The Sexual History of London (26 page)

Mayhew describes these women as engaging in disgusting practices that were gratifying only to men of morbid and diseased imaginations (a prudish reference to fellatio) but whatever services they offered, one thing was obvious: in the West End, Hyde Park had become the Victorian equivalent of Gropecunt Lane, the knackers' yard for ageing whores. Mayhew interviewed one woman who always wore a long thick veil concealing her features, which made her interesting to the unsuspicious and unwise. This park woman had started her career as one of Mayhew's ‘better educated' prostitutes. A former governess, she had lived on the continent with her lover until he blew his brains out with a pistol in a fit of desperation, having lost a fortune at the casino. Eventually returning to England, she had drifted gradually downmarket due to alcoholism and poor health.

Mayhew was genuinely moved by the plight of this woman, endowed with a fair amount of education, speaking in a superior manner, making use of words that very few in her position would know how to employ, reduced by a variety of circumstances to the very bottom of a prostitute's career. She refused to enter a workhouse, but she could not get a job. Although she could sew and paint in watercolours, nobody would hire her, because they didn't like to look at her face, which presented so dreadful an appearance that it frightened people. She had her moments, generally hours, of oblivion, when she was intoxicated, and spent all her money on drink. And she knew that she would not live long. She had injured her constitution greatly, and suffered from a disease which a hospital surgeon had told her would kill her in time. Mayhew paid her for the interview, and told her to spend the money on getting into a refuge, whilst knowing that she would use it to buy alcohol. She would not live long, she repeated, and she wanted to die as she was, where she was.

And it is here that Mayhew makes one of his mission statements: ‘One only gets at the depravity of mankind by searching below the surface of society; and for certain purposes such knowledge and information are useful and beneficial to the community. Therefore the philanthropist must overcome his repugnance to the task, and draw back the veil that is thinly spread over the skeleton.'

Spurred on by these accounts of the depravity of mankind, militant Christians, feminists and other social reformers campaigned against prostitution as the century progressed. While the vast armies of peripatetic whores had roamed Haymarket in the 1850s and 1860s, and the sailors' women of the East End had catered to thousands, the following decade saw a concerted campaign to wipe out prostitution and impose middle-class morality on all Londoners, regardless of their economic circumstances. The onslaught on prostitution took a number of forms, sanitary and moral. In public health terms, the first Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, designed to protect the health of the military in ports and garrison towns, specified that all prostitutes servicing troops and sailors must undergo a compulsory medical examination. The Act, which derived from earlier legislation dealing with the health of cattle, summed up official Victorian attitudes towards whores. ‘Prostitutes should be treated as foul sewers are treated, as physical facts and not as moral agents.'
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Under the terms of the Act, women convicted of being ‘a common prostitute' were summonsed to undergo a medical inspection. If they refused, they were sent to a ‘Lock hospital'. Lock hospitals, so named after the original establishment in London, ostensibly specialized in venereal medicine but were little more than prisons for whores, from which many women emerged to find their children in the workhouse and their few possessions auctioned off to pay their debts.
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Prostitutes were demonized by Victorian moralists for spreading venereal disease, despite the fact that mortality rates from syphilis were considerably lower than those from tuberculosis and childbirth. Being at the front line of the war against venereal disease, many whores were more expert in treatment than doctors, and their preventive measures included examining clients and refusing to have sex with infected men. They also resorted to herbal remedies or cleansing medications which were considerably more effective than the mercury recommended by doctors.
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Prostitutes also faced tougher policing measures. The Metropolitan Police Act in 1850 made loitering an offence, while from 1858, any house which ‘harboured' more than one whore was deemed to be a ‘disorderly house' and the landlady could be prosecuted. Publicans, who had once relied on a co-dependent relationship with whores to bring in the trade, were banned from allowing prostitutes to ‘assemble and continue' on their premises.
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In addition to these medical and legal constraints, a sanctimonious layer of morality was descending on Victorian London like a fog, with famous campaigners such as William Gladstone reaching out to prostitutes as if they were brands to be snatched from the burning.

William Gladstone, four times British prime minister, had already taken the lead in the 1850s, when he began to visit the Argyll Rooms and develop friendships with prostitutes whom he wished to reform. Gladstone's motivations, however, appear somewhat obscure. While his ostensible motive was to pluck fallen women from their depraved state and train them to be useful members of society, he also enjoyed putting himself in the way of temptation and wrote up the charms of the most attractive whores in his diary, in Italian. While it is doubtful that, unlike other politicians, he ever compromised himself or betrayed his marital vows, the premier was not immune to the attractions of the women he interviewed. Returning home from these visits, he would inevitably retire to his chambers and flagellate himself with a whip as punishment for what he considered to be his shameful desires.

