The Sexual History of London (16 page)

A satirical ‘menu' designed to ridicule some of the top-brothel patrons of the day gives some idea of the high cost of these diversions and the price charged for specific services:

 

Sunday the 9th January

A young girl for Alderman Drybones.

Nelly Blossom, about 19 years old, who has had no one for four days, and who is a virgin

20 guineas

 

A girl of 19 years, not older, for Baron Harry Flagellum.

Nell Hardy from Bow Street, Bat Flourish from Berners

Street or Miss Birch from Chapel Street

10 guineas

 

A beautiful girl for Lord Spaan. Black Moll from Hedge Lane, who is very strong

5 guineas

 

For Colonel Tearall, a gentle woman.

Mrs Mitchell's servant, who has just come from the country and has not yet been out in the world

10 guineas

 

For Dr Frettext, after consultation hours, a young agreeable person, sociable, with a white skin and a soft hand. Polly Nimblewrist from Oxford, or Jenny Speedyhand from Mayfair

2 guineas

 

Lady Loveit, who has come from the baths at Bath, and who is disappointed in her affair with Lord Alto, wants to have something better, and to be well served this evening. Capt O'Thunder or Sawney Rawbone

50 guineas

 

For His Excellency Count Alto, a fashionable woman for an hour only. Mrs Smirk who came from Dunkirk, or Miss Graceful from Paddington

10 guineas

 

For Lord Pyebald, to play a game of piquet, for
titillatione mammarum
and so on, with no other object. Mrs Tredrille from Chelsea

5 guineas
³⁷

 

This menu covers almost the entire range of specialities available at a high-class brothel: masturbation, fondling without intercourse, defloration – of a
soi-disant
‘virgin' – flagellation and a stud for the female client, who is charged far more for this service than her male counterpart. This was by no means unusual: there was a demand for male prostitutes from wealthy female clients, and a well-run seraglio would offer them as well, so that man and wife could enjoy their pleasures without encountering each other.
³⁸
The prices are accurate for a top-class seraglio, and some of the names are satirical references to real people. ‘Lady Loveit' was the ‘nymphomaniac' Lady Sarah Lennox, while her lover was Lord William Gordon. ‘Alderman Drybones', the elderly civic with a taste for virgins, was Robert Alsop, Lord Mayor of London in 1752, while ‘Lord Pyebald', so elderly that he can do little more than fondle girls' breasts, was Hugh, Viscount Falmouth.
³⁹

As for the
soi-disant
‘virgin', it was easy, through simply trickery, to persuade a punter that his girl was a first timer, as illustrated by this extract from
Fanny Hill
. Our heroine, directed by her bawd to spend the night with an elderly virgin hunter, puts up a convincing performance as a virgin with a sequence of complaints and refusals, until she finally allows the old man to have his way with her. While he sleeps, having become fatigued after his second ‘let-go', Fanny's nimble fingers spring the lock of a secret drawer which contains a bottle of red liquid and a sponge. It is but the work of a moment to squeeze this sponge between her legs and return the bottle to its hiding place, having produced manifest proof of her client's ‘victorious violence'. He is completely taken in: ‘viewing the field of battle by the glimmer of a dying taper, he saw plainly my thighs, shift and sheets, all yet wet and stained with what he readily took for virgin gore, proceeding from his last half-penetration'.
⁴⁰

There were already black prostitutes working in London, including the curvaceous Miss Lowes of Upper Charlotte Street, Soho, and Miss Wilson of Litchfield Street, Soho, who was of very pleasing features and intelligence and frequently to be found at the theatre in the evening.
⁴¹
But ‘Black Harriott' or Miss Harriott was the only black bawd in London. Born in Guinea, Harriott – she does not appear to have had a Christian name – was shipped to Jamaica as a slave, where her beauty and wit captivated William Lewis, a plantation owner and captain in the merchant navy. Lewis married Harriott, educated her and prepared her for high society. He brought her to England, where they lived just off Piccadilly and moved in the most exclusive circles, until Lewis died in 1772, leaving Harriott penniless.

