The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (40 page)

As might have been predicted, Dennis’s death had a destabilising effect on Charlotte’s mental condition. Already susceptible to upsets following the tragedy of the loss of her daughter, her dark moods seemed to last for
even
longer spells, so that well into the next century O’Kelly relations were still making veiled references to ‘Charlotte’s state’. Additionally, it is possible that Charlotte may have been contending with the long-term effects of syphilis as it gradually eroded her health. From January of 1788, she removed herself once more from London society and from those who demanded her services. She sought refuge at Canons and leant on Dennis’s male relations for the support to which she had become accustomed. Almost everyone, from family to her established friends and business acquaintances, came to recognise this departure as being her last. The 1788 edition of
Harris’s List
, compiled in the winter of 1787 just before her change of circumstances, is the final time her name is found mentioned in these annals. It is certain, however, that when Charlotte took her farewell curtsey and abandoned the theatre of Venus, she did not live a solitary life. Although no longer in practice, her home was frequently the venue for Andrew’s entertainments, including a revival of the great musical performances at Canons originally initiated by the Duke of Chandos. A new generation of beautiful young actresses and singers, such as Mrs Crouch and Ann Storace, was followed there by their many admirers, and the estate would have hummed with the energy of youth, love, lust and music. But what mischief may have come to pass on a warm summer’s evening in the gardens or twelve bedchambers of Canons would have done so of its own accord, without any assistance from Charlotte.

19

THE
LAST DAYS
OF THE
LIST

AT THE TIME
of her death in 1813, Charlotte had seen well over eighty-five years of life. The specific circumstances of her passing are unknown, other than that she died at Half Moon Street on an unspecified date, at an unrecorded time. Her longevity meant that she had lived to witness the deaths of many of her nearest and dearest. She had even survived her rivals and contemporaries in the sex trade, including John Harrison. Remarkably, she had also managed to outlive the
Harris’s List
, a publication by whose existence she had profited threefold, first as a listed ‘lady’, then as a mentioned madam and also as a beneficiary of its sale.

Not unlike Charlotte Hayes, née Ward, a.k.a. O’Kelly and Kelly, the
Harris’s List
had evolved significantly during its existence. Although it retained its original format, by the last year of its issue in 1795 it bore little resemblance to the publication that helped to spring Sam Derrick from the clutches of Ferguson’s Spunging House. From 1757 until his death in 1769, the
List
remained a product of Sam Derrick’s invention: a witty but useful little tome which sought to document the characters
who
comprised Covent Garden’s carnal underworld. It painted them as true flesh and blood, objectively and honestly. As Derrick had never envisioned such a wide-scale success, initially the
Harris’s Lists
were intended to appeal to the Piazza’s regular crowd, containing references and in-jokes familiar to the local pleasure-seeker. The author’s presence on the pages is a palpable one, as is the sense that the
List
is a community effort, coloured with wry personal observations and hearsay, relayed to Derrick by a variety of acquaintances.

Ideally,
Harris’s List
would have appealed to men with some education and at least a hint of discernment. At two shillings and sixpence, the publication would have cost more than an entire day’s wages for a journeyman tailor, or the weekly expense of renting a furnished room, buying a whole pig or paying a dentist’s bill for a tooth extraction. This was a handsome sum to the average man. But
Harris’s List
was not a piece of literature intended for appreciation by the street peddler, the soldier, or indeed the journeyman tailor. It was addressed to a readership that would have smirked at Derrick’s double entendres and easily grasped his cursory nods to the classical. In the eighteenth century this meant those of the middling classes and above. These were men who regarded themselves by virtue of their learning (or at least their ability to read) above the poorly fed, poorly paid rabble. It was the retention of this readership in addition to the
List
’s primary function as a guide which were to remain the only two constant features about it as the decades progressed. By the 1790s, the publication had strayed quite a considerable distance from Derrick’s original prototype.

After Samuel Derrick’s death, the subsequent authors of the
Harris’s List
remain stubbornly elusive. Although Charlotte may have reaped the profits of the 1769 edition, there is no evidence to suggest that she had any editorial control over its content, nor that she was privy to the proceeds from following years. By the 1770s, the
List
seemed to take on a life of its own, and from that point it is reasonable to assume that its execution lay solely in the control of the publishers. The
Harris’s List
had become more of a branded product than a quirky publication with literary aspirations, and it is not surprising that from this era it begins to lose some of its endearing flavour. With the focus of the
List
no longer on the characters and instead more on the intriguing stories of
seduction,
its appeal is to a broader audience, one that might not be familiar with Covent Garden or even the topography of the West End, let alone the regular faces that plied their trade in these spots. The author of the 1773 volume, very much against the spirit of Sam Derrick’s original, took the decision to clean up the prose, to remove the base, grunting euphemisms and to adopt a more genteel tone. Gone are the bawdy descriptions of ‘squat, swarthy, round-faced’ wenches, and of breath that smells like French cheese. Instead, classical allusions and a false flourish of delicacy are employed to transform the prostitute into ‘a fourth Grace, or a breathing, animated Venus de Medicis’. The gentrification of the
Lists
is also reflected in the changing illustration that appears as its frontispiece. The 1761 edition features a couple locked in an uncomfortable embrace on a sofa: she struggles, he persists. By the very nature of the publication we already know what the outcome will be: the reluctant Miss becomes one of the obliging
listees
. By the 1770s such rococo theatricality has been abandoned in favour of a less provocative image: a gentleman stands in conversation with a well-dressed lady. Everyone is circumspect in this picture; everyone exercises a display of manners. Were it not for the exaggerated length of the sword at the gentleman’s side, the vague knowing smirk on the lady’s face or the visible colonnades of Covent Garden in the backdrop, a casual browser might miss the meaning altogether. By the 1790s there are no prostitutes to be found on the frontispiece of the
Harris’s List
at all, only four Arcadian nymphs frolicking nude with a garland. The image bears an unsettling resemblance to Joshua Reynolds’s well-known society portrait of
The Montgomery Sisters Adorning a Term of Hymen
. Surely no accident.

