The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (18 page)

By 1757, when Derrick first touched his pen to paper in the process of committing his
List
to ink, Covent Garden had become his home in every sense of the word. He wrote confidently and from a position of
complete
familiarity with his surroundings, as one who knew each bagnio, brothel and quiet tavern corner, and who had paced every street and byway of the area. The short biographical entries he composed said as much about the locality in which they were written as they did about the women they profiled. Based upon an amalgam of collected observations, he alternately bestows jeers and praises beneath each listee’s title. About ‘Mrs Hughes, in the Strand’, he writes with personal scorn: ‘This matron … keeps a house of entertainment, much frequented by the bloods and bucks, who gives the sign the title of the Cat, although in fact it looks more like a lion; but which of her good qualities bear any resemblance to that animal, I could never learn.’ He praises ‘Nancy Howard, near Spring-Gardens’, who he claims after meeting ‘appears at least ten years younger than she is in reality’, and always seems ‘chatty enough when she pleases’. He also takes the opportunity to wag a finger at acquaintances of his, like Miss Clarke, who he had observed ‘breaking the glasses at taverns and the windows of hackney chairs’, or Bet Davies, who not only could ‘damn a waiter with … grace’ but whom he had spied smashing bottles ‘with the air of a bully’. Such behaviour, he warns, ‘will never recommend’ these ladies ‘to OUR notice’. In taking such a tone, Derrick went beyond any service a pimp might perform by simply compiling a list of available names. Instead, he succeeded in creating an animated record of Covent Garden’s personalities, which appealed to a more literate class of patron.

If Derrick’s intention was to secure his liberty through the creation of a printed pimp’s list, then his endeavours were an unmitigated triumph. Even before it arrived on the shelves, the
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
had earned him enough ‘by its sale to a certain book seller’ to absolve him from his debts. For the first time in his life, Sam’s pen had bought him something truly worthy of merit: his freedom. There was, however, a sting in the tail. In order for his career as an estimable poet to move forward, his identity as the
List
’s author would have to remain a very well kept secret.

9

An Introduction
TO
HARRIS’S LADIES

ON 2 JUNE
1757, the readers of a short-lived satirical publication called
The Centinel
were in for a treat. Its savvy editor had identified his readership as the type who liked prostitutes and chose to tip them off to a new work that might be of interest to them. In keeping with the flavour of the periodical, the announcement was written in the style of an auction advertisement:

For Sale by the Candle At the Shakespear’s Head Tavern

Covent Garden: The Tartar and the Shark Privateers with their

Cargo from Haddock’s, Harris, Master; Square stern’d, Dutch

Built, with new sails and rigging. They have been lately docked

And refitted, and are reckoned prime sailors. Catalogues with

An account of their Cargo may be had at Mrs. D[ouglas]’s in

The Piazza, or at the Place of Sale. To begin at twelve at night.

The
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
had made its entrée into the public domain. In the first instance it was only available for sale at Haddock’s Bagnio, the Shakespear’s Head and next door at the well-established brothel run by Mother Douglas. By the following year, the
enigmatically
named publisher ‘H. Ranger’ had not only assumed the printing of it but had become the primary retailer of the title. Situated in the heart of London’s literary district, H. Ranger’s outlet sold a variety of reading material churned out by Grub Street hacks, most of it smutty. In addition to publishing the
Harris’s List
, his back catalogues also included notable top-shelf works such as
Love Feasts; or the different methods of courtship in every country, throughout the known world
(two shillings and sixpence) and
The Polite Road to an Estate; or Fornication one great source of wealth and pleasure
(one shilling). Like a good tabloid editor, H. Ranger knew the value of a titillating read, and after spotting Derrick’s ingenious idea it was his generous advance that sprung the author out of Ferguson’s Spunging House. Who precisely H. Ranger was in these early days is unknown. He, like Jack Harris, attempted to keep a fairly low profile and regularly moved his bookstall up and down Fleet Street, from Temple Bar to Temple Exchange Passage to No.23 near St Dunstan’s church. Over the thirty-eight-year life span of the
List
it is likely that he was as many as four or more individuals. H. Ranger simply became a useful trading name, as Elizabeth Denlinger points out: ‘ranger’ was a term synonymous with that of ‘rake’. The ‘H’, it is believed, stood for ‘Honest’.

