The Sexual History of London (24 page)

Mayhew records a similar conversation with another girl, ‘Dolly', who hated working the Haymarket, but loved dancing, and spent the money she earned on new clothes and a new bonnet every week. A former servant who had been sacked after being seduced by the master of the house, Dolly was making the best of things in a tough world.

Others, as in our next example, were victims of entrapment, decoyed into the life with a technique unchanged since the days of evil Mother Needham. Mayhew interviewed this young lady, ‘Bella', who lived in a brothel in Langham Place. From the outside, with its handsome green curtains, this appears to be a substantial and highly respectable town house. And, once inside, the veil of respectability continued, as Mayhew and his colleague were shown into a comfortably furnished room with yielding sofas and glass chandeliers. Bella entered the room and, after some confusion when she asked the men what they would like and was surprised when they only wanted to talk, a bottle of wine was sent for which loosened her tongue.

Bella's tale was sadly familiar. A young girl from Stepney who had lost her mother in childhood, she had never been warned by her father, a joiner, about the dangers facing an attractive young girl at large in the East End. One afternoon, Bella was befriended by a kindly middle-aged lady who invited her round for tea. The next thing she knew was that she had been made drunk, signed some papers, and had ‘her spirit broken'. In return for working as a prostitute, Bella was fed and clothed, and had become inured to her way of life. She couldn't imagine anything else, now. She never thought about it; she would go mad if she did; she lived in the present, and never went blubbering about as some did. She tried to be as jolly as she could; where was the fun in being miserable?
⁵⁴
This, Mayhew recalled, was the prevailing philosophy among prostitutes. The girls got through it as best they could with a stoical attitude and plenty of White Satin, a popular brand of gin.

Alcoholism was rife. Mayhew interviewed another woman, in the Haymarket, a woman grown old and fallen upon hard times. ‘Times is altered, sir, since I come on the town,' she confided. ‘Nothing lasts forever and I've stood my share of wear and tear.'
⁵⁵
This woman demonstrates the same weary stoicism: ‘I don't think much of my way of life. You folks as has honour, and character, and feelings, and such, can't understand how all that's been beaten out of people like me. I don't feel.
I'm used to it
.' Although she admitted that when she heard of her mother's death, she did cry and she was genuinely heartbroken, ‘but Lor', where's the good of fretting? It's the drink mostly that keeps me going. You've no idea how I look forward to my drop of gin. It's everything to me.'
⁵⁶

Drink helped to dull the pain of violent beatings from punters and lovers alike. Mayhew met another young girl, just twenty-one, and down on her luck after parting from her gentleman. The said gentleman had seen her flirting with a friend at the Assembly Rooms in Holborn and beaten her so violently that she had been confined to bed for three months. Eventually, she summoned up the courage to run away, taking £300 and most of her clothes and jewellery. But she had to sell the jewellery, and when the proceeds ran out, she had been reduced to ‘walking in the Haymarket' and turning tricks at the cafés. Now she had been forced to sell the remainder of her dresses. ‘Since then I have been more shabby in appearance, and not so much noticed.'
⁵⁷

This unfortunate seemed, even at such a tender age, destined to end up like those poor degraded creatures who constituted Mayhew's third category of Haymarket women, the worn-out wretches who skulked about, scrounging a living from the fashionable passers-by and the more affluent prostitutes who paid them to go away.

However, this picture of prostitutes as doomed and damned for all eternity represents only one side of the story. One of Mayhew's interviewees, a young lady at the top of her game, was deeply offended when he asked what she thought would become of her. ‘What do I think will become of me? What an absurd question. I could marry to-morrow if I liked!' she responded pertly. Mayhew was repelled by this unrepentant attitude, describing the girl as a typical example of her class. ‘They live entirely for the moment, and care little about the morrow until they are actually pressed in any way, and then they are fertile in expedients,' he noted, wearily.
⁵⁸
But this young lady was not alone in her defiant attitude. On 24 February 1858, when moral panic about prostitution was at its height, a letter appeared in
The Times
actually written by ‘Another Unfortunate', who described herself as ‘one of those who, as Rousseau says, are born to be prostitutes', and made a spirited defence of her profession, demanding to be treated with the same courtesy as a ‘respectable' woman. ‘I earn my money and pay my way…I do not get drunk, nor fight, nor create uproar in the streets or out of them. I do not use bad language. I do not offend the public eye by open indecencies.' The prostitute then reminded her readers that she had not only paid her debt to society, but had contributed to the economy, paying the most fashionable West End milliners, silk makers and boot makers, who all knew who she was and how she earned her money, and solicited her business as earnestly and cringingly as if she were married to the chairman of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

