Consequently hordes of prostitutes thronged dockyards and garrison towns. It is hardly surprising that by 1860 venereal disease accounted for half the sickness among home-based soldiers and infected one in every three. The aim of the Contagious Diseases Act, 1864, was to stop the spread of venereal diseases among the armed forces by compelling prostitutes to undergo medical examination and, if diseased, undertake treatment. As a result of protests by feminist groups the authorities suspended the Act and subsequently repealed it. Yet throughout the 1880s the country remained preoccupied with the threat of venereal disease, understandably as it infected half of all outpatients of public hospitals.

Among the general population venereal disease was also widespread. An official estimate in 1868 suggests that it infected seven per cent of the sick poor. At the time medicine had little understanding of the causes of syphilis and gonorrhoea and diagnosis was frequently mistaken. Available treatments were painful, slow and uncertain. Additionally, many hospitals made little provision for sufferers. Those that did showed little sensitivity to the feelings of their patients in describing their treatment areas as ‘the Foul Wards’.

Syphilis is most frequently fatal when neglect allows it to reach its tertiary stage. The build-up of deposits of bone inside the skull produces pressure on the brain, resulting in convulsions and paralysis. Occasionally the cartilage of the larynx falls in and the sufferer dies of asphyxiation. For prostitutes, disease was an occupational hazard. In 1867, 840 women died of syphilis in England and Wales. Despite this hazard, the number of prostitutes in the city was always high. In 1843 the Manchester police calculated that there were 330 brothels and 701 ‘common prostitutes’ in the city. This figure, however, like all police estimates, is certainly on the low side as it includes only prostitutes known to them. The Chief Constable, Captain Palin states in his report for 1868 that there were 981 convictions of prostitutes for being drunk and disorderly and only ninety-two for accosting wayfarers. There were at that time ‘over 800 prostitutes in the city and 325 houses of ill-fame’, which almost certainly refers to houses, often lodging houses, used by prostitutes, as opposed to brothels. Nearly all of these women combined theft with selling their bodies.

Why did so many women become prostitutes? For many, prostitution was a more attractive proposition than honest labour. When social researchers questioned Manchester and Liverpool prostitutes in the 1840s they found that many of them, far from being victims of domestic cruelty, had fled caring homes. Many cited their love of drink and desire to have pretty clothes as steps on the road to prostitution. The Salvation Army, like other temperance groups in the city, was convinced that drink was the root of most prostitution. As one prostitute said: ‘Drink? I should think so! Do you imagine we could lead this life without drink? The drink drowns all feelings of sorrow and shame and deadens the conscience.’ Manchester prostitutes were extravagant, frittering away their money and consequently often in debt. In addition to drinking, they gambled, were partial to sweets and were famously generous to the poor – both deserving and otherwise. It is certain that drink and improvidence were what led many women into prostitution in the first place. Others explained that they could earn far more by prostitution than by working and more explained that it provided an escape from the deadening monotony of manual labour and domestic service.

The status of women in Victorian society at this time is hard to imagine. The 1861 census, for instance, showed that of 2,700,000 women employed outside the home, 2,000,000 were in domestic service. About a third of Victorian women had some experience of domestic service, which remained the biggest employer of women until the outbreak of the Second World War. Many of the women who were professional or part-time criminals were former domestics dismissed without ‘a character’. Theft among domestics was common. One of the few saleable assets of an unemployed domestic was knowledge of the layout and routine of her former place of employment – which was of value to a burglar.

To understand why they went into prostitution, it is first necessary to know something about the life of the domestic servant. Distinctions between servants were as great as the class distinction that separated the duke from the dustman. At the pinnacle of the hierarchy were those who served the landed aristocracy in their great houses. In many cases they ate the same food as their masters and enjoyed a lifestyle beyond the wildest dreams of the ordinary servant. These, however, were the fortunate few. Most domestics were ‘general servants’, aptly known as the ‘maids of all work’.

The definitive account of the role of the domestic servant is
Mrs Beeton’s Domestic Service Guide
of 1880, which provides a formidable list of her responsibilities. And the lower the status of the servant, the more onerous her tasks. Her work consisted of whatever tasks her employer chose to impose. As Mrs Beeton pointed out ‘the mistress’s commands are the measure of the maid-of-all-work’s duties’. She adds, ‘The general servant’s duties are so multifarious, that unless she be quick and active, she will not be able to accomplish them.’ Even in the bigger houses, the girls who worked as kitchen maids or ‘between maids’ – ‘tweenies’ – endured abject drudgery. They generally began and ended their day working by candlelight, rising in the dark to set the fires. Their labours ended only when they had safely delivered the warming pans to the master and mistress’s beds.

