The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (19 page)

The occupation of prostitution was not the exclusive preserve of the poor. Middle-class women also make an appearance in the
Lists
, or
at
least this is the impression that the publications’ authors wanted to impart. The daughters of the ‘precarious middle classes’ – those who perched on the middle to lower end of London’s burgeoning and diversifying bourgeoisie, the petty shop-keepers, the master craftsmen, the sometimes-successful artists, whose fortunes rose and swelled and occasionally fell – were the prime candidates for lives of high-class prostitution. Just how many girls from this level of society were responsible for expanding the legions of Venus is entirely unknown, although there is evidence to suggest that their numbers were strong. Certainly, the many young ladies trained as haberdashers and dressmakers would have come from families sufficiently well endowed to pay for their apprenticeships, a luxury that the poorest classes could not afford. Even Francis Place’s own apprentice-master in the 1780s, a breeches-maker by the name of Mr French, had three daughters actively earning their livelihoods as whores. ‘His eldest daughter was and had been for several years a common prostitute. His youngest daughter, who was about seventeen years of age, had genteel lodgings where she was visited by gentlemen; and the second daughter … was kept by a captain of an East India ship’, Place explained. Similarly, James Grant, a friend of William Hickey, kept a mistress called Miss Brown who was the daughter of a successful tailor with his own shop on Ludgate Hill. Far from disapproving of her lifestyle, Tailor Brown profited greatly by his daughter’s position, as she kept ‘the interest of her father in view by recommending all … Mr. Grant’s friends to employ him in this business’. Slightly further up the middle-class ladder, even the lawyer and author Thomas Vaughan, lumbered with the misfortune of having fathered six pretty daughters, confided to Hickey that lack of funds meant his girls might ‘have to turn out whores’. As the
Lists
suggest, there was a healthy market for attractive, educated girls without suitable marriage portions. In fact, they made the best courtesans.

However, not every woman in the
Harris’s List
originated from the respectable background the authors claimed. As Sam Derrick saw himself as a chronicler of Covent Garden characters, he preferred truth to embellishment. Unlike the authors of succeeding editions, honesty and the recounting of gossip and amusing stories were his principle
aims.
In later years, as eighteenth-century society became increasingly obsessed with gentility and politeness, its authors attempted to ‘prettify’ not only the prose used in descriptions but the stories of the ladies themselves. Editions from the 1770s through the 1790s feature more daughters of lawyers, clergymen, half-pay officers, schoolmasters, physicians and shop-keepers. The
List
’s publishers had learned that, like modern celebrities, part of a prostitute’s allure was her persona: her name, tales of her escapades and, most importantly for Georgian society, her background or ‘breeding’. After all, where was the glamour in bedding a streetwise orphan from Shoreditch? As a motherless and disowned daughter of a country parson, her attraction was much greater.

The eighteenth-century middle classes loved to be scandalised by what they read. They were enthralled by suggestions that the dissolute women who lived under the roofs of disorderly houses were in fact the daughters and sisters of people they might have known, people just like them. The unsure footing of many on the margins of the middle classes meant that the line between maintaining a respectable appearance and slipping down in society’s estimation was a genuine fear. As the heroine of Fanny Burney’s
Evelina
learned, little distinction was made between a virtuous young lady and a sexually available one, when one’s address was ‘an hosiers in High Holborn’. The era’s print media was more than pleased to cash in on this sense of social insecurity, and the literate public, in turn, lapped it up. Novels such as Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
and
Pamela
, tales of seduction and rape, became instant bestsellers, while all of London thrilled to reports of the trial of Elizabeth Canning, a girl purported to have been abducted and imprisoned in a bawdy house. The era seemed unable to get enough of tales of ‘virtue in peril’. Understandably, the producers of the
Harris’s Lists
recognised this and made it a noted feature of later editions.