For all her intelligence, looks and education, it seemed as if Harriott would languish in debtors' prison, but she was freed by a band of admirers and set up a brothel in St James's which became wildly successful. A brothel guide of the time rather insultingly commented that Harriott had ‘attained a degree of politeness scarce to be paralleled in an African female'.
⁴²
Harriott's top-drawer clientele included peers of the realm, and it was her proud boast that nobody spent less than ‘a soft paper', in other words, a £20 note. Two of Harriott's most famous clients were the hellraiser the Earl of Sandwich, famous of course for inventing that invaluable snack, and his one-time friend, the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes. When they fell out, Sandwich shouted at Wilkes, ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of the pox', to which Wilkes replied, ‘That, my Lord, depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.'
⁴³
Harriott, sadly, fell hopelessly in love with a Guards officer and neglected her business. Her girls sold off the contents of her brothel and she ended up in debtors' prison again, eventually dying of tuberculosis.

Despite regular moral panics and attempts to crack down on prostitution, a sentimental journalistic convention had developed by the 1730s which suggested that most prostitutes were innocent country girls, lured to the big city by the promise of fame and fortune and decoyed into immorality by wicked old bawds. This is the backdrop for both
The Harlot's Progress
(1733) by William Hogarth, and John Cleland's
Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(1749). These famous accounts of prostitution bookend the popular perception of sex in eighteenth-century London. At first glance, the two young protagonists, Moll Hackabout and Fanny Hill, appear to have much in common, but in fact their lives and destinies are very different, as we shall discover when we compare their experiences of the seamy underbelly of city life.

John Cleland (1710–89) was an educated but impoverished London hack who wrote himself out of debtors' prison with his genial erotic classic.
Fanny Hill
is essentially a titillating saga about a lively country girl who is forced to live on her wits in London by prostituting herself, and was accurately described by the lubricious James Boswell as ‘a most licentious and inflaming book'. Hogarth's
The Harlot's Progress
, on the other hand, represented a harsh satirical critique of London morality and the fate which awaited poor, deluded young women who were lured into the sex trade. To make his point, Hogarth folded in vicious caricatures of actual people, such as the bawd Mother Needham and Colonel Charteris, ‘Rape Master of Great Britain'.

The first plate of
The Harlot's Progress
shows young Moll Hackabout arriving at the Bell Inn in Cheapside, just up from the country. Fresh and healthy, in her plain peasant clothes, she is seeking employment as a seamstress or a servant. Moll is based on a real person, one Kate Hackabout, who worked for Mother Needham. Innocent and modestly attired, she stands before the bawd, who is examining her youth and beauty beneath a cracked bell, a medieval symbol of fallen chastity. Mother Needham is immediately recognizable, a handsome middle-aged woman, well dressed in silks, simpering beneath the patches on her face, which are placed there to conceal the symptoms of the pox. Moll may well have been duped by a bawd, such as Needham, or one of her operatives, whose task it was to scour the countryside for talent, inviting naive or newly orphaned girls to come up to town with the promise of a glamorous life in London. Sir Richard Steele, one of the founders of the
Spectator
, remarked in 1712 that on a trip to the Bell, he saw ‘the most artful Procuress in Town examining a most beautiful Countrey girl who had just come up in the same Wagon as my Things', while Tom Brown described Needham as haunting taverns so that she could pick off ‘fresh Countrey Wenches sound and plump & juicy'.
⁴⁴

Mother Needham was mentioned around 1710, running a luxurious brothel in Park Place, St James's, a rich and fashionable area only yards away from the royal palace. She was a well-born woman, related to the Earls of Kilmorey, and her aristocratic connections, good looks and considerable management expertise made her almost immune to prosecution. With neighbours such as George Hamilton, Duke of Orkney, husband of William III's mistress; George Montagu, Marquess of Halifax; and Barbara Castlemaine, Needham went unchallenged; the fact that the young Prince of Wales liked to drop by from time to time only enhanced her reputation. Needham was a strict and brutal employer, who hired out the very clothes on the girls' backs and was quick to dismiss any harlot who did not adhere to her punishing work ethic. Girls who grew old or sick, or fell into disfavour, were summarily ejected, to debtors' jail or the gutter.

