The Sexual History of London (20 page)
Read The Sexual History of London Online
Authors: Catharine Arnold
There had been a cave beneath the original abbey, with a low narrow entrance surrounded by yew trees. Believing this to be an old pagan site, Dashwood had a further network of caves excavated, where he and his followers could celebrate their rites. For some idea of what actually went on, one must turn to coffee-house gossips such as Horace Walpole, who described these events as ârigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits.' The thirteen members addressed each other as âbrothers' and the leader, who changed regularly, as âAbbot'. During meetings members supposedly wore ritual clothing: white trousers, jacket and cap, while the âAbbot' wore a red ensemble of the same style.
The Hellfire Club was an open secret among the establishment, and its members and visitors included some of the most influential political figures of the day: Lord Bute, who was to become Prime Minister; Lord Sandwich, a sadistic rapist and First Lord of the Admiralty, described as âcompletely depraved, as mischievous as a monkey and as lecherous as a goat'; and his rival, John Wilkes, the radical MP and journalist. Other devotees included Thomas Potter, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Paymaster General and a rumoured necrophiliac; and William Douglas, later 4th Duke of Queensberry, one of the richest and most rapacious men of his age. Benjamin Franklin, the Prince of Wales and even Horace Walpole himself were alleged members.
Dashwood's mistress, âHell-fire Stanhope', one of London's top bawds, ferried molls down from the city to participate in orgies, and also initiated upper-class ladies into the club. These women included Dashwood's half-sister, Mary Walcott; Frances, Viscountess Fane; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who no doubt enjoyed the lesbian displays which were actively encouraged.
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Inevitably, it was claimed that Dashwood's monks celebrated black mass, with satanic prayers offered in the flickering candlelight over the naked body of an aristocratic young woman, as masked participants gathered round to watch and then sipped wine from her navel, but to the modern eye, events as described seem no more sinister than an erotic party or a sex club.
Dashwood is remembered as a libertine
par excellence
, but even Dashwood did not believe that pleasure should be for everybody. Whatever went on at the Hellfire Club, he was still a member of the establishment. Enjoyment was not for the common man: Dashwood's first act on becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762 was to levy a tax on cider, an act which must have earned the condemnation of pagans and Christians alike.
Over the centuries, London's whores had proved capable of indulging every peccadillo imaginable. What these women and men could not have foreseen, however, was the next development in the city's sexual history. As London became the world's great capital of industry and commerce, a global workshop and a glittering metropolis, it also became the centre of the world's sex trade, as young girls arrived in their tens of thousands, desperate for a new life but soon drawn into the net of the world's oldest profession.
âThe streets of London are an open bookâ¦'
In 1853, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt exhibited a painting entitled
The Awakening Conscience
. The art historian Peter Quennell described the scene, which depicts a young woman with dishevelled hair leaping from the grip of her foxy lover, touched to the heart by the associations of the music he has been âstrumming' on the piano in an âincautious' moment. Holman Hunt intended to illustrate the âmanner in which the appeal of the spirit of heavenly love calls a soul to abandon a lower life'. His piano playing and her âcareer of shame' are simultaneously interrupted as her conscience breaks like dawn across her clouded features.
1
The young woman's expression was regarded as so disturbing in the original version that the first owner of the painting asked Holman Hunt to tone it down.
And who is this young woman with the dishevelled hair and a rather startled expression, turning away from her life of luxury? She is, of course, a âfallen woman', who depends for her livelihood on the charity of rich gentlemen such as the foxy lover upon whose lap she rests. Holman Hunt was so determined that his depiction should be accurate that he visited several houses in St John's Wood, the neighbourhood associated with âkept women', to gain an accurate impression of such a creature and her way of life. As a result, the canvas presents an invaluable record of the home of a mid-Victorian
demi-mondaine.
Her sitting room is cheerful, opulent and overcrowded, with an upright rosewood piano, a busy carpet clashing with the florid wallpaper, a gilded clock beneath a glass bell and a gold-framed mirror which reflects a sunny back garden through the open window. All the furniture is new, expensive and, according to Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, embarrassingly vulgar. This is a gilded cage, similar to many other gilded cages all over north London, where many a âsoiled dove' was kept in her love nest by a generous gallant.
2
Motivated by moral fervour, Holman Hunt drives home the message with clunkingly explicit imagery: the young woman's pet cat is toying with a bird; the fingers of a discarded glove, lying on the floor, point to her future: she too will be carelessly thrown aside, when the time comes. Hogarth would have blushed at the younger painter's earnestly doctrinaire approach.