Mixed in with the standard stories of seduction and betrayal, by women claiming to be illegitimate daughters of the nobility and legitimate daughters of wealthy city merchants, are genuine tales detailing the paths women took to their present situations. Love and youthful innocence are most regularly cited as the root of their misfortunes. Numerous girls are recorded as having ‘absconded’ from their villages
with
recruiting officers and soldiers who then abandoned them in London. Wilful deception and broken promises of marriage are also recounted. Many of these tales include the woes of rejection by one’s parents and friends, adding a tragic but often fictitious postscript to their falls from grace. Rape, unfortunately, also figures prominently, although it is frequently veiled in the use of the term ‘seduction’. Like the era’s favourite protagonist, Clarissa Harlowe, many of
Harris’s
listees were ‘seduced against their will’.

While the romantic tendencies of teenage girls make these stories entirely plausible, few of the
Lists
’ authors after Sam Derrick are willing to acknowledge the more mundane routes often taken to prostitution. The search for employment in rural areas led a significant number to the capital, where prospects were better. Alone in the metropolis and left to their own devices, women fell prey to lecherous employers, gave in to the advances of admirers, and were ‘inveigled’ by the sex trade. The old urban legend as illustrated in Hogarth’s series
The Harlot’s Progress
, where country bumpkin Moll Hackabout is astutely picked from the London wagon by the insidious Mother Needham, has more than a resonance of reality. The tricks of the procuring trade were well known to Saunders Welch and his reforming companions. ‘Agents are constantly employed by bawds to attend the coming and going of wagons and other carriages’, he wrote in 1758. They also lurked at the register offices and deceived the unsuspecting into hiring lodgings from them or taking sham positions as servants. It was then that, by use of ‘persuasion or force’, they were made ‘one of the family’.

Simply because the
Lists
’ authors filled their biographical sketches with details of young women’s deceptions and rapes in order to arouse their readers does not preclude the occurrence of such horrors. They might not have been as commonplace as hacks and novelists would have the literate believe, but such schemes were not unknown. In 1768, Sarah Woodcock, a milliner, was held captive and raped by Lord Baltimore. Just over thirty years earlier the infamous Colonel Francis Charteris was tried and hanged for ‘carnally knowing’ a servant, Ann Bond, against her will. In both instances the men had plotted with procuresses who were closely involved in the deception of their victims. While these were quite high-profile cases owing to the social standing of their defendants,
similar
crimes in which bawds were involved, such as the rape of Ann Cooly in 1758, were allowed to occur quietly in the background. Of course, in a system so stacked against them, few women of the lower and middling orders would have had the resolve to bring these crimes to the notice of the authorities. Without influential family or friends behind them, no one was likely to have believed their accusations. As suggested by publications like the
Harris’s List
, it was easier simply to accept the tragedy and assume their new role. A life of prostitution, as the users of the
List
would have seen it, held many virtues.

To the modern reader, Sam Derrick and the subsequent authors of the
Lists
appear to approach the condition of prostitution in quite a glib manner. The harsh realities of a ‘working woman’s’ existence, the threats of syphilis and venereal disease, the fear of pregnancy and induced abortions, the implications of alcoholism, violence, imprisonment and starvation, are rarely mentioned more than in passing. Readers didn’t want to be reminded of these things. The
Harris’s List
provided men with the means of gratifying their lusts and enjoying themselves. When they set out to locate a wanton woman, their intentions were to bury their troubles and their consciences. In a good whore’s arms, the miseries of the world were immaterial. When he rapped on her door or requested her company at the tavern he was only in the mood for pleasure. What mood she was in was of no consequence.