This letter inspired an editorial the very next day, in which the anonymous leader writer commented that

Dr William Acton also believed that the phrase ‘Once a harlot, always a harlot' was a myth. During the course of his extensive research, Acton had found plenty of evidence to show that prostitution was a transitory state. Otherwise, he argued, where on earth did all those women go? London's 80,000 prostitutes did not simply vanish into thin air. They were not all struck down in mid-career by suicide, alcoholism or venereal disease, nor did they fall by the wayside like autumn leaves, to be heaped up to rot, or crawl home to die of remorse. Instead, argued Acton, after a maximum of four years on the streets they were fully conversant with the hardships of the trade and ready to escape should the opportunity present itself. Anyone who had survived the life would by this stage have a healthy physique, an excellent constitution, good business sense and an unparalleled insight into human nature which could only be an asset in any career she chose. Any sensible woman by then would have made ‘a dash at respectability by marriage' or sunk her savings into a milliner's shop or a lodging house. Emigration to the colonies, with the promise of a fresh start, was another popular choice.

The last word on a successful transition from prostitution comes from the writer Arthur Munby, who recorded the fascinating story of Sarah Tanner. Munby had first met Sarah in 1855, when she was ‘a maid of all work to a tradesman in Oxford Street: a lively honest rosy-faced girl, virtuous & self-possessed', a brunette with fine hazel eyes. Munby ran into her a year or so later, on Regent Street, ‘arrayed in gorgeous apparel'. It appeared that Sarah had got tired of being in service, wanted to see life and be independent, and so had
chosen
to become a prostitute, of her own accord. Sarah had taken it up as a profession, even reading and taking writing lessons so that she would be a fit companion to gentlemen. She saw no harm in it, enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her and perhaps be profitable. After taking her for a glass of beer, which Sarah did not ask for, Munby took his leave of her. He saw her a few times subsequently, on duty (although there is no indication that he availed himself of her professional services), until one day he ran into her dressed differently again, like a respectable upper servant, in quiet, tasteful clothes. ‘“I've left the streets and settled down,” she said quietly. “I'd been on the streets three years, and saved up – I told you I should get on, you know – and so I thought I'd leave, and I've taken a coffeehouse with my earnings – the Hampshire Coffeehouse, over Waterloo Bridge.” I laughed, incredulous. “Quite true,” said she simply. “I manage it all myself, & I can give you chops & tea – & anything you like: you must come & see me.”'

Munby was surprised and impressed by Sarah's entrepreneurial spirit.

Sarah's story is a satisfying corrective to the repellent depiction of ‘flaunting queans' and mercenary human tigresses served up in the popular press. However, in an overcrowded city riddled with poverty and social injustice, there was inevitably a more sinister side. To experience this, let us accompany Mayhew and Acton on their expedition into darkest London.

While the dashing courtesans of the Haymarket ruled the West End, life in the East End was one long battle for survival. Poverty and hunger, rather than an excessive desire for extravagant clothing and a proclivity to sin, drove young women onto the streets. During the course of his research, Henry Mayhew was shocked to hear from one seamstress who sewed shirts from five o'clock in the morning until midnight, but still did not earn enough money to feed herself and her child.
¹
Struggling to survive on derisory wages, young women often faced a stark choice: ‘render up your body or die'. Prostitution, for all its drawbacks, was a welcome alternative to starvation. It was also a welcome alternative to a wretched, poverty-stricken marriage.

For all the glamour of the West End, a million Londoners lived in slums where the streets were frequently so narrow that you could step from the window of one house into that of its opposite neighbour, while the houses were piled so high, storey upon storey, that the light could scarcely penetrate into the court or alley that lay between. Far from the theatres and cafés of the Haymarket, this was a world where there were no sewers or privies or drains and the houses were filthy and overcrowded. Most families lived in a single room, sleeping together on a heap of straw and rags, men and women, brothers and sisters, old and young. The only water source was a parish pump, and this water was so difficult to obtain that the majority of families lived in unsanitary conditions.
²
In 1883, in
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
, W. C. Preston recalled visiting a tenement house in which one cellar was occupied by a father, mother, three children and four pigs; in another room, a man lay ill with smallpox, while his wife was recovering from the birth of her eighth child and the other children ran around naked and dirty; an underground kitchen turned out to be occupied by seven people and the corpse of a child that nobody could afford to bury.
³
Intimacy, comfort and recreational sex were impossible in such inhumane conditions; instead, any sex that did take place was nasty, brutish and short. The possibility of further pregnancies and childbirth rendered women frigid with anxiety, while contraception (in the form of condoms and pessaries) was prohibitively expensive for women who could not even afford to buy food. Beer and gin, at least, offered parents a brief spate of oblivion from the struggle to feed and clothe their families. Men took their pleasure, if they could afford it, with the cheapest whores available in the nearby taverns, while domestic violence was an inevitable consequence of mental and physical exhaustion and despair.