Plate 1 of
The Harlot's Progress
implies that Mother Needham may be acting on behalf of Colonel Charteris, who stands in the doorway to the right, fondling himself and eyeing up the new arrival, accompanied by his valet, Jack Gourlay. Over the years, Needham had sourced ‘above one hundred Maidenheads' for Charteris, ‘which she picked up at the Carriers'. What Charteris liked were ‘Strong lusty fresh country Wenches that would make a dint in a wooden Chair & work like a Parish Fire engine at a conflagration', and for which he was willing to pay £20 a time.

Charteris was a cashiered army officer who had prospered as a property developer and made a killing from South Sea stock. He owned several brothels, paid for with the proceeds of his gambling, and, of course, he cheated at cards. He once won £3000 from the Duchess of Queensberry by placing a mirror nearby so that he could read her cards. He was also a convicted rapist with a taste for young virgins. In collusion with his servants, he used false names and addresses to lure girls to his house, and he also arranged for the bawds to recruit suitable fresh-faced country girls. His methods were so violent and arrogant, even by the standards of the time, that he frequently came to the attention of the magistrates. In 1717, he raped a young virgin, Sarah Selleto, at the Scotch Arms Ale House in Pall Mall and was ordered to pay for her bastard child. Another victim of his was Isabella Cranston who fell into his clutches at the brothel run by Mrs Jolley in Suffolk Street, where she was decoyed under the pretence of being taken into service, though she did not become an official member of Mrs Jolley's establishment. After she had seen Charteris a number of times – only Charteris, no other men – she became pregnant, was abandoned and had to apply for poor relief to the parish of St Margaret's, Westminster, in 1729.

Charteris's house in Scotland was little more than a brothel, run by a full-time matron, Mary Clapham, whom he treated violently and eventually dismissed after years of service. One Scots rape victim described him as ‘the huge raw Beast that in guid faith got me with Bairn. I know him by his nasty Legg for he has rapt it around my Arse mony a guid time.'
⁴⁵
So, here is Charteris viewing the latest arrivals and eagerly anticipating sampling the new goods. But nemesis awaits. That tumbling pile of pots on the left of the picture represents a tower of destruction, but not only for Moll. As to her immediate future, she is about to be sold to Charteris, with all the horror that implies.

Moll's literary counterpart, Fanny Hill, can expect a more enjoyable introduction to the flesh markets. She is, after all, a ‘Woman of Pleasure', and her initiation into erotic ecstasy is at the hands of another young woman, Phoebe, at the brothel to which she has been decoyed. Fanny is so naive that when Phoebe begins to seduce her, she reflects, ‘this was new, this was odd' but puts it down to ‘pure kindness, which, for aught I knew, it might be the London way to express in that manner'. It is not long before Fanny is moved from tame and passive endurance of Phoebe's advances to discovering that ‘her lascivious touches had lighted up a new fire that wantoned through all my veins', to appreciating that Phoebe, ‘the hackneyed, thoroughbred Phoebe', had found in her vocation of breaking in young girls ‘the gratification of one of those arbitrary tastes for which there is no accounting'. Following these Sapphic delights, Fanny is sold to a repellent elderly gentleman, over sixty years old, with a cadaverous hue, goggling eyes and ‘breath like a jakes'. Horrified, Fanny fights him off (to her bawd's discomfort) and later surrenders her virginity in fine romantic style to a handsome young man, the love of her life. So far, so very different from the reality of life in the Garden and the grim world of Hogarth.

By Plate 2 of
The Harlot's Progress
, Moll is at the top of her trade. As the mistress of a wealthy London Jew, she lives in a beautiful town house, complete with a black slave, mahogany furniture and a silver tea service, all symbols of the colonial wealth enjoyed by the mercantile class which Hogarth despised. But Moll's protector has returned unexpectedly from the Exchange, almost catching Moll in bed with her aristocratic lover, and Moll has created a diversion, kicking over the table and snapping her fingers, so that her lover can creep out undetected. Moll's protector is no fool, however: the viewer can judge from his expression that he is not taken in by this performance, and Moll's days as his mistress are numbered. As are the days of her beauty: visible on her head and breast are two pox marks, indicating that she has already succumbed to venereal disease.