Those housemaids who kept detailed diaries allow us to reconstruct the working day of the typical Manchester skivvy. She rose at 5.30am, blackened a six-foot cooking range, lit the fires in the servants’ quarters, scrubbed the kitchen tables and floor and then prepared tea for the servants before calling them at 7am. Her employer gave her strict warning not to waken anyone in the household and, to ensure that they weren’t disturbed, she was forbidden to wear her shoes around the house. Regardless of their station or the size of the establishment, domestics were responsible for keeping the house clean. It is difficult for us to appreciate what this involved. The Victorian passion for heavy drapes, clutter, ornaments and embossed frames all increased the domestic’s labours at a time when there were no labour-saving devices. She had to scrub stone-flagged floors and corridors and clean carpets on hands and knees. There were few ready-made cleaning materials. A great deal of time was spent combining ingredients such as silver sand, vinegar, melted beeswax, turpentine, linseed oil, methylated spirit and white wax to produce cleaning agents. The mixture of soft soap and silver sand used to scrub bare boards, which left the maids’ hands and arms red raw, was only one of the domestic’s discomforts. Until the start of the twentieth century, gas, oil lamps and candles lit most houses. There were few bathrooms and central heating was rare. All this added to the domestic’s labours. Hip baths and coal fires in every room were the order of the day – with all their attendant hauling of materials. Given this range of tasks, it’s hardly surprising that they had only a few hours recreation each week.

To accomplish all these demanding tasks was not enough for the exacting employer. A good servant had to be more than a tireless workhorse. It was also essential for her to ‘know her place’. The nineteenth century produced a vast literature on the appropriate demeanour of servants. All these authorities agreed on the essentials.

Servants had to be silent and invisible. They worked in silence, without whistling or singing. They spoke only when spoken to – and then as concisely as possible. Under no circumstances were they to address members of the family other than as Ma’am and Sir, and in the case of children, Master and Miss. Most important of all, they were to avoid any possibility of physical contact. For this reason, it was never permissible to place an object in the master or mistress’s hand. Instead, the servant placed it on a convenient surface. Letters, for instance, she placed on a tray and then proffered the tray. Outside the house, servants walked some paces behind the mistress. Servants had to be totally discreet. For a servant to repeat family business outside the home was unforgivable, an instant dismissal offence. When waiting on table, she was blind and deaf to all conversation, no matter how insignificant.

Yet the Victorians also accepted that employers had responsibilities to their servants. To the modern ear contemporary views on these duties seem patronising and condescending. The good employer should treat servants as he would his children, show a ‘kind interest in their affairs’ and behave with ‘goodness and justice’ . In practice, employers were often suspicious of their servants. Victorian newspapers fostered this distrust. They abounded in stories of burglaries that were ‘inside jobs’. Some servants were worse than dishonest.

Kate Webster [see Chapter 5] was the most infamous of Victorian servants. Her case received saturation coverage, newspapers regaling readers with all the gruesome details. Lucy Ellis, hanged in 1876 for the murder of her illegitimate child, also exemplified the servant’s potential for evil and served as a warning to all employers. Many employers developed such distaste for their servants that they found even the sight of them uncomfortable. Elizabeth Simpson worked in a large house in Harrogate. The rule of the house, strictly enforced, was that none of the family must ever see her. If they happened to meet, she was not to speak but to curtsey and disappear as quickly as possible.

Servants’ working conditions were entirely at the discretion of their employers as there was no legislation limiting working hours or providing for their health and safety. In the view of their employers, these were unnecessary. The way they saw things, it was the tendency of servants to give themselves airs and to regard certain tasks as beneath them that threatened the proper relationship between master and servant.
Punch
and other fashionable Victorian journals abound with jokes ridiculing the uppity servant. In reality, the living conditions of most servants were so dismal that they discouraged any pretensions. Male servants usually slept in the cellar and maids occupied the attic. Often their only light was from a small candle. Even when gas and electricity became available, employers often avoided the expense of installing them in the attic. Grey distempered walls, bare floorboards, lumpy flock mattresses on iron bedsteads, ill-assorted oddments of furniture discarded from the family quarters, cracked chamber pots and flaking wash-stands were the stuff of servants’ quarters.

The frontier of domestic service ran perilously close to the margins of prostitution. Poverty was a major reason for this. A maidservant in a residential district earned between £12 and £18 a year, whereas a ‘slavey’ in a lower middle class home earned half that. Both got very little in cash – most of their income was in food, accommodation and clothes. Generally they got one day a month off and the fortunate also enjoyed two afternoons or one evening every week. There is no doubt that for some the excitement of a sexual liaison was a rare pleasure in a drab life. Making these liaisons a source of income was a common way of getting money to buy the luxuries that were otherwise beyond the means of the domestic servant.