In
Liza of Lambeth
the author Somerset Maugham drew on his experience as a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital, where he had witnessed the aftermath of countless ‘domestics'. A friend of Liza's confides that she was beaten up by her new husband: ‘I 'ad ter go ter the 'orspital – it bled all dahn my fice, and went streamin' like a bust water-pipe.' But, after threatening to have her husband arrested, the woman relents. ‘I wouldn't charge 'im. I know 'e don't mean it; 'e's as gentle as a lamb when 'e's sober.'
⁴
A classic victim, this young woman espoused the sentimental view that a fist was as good as a kiss in such straitened times.

Insanitary conditions meant that the infant mortality rate was high in the East End, but many women were so desperate that they found themselves unable to face the prospect of another birth. These were the women who, for a fee of ten shillings, put themselves in the hands of an abortionist. There was an abortionist in every working-class district of London. Some were wise women, noted for their infallible folk remedies, treating their patients with herbs and tinctures; others were struck-off doctors, or half-trained nurses skilled in the application of hot baths, pints of gin and long knitting needles. In most cases, these latter procedures resulted in severe, sometimes fatal injury to the mother, left to haemorrhage to death or succumb to peritonitis. If she survived, the mother was still liable to be prosecuted for infanticide, as, to all intents and purposes, abortion remained illegal until the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967.

If a child still succeeded in being born, its parents had one final option: infanticide. Some mothers, faced with another mouth to feed, suffocated their babies or left them to die of malnutrition and neglect; some babies were sent to ‘baby-farms', where newborns were taken in and raised for a small fee, frequently growing up to become prostitutes in their turn. In a more macabre development, many ‘baby farmers' disposed of their tiny charges in the river. Every year, the Thames would yield up its grisly catch of infant corpses;
⁵
the sight of drowned babies floating in the Thames became such a regular occurrence that it scarcely occasioned comment.

Little wonder then that when glamorous young women returned to the slums to visit their families, loaded with gifts and cash, younger girls flocked to follow their example. Our
Times
correspondent, ‘Another Unfortunate', recalls just such an incident when she was thirteen years old and a cousin arrived, lavishly dressed and bearing trinkets and ribbons. ‘Another Unfortunate' was captivated and her ambition was stirred. This, she realized, was the way out, this was the way to escape from sharing one room with her bricklayer father and several siblings and watching her parents' wages going on beer and gin. This was infinitely preferable to her mother's life, her figure wrecked by childbirth and working in the brickfield. ‘Another Unfortunate', like many a pragmatic backstreet girl, had no illusions regarding surrendering her ‘honour' to obtain this lifestyle.

‘Another Unfortunate' did not have to wait long before she received the opportunity to put her knowledge to profitable use. ‘In the commencement of my fifteenth year one of our be-ribboned visitors took me off, and introduced me to the great world, and thus commenced my career as what you better classes call a prostitute.' ‘Another Unfortunate' was fortunate enough to find her own Professor Higgins in the form of a kindly older gentleman who educated her and taught her the social graces, enabling her to gain the skills to write letters to
The Times
arguing the case for prostitutes.
⁶

During a ‘pilgrimage' to the East End, accompanied for his own safety by the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Dr William Acton was dismayed to see ‘respectable' women rubbing shoulders with prostitutes like ‘Another Unfortunate' in a music hall. The bar was crowded with well-dressed women, some of whom were prostitutes, but many of whom were married women, out with their husbands to enjoy a drink and a smoke and watch the turns on stage as a brief respite from their daily troubles. Acton was surprised by this ‘elbowing of vice and virtue' although he had witnessed similar scenes in the West End. What also surprised him was the reverence shown by locals to girls who had evidently done well from prostitution, and the attitude of tolerance towards the ‘gay' women. ‘Any persons connected with them whom they see well-dressed, and with money in their pockets, command a kind of respect, although the source from whence the means are obtained may be a disreputable one.' Acton found these reunions disturbing and his attitude was one of disgust at witnessing ‘the vicious and profligate sisterhood flaunting it gaily, or “first-rate”, in their language – accepting all the attentions of men, freely plied with liquor, sitting in the best places, dressed far above their station, with plenty of money to spend, and denying themselves no amusement or enjoyment, encumbered with no domestic ties, and burdened with no children'.
⁷
Acton fretted about the effect this would have upon respectable women. ‘This actual superiority of a loose life could not have escaped the attention of the quick-witted sex,' he worried, as though the sight of Victorian women enjoying themselves was completely unacceptable!