10

THE
LIST

COVENT GARDEN CHARACTERS AND REIGNING CELEBRITIES

Cherry Poll, Covent Garden

Any one who has been at Bob Derry’s, that house of remarkable civil reputation, must be too well acquainted with the celebrated Cherry Poll, to need a particular description. How she came by the name is variously reported; but her red cheeks, her red lips, and her red something else, have all helped to the dubbing of her. She is an agreeable girl, but so frolicksome and noisy, that she often forces the worthy Bob to cry out, What a blasted house is here! (1761)

Lucy Cooper, Parliament Street

No body, in the least acquainted with the world of amusement can be a stranger to the accomplishments of the sprightly Lucy. No woman can be a more jovial companion, or say better things. She has often true wit about her; but lards it rather a little too much with blasphemy. She was, to the astonishment of the world, kept for three years by Sir Penurious Trifle
¹
, who never had before shewn the slightest tendency to extravagance, but once; and that was in giving a guinea instead of a shilling, by mistake to a coachman; which, is he never demanded, it was because he knew not where to seek for jolt. She is said to have squandered for him 14,000l. without realising 1400l. She is closely connected with an actor at the Old House; and some people say, they have tucked themselves up in the matrimonial noose; but the theatrical
legends
range this article under the head of apocrypha. Lucy’s features are regular, her hair brown, her air easy, and her shape genteel: though she is very thin, her bones are not so sharp as a razor, as a certain noted Templar, lately deceased used to affirm. (1761)

Miss Kitty Fisher

In our list of public beauties for last year, we inserted the name of this agreeable girl, with a promise to our readers of a farther and more circumstantial account of her, and it was actually ready for press, when the following letter was brought to us, which we shall give verbatim as an excuse for our failing in the contract above mentioned.

To Mr. Harris.

Sir,

As I see you have advertised your List for this year, and I remember you promised the public some account of me in it, I beg for God’s sake, you will suffer old acquaintance to sway so far with you, as to prevent your doing a thing which will be so grievous to me. Besides you know, Mr. Harris, though brought to misfortunes I never yet was on the common: you may, perhaps, be at some loss in complying with this request, the servant therefore will give you five guineas*. Pray consider me, and believe me to be,

Sir, your most humble servant,

K-th-r-ne F—r

P.S. Mr. — desires you will send in six dozen of your best burgundy.

*the above sum has been faithfully applied in discharging Polly Hawkins from the Marshalsea; – we scorn to pocket a bribe. (1761)

Bet Davis, alias Little Infamy, Russel Street

Of all the ladies we have inserted in our List, Bet is the most eminent, among those of her own class, who have given her the name, Little Infamy, from her abandoned and libidinous disposition. It is reported, she has transplanted an
antique
gonorrhoea by many drunken vicious husbands, to their innocent wives, and to the blood of posterity; and that many a sessions paper has owed part of its historical existence to heroes of her creating. Let this be as it may, we advise her enamoratos to be careful. – A word to the wise is enough. (1761)

Mrs Cuyler, Craven Street, Strand

To trace this lady through all her mazes and wanderings, from her first setting out in life to the time of her appearance on the stage in the character of Miranda, would far exceed the boundary of our limits; we must therefore content ourselves with giving a brief outline of her character which we have had opportunities of being well acquainted with.

She was brought up under the Wing of the celebrated Bird of Paradise
²
, who taught her the rudiments of knowledge from which she soon, by the strength of her own natural genius, became a complete mistress of the science, in which she has cut a conspicuous figure. She is about twenty-eight, is slim and tall; has a fair complexion; brown hair; good teeth; and is upon the whole a very pretty woman. She lately behaves with a great deal of reserve in public, but in private, when she likes her company; there is not a more agreeable, good-natured convivial soul in the universe. At such times she is very fond of singing ‘King David on a certain day, &c.’ which she performs with a good deal of humour. She does not give her company now, but to two or three particular friends, except she chances to meet with a young fellow whose arguments are too powerful for her to resist, or an old one, who will assail her like an other Danae, with a shower of gold. We cannot conclude without assuring our readers that she is a woman of the strictest honour and secrecy, and expects prudent conduct and behaviour from those in whom she places any confidence. (1779)