‘Refuges', such as the ones Gladstone visited, were opened where former prostitutes could retrain as factory workers or servants, although few women found the prospect appealing compared with the money they could earn ‘on the game'. Another solution, advocated by Victorian doctors, police and the military, was to legalize prostitution, in line with Britain's continental neighbours. But such a pragmatic response met with outrage from middle-class feminists such as Josephine Butler, who had declared in 1871 that it was ‘the old, the inveterate, the deeply rooted evil of prostitution itself against which we are destined to make war'.
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Butler's mission was to wipe prostitution off the face of the earth, or at least off the face of Great Britain, and so she founded the Social Purity Alliance in 1873, which required young men to abstain from all sexual activity. This organization inspired other such fellowships as the National Vigilance Association, intended to guard the nation's morals, and the White Cross Army, whose members were exhorted to ‘endeavour to put down all indecent language and coarse jests' and ‘to use every possible means to fulfil the commandment “keep THYSELF pure”'.
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Butler and her supporters relied on moral outrage to focus public opinion on their campaigns. To this end, she exploited two sensational developments: the so-called ‘white slave trade' or supposed international trafficking in women, and the phenomenon of child prostitution.

In a spirited piece of revisionism, prostitution historian Nickie Roberts maintains that ‘white slavery' was an urban myth, but it was certainly one which exercised a powerful grip over the Victorian imagination. In such circumstances, the typical victim would have been an innocent white adolescent girl who was drugged and abducted by a sinister immigrant, and who would wake to find herself held captive in some infernal foreign brothel, where she would be subject to the pornographic lusts and whims of sadistic non-white pimps and handlers.
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Moralists were convinced that such traffic in women existed, operated by established underground networks, and succeeded in whipping up hysteria about this imaginary outrage. A pamphlet by Alfred Dyer, ‘The European Slave Trade in English Girls' (1880), claimed that English girls were being abducted by the score and forced to work in the brothels of Brussels. A parliamentary commission of inquiry subsequently revealed that there was already an existing traffic in established British prostitutes being recruited to continental brothels, of whom about 200 eventually returned home again, having discovered that they did not enjoy working under the strict regulations operating in French and Belgian establishments.

According to Roberts, evidence for the ‘white slave trade' rests upon the international migration of whores which had developed towards the end of the nineteenth century. With the expansion of trade routes to the outposts of the British Empire, millions were on the move, not least enterprising prostitutes who felt they might fare better in America and the Colonies. These women willingly travelled thousands of miles to escape oppression in their own country and work in the USA, Latin America, Egypt, South Africa and Asia. Men often travelled with them, acting as their chaperones and agents, and providing valuable introductions in the overseas sex trade.

One such young woman was Fanny Epstein, a Jewish immigrant in Whitechapel, who left home with a man called Alexander Kahn in 1891 and set off for India. When she went missing, Fanny's father appealed to the Foreign Office and she was traced to the red-light district of Bombay. Officers from the Bombay police were duly dispatched to ask Fanny if she required help in getting home to England, only to be told that she had come to India of her own free will and intended to stay. She had no regret or embarrassment about her work and impressed the commissioner of the Bombay police as ‘singularly calm and self-possessed, a somewhat determined young woman and well able to look after herself'.
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Kahn had been arrested, but when Fanny testified that she had left home of her own free will and that Kahn had provided her with money to set herself up in Bombay, the case against him collapsed.

A further outburst of moral outrage developed with the campaign to raise the age of consent from twelve to sixteen years, and concern about the ‘trade in virgins'. As we know from previous chapters, there had always been a trade in virgins from London's earliest days, with bawds reserving their latest recruits to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is also evident that despite the sentimental Victorian ideal of the innocent little girl as portrayed by Charles Dickens or Lewis Carroll, creator of
Alice in Wonderland
, in reality millions of children endured a short life of miserable exploitation in factories, coal mines and sweatshops. Given these conditions, it is scarcely surprising that they also faced sexual exploitation. Back in 1835, the London Society for the Protection of Young Females found 400 individuals making a living by procuring girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen ‘for the purposes of prostitution',
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while the same society recorded 2,700 cases of syphilis in girls between the ages of eleven and sixteen over an eight-year period.

‘Walter' described one encounter with ‘a small girl' who invited him into her ‘miserable house'. Enticed by her ‘smallness and freshness' (‘Walter' imagined the girl to be about fifteen years but she appears to have been younger), he began to undress her, but was incapacitated by fear of disease, and asked for a condom. At this point of the narrative, the girl's mother entered the scene, breast-feeding a baby. She provided money for the girl to go off and buy a French letter, and sat and talked to ‘Walter' as they awaited her daughter's return. ‘She must live,' says the mother, philosophically, ‘and she's better at home doing that, than doing it away from me.' The girl then returned, but ‘Walter' had lost interest. ‘The affair was not enticing,' he concluded, laconically.
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‘Walter's' experience is shocking but not remarkable in a culture where children and young people were regularly exploited.

Waterloo was notorious for child prostitutes and beggars who plucked at the sleeves of passers-by, whining for pennies and making obscene suggestions in the hope of fleecing a potential client.
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Judges reported that children had appeared before them aged less than fourteen who could not remember the circumstances of their first intercourse. As in previous centuries, the backstreets and rookeries of London teemed with vagabonds and tiny desperadoes who survived on their wits and scratched a living by begging, stealing and selling their bodies.

According to one investigator, old roués with a desire for ‘green fruit'
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frequented the child brothels or employed procuresses to track down virgins, as in this description of a ‘fashionable villa' where virgins were regularly sacrificed. The proprietress welcomes our narrator in, and shows him