But life on the streets, or in a brothel, was preferable to life at home with drunken parents, no food and no clothes. As Mother Willit of Gerrard Street, Soho, put it: ‘So help her kidnies, she
alu'us
turned her gals out with a clean arse and a good tog [dress]; and as she turned 'em out, she didn't care who turned 'em up, 'cause 'em vos as clean as a smelt [fish] and as fresh as a daisy – she vouldn't have a speck'd [diseased] un if she know'd it.'
⁸

Other women, of course, were not so fortunate. These are the lower categories of Henry Mayhew's classes of prostitutes, the streetwalkers, the dress lodgers, the sailors' women who worked the docks, and the lowly park women. The streetwalkers fared particularly harshly. In ‘A Night on Waterloo Bridge', American journalist James Greenwood describes a typical night on the ‘Bridge of Sighs'.

It is a freezing cold night, with a small rain falling, and he finds himself speculating as to how many ‘unfortunates' came to this scene, to stand on the centre parapet and brood on the prospect of that final terrible leap into the dark, and how many changed their minds, brought to their senses by the contemplation of the black and awful depth and the bleak wind that blew off the icy water. Greenwood interviews a policeman, who has become experienced in dealing with maudlin prostitutes who always seemed to find the bridge awkward to get over on their way home to Blackfriars. ‘I ain't equal to explainin' it' the policeman admits, ‘but it's a dark and solitary bit after the gas of the public-houses and that, and it strikes 'em as such, I suppose, and sets 'em thinking of the lots that have made a jump of it when they got as far as the middle arch, and then they get the ‘blues,' and there's no doing anything with 'em. It would do good to some of them fast young fellows who go in for ‘seeing life,' as they call it, if they could see some of them miserable gals shivering home over the bridge here, in the dark and rain, sometimes at one or two in the morning.
⁹

Death by drowning was a common fate for London's prostitutes and a popular theme for writers and artists. Cover illustration for Charles Selby's
London by Night
(1886).

Greenwood waits around, and sees for himself an amazing number of wretched girls and women come hurrying from the Strand side of the bridge, and, ‘with an aspect exactly as opposite to “gay” as black is to white, making haste, through the rain which had saturated their flimsy skirts and covered the pavement with a thick paste of mud, cruelly cold to ill-shod feet, towards the miserable lodgings in the poorer neighbourhoods of Lambeth and Blackfriars which were dignified with the name of home'.
¹⁰

The only whores who seemed cheerful were the ones still the worse for drink, who were distinguished by their cheerful singing, keeping their courage up, Greenwood reflects, like small boys whistling in the dark. As for the rest, ‘they looked so wretchedly wet, cold, and utterly comfortless, that it would have been a mercy rather than a sin to have conferred a glass of brandy on them'. One of the youngest whores begs him to buy her a cup of coffee, and he relents, regarding her as a sorry child ‘for really she was little better', and she jokes that the man on the coffee stall is as good as a father to her, before falling into such a severe coughing fit that it is obvious she is not long for this world. The stall is a snug little cabin, built of boards and canvas, with the cheerful glow of a charcoal fire within, and the stallholder himself dispensing the smoking beverage and bread and butter to seven or eight female outcasts who huddle together in the friendly shelter, two or three being seated on a form and dozing by the fire, their drenched clothes steaming in the heat. By the light of the fire, Greenwood observes the ghastly contrast between their pinched and haggard faces, pale except for the paint patches that glare like plague spots and their dishevelled finery, the drooping feathers and festoons of rainbow ribbon with which their hats are trimmed.

On his way back, Greenwood spots another low-life scene in one of the recesses of Waterloo Bridge. There are two women, one young and well but flashily dressed, the other miserable, shabby and middle aged, wearing an old black cloak with which she is trying to protect the younger woman from the rain. With them is an unprepossessing individual of the male sex, whose cadaverous features are a combination of the lowest of the low: he looks like a dog-stealer, a police informer and a street-fighter. The older woman is trying to persuade the younger one to go ‘back', wherever that might be, or face getting into a row. ‘Lor! you needn't fret about that,' declares the cadaverous gentleman, with a growl that sounds like a preliminary to a bite. ‘She'll come to her senses. She's a pretty one to cut the high caper – without a rag to call her own.' This sneer appears to cut the young woman to the quick. Casting off the protective wing of the older woman's cloak, she bursts out: ‘Curse you both! Curse you both! Who was it that robbed me of my good clothes? Who cheated and plundered me but you, you thief, till I hadn't a skirt to call my own!'