Alterations to the tone of the
List
in later years pervaded every aspect of the publication. As the publishers moved with the fashion for gentility, the personality of the work and its buoyant sparkle begins to dim. From its outset the
List
was always about making money, but by the 1780s, as the seams of the publication have started to wear through, this motivation stands out more discernibly than ever. No longer troubled by maintaining accuracy or even creative verve, those who had taken on its production had simply resorted to bastardising entries from previous editions. The exploits of Miss Smith in one year were reprinted two
years
later as the joyous romps of Miss Jones. As long as the addresses were vaguely correct, the publishers were not concerned about names or histories. They assumed that punters weren’t either. Its last extant volume, that from 1793, is but a distant cousin of the earliest work. Containing very little originality and no character, the cyprians who appear on its pages are mere archetypes with names attached. Not much better than a cut-and-paste job of previous works, by the time the law put its boot down on the publication in 1795, the true spirit of the
Harris’s List
was already dead.

Those to blame for the publication’s down-slide, at least in part, are two brothers, John and James Roach, and a third conspirator, the bookseller John Aitkin of Bear Street. From the late 1780s they had been running the
List
off on their printing presses. The work’s desirability, evidently on the wane, was squeezed one final time in the hope of yielding its last drops of profitability. The Roaches and Aitkin had no interest in reviving the work’s content or its original concept. Even the publication’s title, the
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
, was by this date outmoded, as almost any prostitute worth her guineas had moved west to the newer districts stretching northwards from Mayfair to Marylebone.

There are a number of theories about who the Roach brothers were. Little exists to enlighten us about Aitkin, who it seemed had died by the time James Roach was hauled before the King’s Bench. Although the publishing pseudonym ‘H. Ranger’ predated the Roach brothers’ activity in the trade, by the time they had picked up the gauntlet the name had become a fixture on the title page, a traditionally used veil behind which otherwise respectable booksellers could hide. Indeed, the Roach brothers were deemed so respectable that they even warranted mention in that august Victorian publication,
The Dictionary of National Biography
, where they are described simply as booksellers and compilers. Among their mainstream credits are innocuous works such as
Roach’s Beauties of the Poets of Great Britain
(1794),
Beautiful Extracts of Prosaic Writers, Carefully Selected for the Young and Rising Generation
(1795), and
Roach’s New and Complete History of the Stage
(1796). It is possible that John and James Roach had fallen upon hard times and resorted to printing material which they knew to be immoral, but would assist in paying the bills.
It
is equally plausible that they, like the Harrisons of Covent Garden, were a family quite at home with the dealings of the criminal underworld, although they attempted as far as they could to keep this disguised. Roach is a name that appears frequently during the later half of the century in and around the Piazza. A nefarious figure known as ‘Tiger’ Roach acted as the bully for the Bedford Arms and later for the Bedford Coffee House in the 1760s and 1770s. A Miss Roach is also listed among Harris’s ladies for the year 1773. Francis Place mentions a Mrs Roach willing to show obscene prints to young people from her shop in the 1770s and ’80s. As the Roaches were known to have included ‘odd volumes and indelicate prints’ among the items on their shelves, it is possible that she may have been a relation. It is equally probable that a connection between her and the Covent Garden procuress Mrs Margaret Roach, active at the same time, may have existed. In all likelihood, they may have been one and the same. As John Harrison’s brief foray into the publication of obscene material proves, it was not unusual for those engaged in selling sex to seek other outlets for their enterprises. As J.L. Wood speculates, the seemingly respectable Roaches trading out of Vinegar Yard probably kept their ‘top-shelf’ material on Little Bridges Street at the address printed in the
Harris’s List
, where they traded under the name H. Ranger. Like most involved in criminal dealings, maintaining a front for less-acceptable business was of the utmost importance. Nevertheless, the effective marketing and sale of the
Harris’s List
posed some serious dilemmas.

As criminals, the Roach brothers and John Aitkin cannot have been very clever. Alternatively, they may have been very much alert to the risks entailed in the publication of the
List
but willing to lay themselves on the line in order to reap the profits from its sale. In either case, the publication was invariably bound to spill the beans on its producers and retailers. The
Harris’s List
had been, since at least the 1760s, an annual which appeared at H. Ranger’s stall each winter. One might anticipate the arrival of an updated version around the Christmas period, as the poem that prefaces its 1788 edition reveals:

Again the coral berry’s holly glads the eye,

The ivy green again each window decks,

And misteltoe, kind friend to Bassia’s cause,

Under each merry roof invites the kiss,

Come then my friends, ye friends to Harris come,

And more than kisses share …

H. Ranger’s regular customers would have recognised that the end of the year meant another discreet visit to his premises. However, the
List
’s circulation would never have reached its purported height of 8,000 annually without some assistance from advertising. Unabashedly, and seemingly without fear of any repercussions, the publisher would place short promotions in popular newspapers such as the one that appeared in the
Daily Advertiser
on 3 January: ‘This Day published, priced 2 s 6d with the original Introduction,
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies; or a Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the year 1775
, Containing an exact description of the most celebrated ladies of pleasure who frequent Covent Garden and other parts of the metropolis.’ The newspaper proclaimed this across a corner of its front page, next to advertisements for products promising to cure venereal disease and ‘all disorders of the genitals’. With H. Ranger’s address in the public domain and a regular date set for the publication of the
List
each year, it was as if the Roaches and Aitkin had turned informer on themselves.