For those who managed to track down the furtive bookseller (and it is claimed that approximately 8,000 did annually), the cost of purchasing the
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
was two shillings and sixpence. For their cash, the reader received a six-by-four-inch volume that, like any useful guidebook, could be slipped into a waistcoat pocket. It could be put to immediate use on the streets of London or taken home secretly and consumed in private. The publication’s suitably lewd prose was undoubtedly created with the purpose of solitary sexual enjoyment very much in mind. This may explain why H. Ranger’s catalogue of stock regularly promotes
Lists
from earlier years, sold, interestingly, for the same price. The devoted
Harris’s List
collector would have relished thumbing through the pages of his various copies, comparing the entries of ladies they had sampled in bygone days and savouring the descriptions.

The reader of the
Harris’s List
need never feel ashamed of his purchase, or for that matter of his love of whoring. Once he had parted
the
cover in his hands and pushed past the publication’s mildly arousing frontispiece of a stock-image seduction scene, Sam Derrick’s preface in celebration of fornication would have assuaged all pangs of conscience. Nearly every edition from the 1760s to the 1780s is introduced by a lengthy sermon praising the merits of prostitution. Derrick’s original essay, which appears in the 1761 re-print ‘at the request of several gentlemen and ladies’ after being ‘universally admired’, seems to have been an important feature of the
List
from its outset. In it, the cases of both the whore and her keeper are exalted. To Derrick, the prostitute becomes a ‘Volunteer of Venus’, wrongly persecuted and shunned by the society whom she seeks to benefit. He argues that it is through her amorous embraces that the violent natures of men are distracted and placated. To the whore we owe ‘the peace of families, of cities, nay, of kingdoms’. To her customer and her keeper equal regard is given. Referred to as ‘gracious’ and ‘venerable’, dealing out ‘comfort to the oppressed’, the male user becomes the ultimate patron, applying his coin to a good cause. Derrick concludes with a lascivious rallying cry:

Persist, oh ye hoary seers! Persist in the cause of keeping; in that you shew yourselves friends to charity, virtue and the state; continue it cherish these gifts of heaven; still hug to your bosom the cordial, the reviving warmth communicated by youth and beauty: to the dear girl whom you shall select, be your purse strings never closed; nor let the name of prostitute deter you from your pious resolve!

While such a preamble would have been penned with tongue firmly in cheek, it nevertheless makes a good attempt at presenting non-believers with a convincing case in favour of the trade.

Beyond its decorative merits and its introductory epistle, the entire
raison d’être
of the
List
was to conduct the desirous to the embrace of a prostitute. However, the question of what type of prostitute has never quite been decided. Derrick saw his creation as worthy of containing the names of a wide range of Thaises, from the most celebrated women such as Kitty Fisher and Lucy Cooper, to those he called ‘low-born errant drabs’. Subsequent authors chose to employ the
List
as a vehicle to warn users off certain women, while others only included genteel
mannered
prostitutes worthy of praise. Even their prices varied, ranging from an affordable five shillings to the exclusive ‘banknotes only’. Those looking for uniformity in the publication across its thirty-eight-year print run would be hard-pressed to find any. The
List
’s contents and objectives continued to change with the whims of its authors, publishers and readership. It defies all attempts to categorise it as either exclusively up-market or simply middle of the road.

Similarly, the social origins of the women who comprised the
List
’s roll call of names were diverse. In 1758, Saunders Welch estimated that out of a London population of 675,000, the capital was home to just over 3,000 prostitutes, most of whom were drawn from the lowest ranks of the poor. Although this figure appears to be quite a plausible one, other commentators such as German diarist Sophie von la Roche and the reformer John Colquhoun believed the number to be considerably higher. As Welch never clearly specifies who he included in his count, it is difficult to be certain about his accuracy, particularly as the era’s definition of a ‘whore’ was a broad and convoluted one. Along with visible streetwalking prostitutes and those who plied their trade in the theatres, taverns, brothels and bagnios, there existed an entire stratum of ‘invisible’ whores, from the outwardly respectable woman who conducted secret affairs to the labourer who offered sexual favours from time to time. The author of
A Congratulatory Epistle from a Reformed Rake
, written in the same year as Welch’s tract, attempted to break down the term ‘prostitute’ into a ‘gradation of whores’, whose hierarchical ranks included:

Women of Fashion Who Intrigue
¹

Demi-Reps
²

Good-natured girls
³

Kept mistresses
⁴

Ladies of pleasure
⁵

Whores
⁶

Park-walkers
⁷

Street-walkers
⁸

Bunters
⁹

Bulk-mongers
¹⁰

Of these ten categories, those from Demi-Rep to Street-walker were found on the pages of the
Harris’s List
from 1757–95. Interestingly, irrespective of where they may have found themselves along this scale, H. Ranger treated them all as equals, facetiously omitting certain vowels and consonants from their names as if they were members of polite society who sought to have their identities protected.

In Welch’s assumption, the majority of those who resorted to prostitution entered the trade as either orphans or children of poor families. Among the poor he included those of the ‘laborious poor’ with offspring ‘too numerous for their parents to maintain’. Justice Fielding also found this to be the case when he questioned a group of prostitutes arrested on the night of 1 May, 1758. While a considerable amount of full-time prostitutes came from the poorest of the poor, many of those who featured in the
Harris’s Lists
did not. In addition to those like Charlotte Hayes, born into financially comfortable sex-trade families who had been in the procuring or bagnio-keeping game for generations, was an entire range of often unseen, part-time prostitutes. Were Saunders Welch to have included this sub-category of ‘working girl’ in his estimate, he would have found the social pool from which they originated to be much more diverse.

Much to the frustration of dedicated moral reformers, identifying all of London’s harlots was not as easy as simply taking a stroll down the ill-lit Strand. Not every prostitute in London was engaged in openly plying her trade and not every woman that society considered a prostitute was immediately identifiable. As women of the lower classes were generally believed to have a looser sense of morality, it was assumed that their sexual services were also available for sale if the right price was offered. This particularly applied to female market traders and street peddlers. Contemporary accounts, as well as ballads and engravings, suggest that these women frequently sold more than their baskets of fruit and nosegays. At times the street seller and the prostitute were considered so closely related that little distinction was made between those legitimately attempting to make a living and those using the trade of merchandise as a front for their more lucrative sexual activities. Female workers toiling indoors also found themselves the objects of similar suspicion, and not without some cause. An absence of well-paid
employment
for women made it necessary for those who laboured in traditional female occupations, trades dedicated to the laundering, mending or creation of clothing, to occasionally supplement their earnings by offering access to their bodies. No one profession was considered more notorious than the milliner’s trade, which it was believed imparted the value of vanity to its many impressionable practitioners. The same was said of other female-dominated and fashion-oriented fields such as haberdashery, glovemaking, and dressmaking, all of which bore the stigma of being ‘seminaries of prostitution’.

Had Welch probed his sample further he would also have discovered that prostitution for many women was a seasonal occupation to which they turned as a stopgap between periods of employment. Notable among this type were entertainers, namely London’s aspiring and established actresses, singers and dancers. The end of the annual theatrical season meant a period without income for many of the faces who earned their bread by treading the boards. Entertainers were always on the look-out for generous patrons who might ensure their comfort during ‘resting’ spells. But for those less fortunate, the brothels of Covent Garden and the Haymarket proved to be useful refuges. Not unlike entertainers, domestic servants were particularly prone to stints on the town. Even with the high demand for domestic help in London, the turnover of household servants could be quite rapid among families and individuals with ever-changing needs and places of residence. Out-of-work female servants with no alternative and immediate means of earning their keep might find it expedient to fall back on the one sure source of work available for women. As Daniel Defoe observed in 1725, resorting to such measures was quite common, causing servants to move frequently from ‘Bawdy-House to Service and from Service to Bawdy-House’ time and time again. In all of these cases, incidental periods of prostitution which may have lasted several weeks, months or years were integrated into life when the need to defray expenses and make ends meet arose. According to the eighteenth-century model, these women wore the label of ‘whore’ as much as those who practised the profession full time. Certainly, the authors of the
Harris’s Lists
made no distinction between them.