But for all her awakening conscience, Holman Hunt is keen to remind us that this dove's flight will not be an easy one. Victorian morality dictated that once a young woman had turned her back on respectable society, rehabilitation would be a lengthy process, if it came at all. âThe doors of the wholly respectable world are closed against her,' wrote Quennell in his commentary on the painting. âShe must be content perhaps with a quiet country refuge, there under an assumed name to pass her remaining days in piety and good works.'
3
The popular notion was that a fallen woman was always fallen. If she fluttered back to the domestic dovecote, it was as a crippled supplicant. While
The Awakening Conscience
represented the most upmarket form of prostitution, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Found
(begun in 1853 and never fully completed) was more brutal. Writing to Holman Hunt and anxious to explain that the concept of
Found
preceded Holman Hunt's depiction of a fallen woman, Rossetti told his colleague that the picture represents a London street at dawn, with the lamps still lit along a bridge that forms the distant background.
A drover has left his cart standing in the middle of the road, in which stands a bleating calf on its way to market, and has run a little way after a girl who has passed him, wandering in the streets. He had just come up with her and she, recognizing him, has sunk under her shame upon her knees, against the wall of a raised churchyard in the foreground, while he stands holding her hands as he seized them, half in bewilderment and half guarding her from doing herself a hurt. The calf, a white one, will be a beautiful and suggestive part of the thing.
4
The girl is clearly that popular cliché, the lost innocent who has been decoyed up to London and fallen among thieves. The honest yeoman, filled with pity and repulsion by her plight, is either her father or her childhood sweetheart.
One of the most famous fictional depictions of the wages of sin occurs in
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens, when old Mr Peggotty, who has wandered across Europe searching for his lost daughter, eventually tracks her down near Golden Square, in Soho, with the assistance of another prostitute, Martha. When David and Peggotty meet her, Martha is on the brink of suicide:
As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the river's brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and still, looking at the waterâ¦I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although absorbed in gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and that she was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and bewildered way, more like the action of a sleepwalker than a waking person. I know, and never can forget, that there was that in her wild manner which gave me no assurance but that she would sink before my eyes, until I had her arm within my graspâ¦We carried her away from the water to where there were some dry stones, and there laid her down, crying and moaning. In a little while she sat among the stones holding her wretched head with both her hands. âOh, the river!' she cried passionately. âOh, the river!'
5
Martha is past saving; but David and Peggotty do at least trace âLittle Emily', who, having been âruined' (that is, seduced) by the rakish Steerforth, is considered unfit to return to her family but is instead bundled off in an emigrant ship bound for Australia to start a new life. Death by drowning was a common fate for London's prostitutes, and a popular theme for writers and artists. While
Found Drowned
by George Frederick Watts was exhibited in 1850, Thomas Hood explored the theme in âThe Bridge of Sighs', where the poet gazes voyeuristically upon the drowned body of a young woman, speculating as to the tragic cause of her death and lingering salaciously over the soaking garments which cling to her wet body, the looped auburn tresses dripping with water and âthose poor lips of her, oozing clammily'.
6
On a lighter note, a cartoon appeared in
Punch
on 10 January 1857, depicting âThe Great Social Evil'. The time: midnight. The scene: ânot a hundred miles from the Haymarket'. It depicts two women: Fanny, who is resplendent in her finery but haggard, and Bella, whose shabby clothes denote her rustic origins. Fanny is propping up a theatre doorway where
La Traviata
(an opera about a doomed courtesan) is playing. She looks as miserable as sin and the punch line is glaringly obvious: âAh, Fanny!' exclaims Bella, looking at her friend. âHow long have you been gay!' (âGay' at that period was street slang for âprostitute'.) Thomas Hardy, creator of one of literature's most famous fallen women, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, was also attracted by the irony of the âgay' woman in âThe Ruined Maid':
âO 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?'
âO didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she.
âYou left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!'
âYes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,' said she.
âYour hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!'
âWe never do work when we're ruined,' said she.
âYou used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock [sulk]; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!'
âTrue. One's pretty lively when ruined,' said she.
7
These representations of fallen women all appeared at the height of a moral panic about prostitution, fanned into hysteria by social reformers and the popular press. Dr Michael Ryan, an authority on prostitution, claimed that, by 1857, there were 80,000 prostitutes working in London, making over £8m a year.
8
The significance of this turnover was not lost on the industrious Victorian establishment, with newspaper columnists reduced to spluttering moral outrage by the prostitutes' earning power and the fact that none of them paid taxes. In time-honoured fashion, whores were demonized as a menace to public health. âWho are those fair creatures, neither chaperone nor chaperoned, those somebodies nobody knows, who elbow our wives and daughters in the parks and promenades?' demanded Dr William Acton (1813â75), a noted campaigner against prostitution. âWho are those painted, dressy women, flaunting along the streets and boldly accosting the passers-by?'
9
Who were these women? They were the visible evidence of a flourishing night-time economy (and, it has to be said, a daytime economy too) which offered rich rewards and considerable incentives compared with twelve-hour days losing their eyesight sewing shirts in a sweatshop or scrubbing floors. The logic of their choice was lost upon misogynistic commentators who characterized prostitutes in vivid rhetoric as rolling along the road to ruin in hired carriages, looking out with shameless faces and despairing eyes, to the envy of their wretched sisters, who slouched along in faded finery and the mere rags of fashionable attire.
10
Acton described an upmarket prostitute as the âflaunting, extravagant quean', young and fair, dragging a besotted young lover like a lackey to parties, flower shows and the races, and night after night to select balls, plays or public saloons, and then dropping him once she has spent his allowance, taking up with another man, possibly his best friend, until she has run the gauntlet of men about town and is reduced to going downmarket, becoming a toast of the tavern by the age of thirty, âthe loudest of the loud, in the utmost blaze of finery, looked on as first-rate company by aspiring gents, surrounded by a knot of gentlemen who applaud her rampant nonsense, and wandering, hotel-sick, businessmen whose footsteps stray at night to where she keeps her foolish court'.
11
At this point, Acton becomes positively venomous: âShe is a sort of whitewashed sepulchre, fair to the eye, but full of inner rottenness â a mercenary human tigress,' demanding respect but insufferably rude, proud and high-minded one moment, but not ashamed to beg for a shilling the next, spending her considerable earnings with romantic extravagance upon her own appearance and upon the sharks and parasites who feed off her and her world. These were the young women condemned by Acton because they âflaunted it first rate' on the streets of London,
12
and they were vilified not only for exploiting sexuality (their own and that of their clients) and selling themselves for money, but as a result of that age-old stereotype, the Madonna and the Magdalene, the mother and the whore. According to prevailing Victorian morality, the role of the woman was to be âthe angel of the house', who set the moral tone of the family through sacrifice and self-denial and whose body was the exclusive property of her husband. Sex, as far as ârespectable' women were concerned, was a duty.
Dr William Acton, who was a consultant gynaecologist, maintained that the majority of ârespectable' women did not enjoy performing their conjugal rites and
(happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. The best mothers, wives, and managers of households, know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic duties, are the only passion they feelâ¦she submits to her husband but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.
13
While the aristocracy had always had their affairs, the lord taking a mistress while his lady pursued her intrigues after producing an heir and a spare, the effect of such social conditioning upon the middle classes was to create a vast market of punters. For where was a man to turn if his wife despised sex? âWalter', the anonymous author of a notorious sexual memoir, struggled for years with fidelity; his is a rather extreme example of an unhappy marriage but provides some insight into the frustrated husband's mentality:
I tried to like, to love her. It was impossible. Hateful in day, she was loathsome to me in bed. Long I strove to do my duty, and be faithful, yet to such a pitch did my disgust at length go, that laying by her side, I had wet dreams nightly, sooner than relieve myself in her. I have frigged myself in the streets before entering my house, sooner than fuck her. I loving womenâ¦ready to be kind and loving to her, was driven to avoid her as I would a corpse. I have followed a woman for miles with my prick stiff, yet went to my wretched home pure, because I had vowed to be chaste. My heart was burning to have an affectionate kiss, a voluptuous sigh from some woman, yet I avoided obtaining it. My health began to give way; sleepless nights, weary days made me contemplate suicide.
14
âWalter' was, of course, the punter
par excellence
, and we shall return to his anecdotes in due course, but his needs were familiar to thousands of London men, and an army of prostitutes inevitably sprang up to service them.
Those ârespectable' women who enjoyed sex to the extent of having an affair were subject to a vicious double standard, illustrated perfectly by a triptych of paintings by Augustus Egg entitled
Past and Present
(
c
. 1858), depicting the collapse of a middle-class marriage.