The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (41 page)

However carefully they may have endeavoured to conduct their business, James Roach and John Aitkin were rumbled in 1795. Since 1787, a band of moral reformers headed by the Bishop of London and comprising ‘A great number of Gentlemen of the Highest Rank and Estimation’ had committed themselves to pursuing malefactors such as the Roaches to justice. Their primary intent had been to carry forth the wishes expressed by George III as outlined in his ‘Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness, and Immorality’. In the course of stamping out ‘loose and immoral publications’, they had determined on quashing the nearly forty-year-old institution of the
Harris’s List
. By early 1794 they had hunted down John Roach and brought him successfully to trial for libel. Undaunted by this, James rather foolishly decided to continue publishing. The 1795 edition, which had arrived on H. Ranger’s shelves around December or January, inevitably led the
Society
straight to his back door. In February, Roach appeared before Lord Chief Justice Kenyon and Justice Ashurst, also on charges of libel. Cowering under the prospect of incarceration, Roach repented of his folly and lied remorselessly. He claimed to be unaware of the illegality of such a publication and to hold no knowledge of anyone else prosecuted for printing a work that ‘had been published regularly every year like a Court Calendar’. On this point, Judge Kenyon reminded him that only recently ‘a defendant of the name of John Roach was formerly convicted of this very offence’. Chagrined, James Roach replied simply that the said John Roach was not him.

In spite of the pleadings of Roach’s legal counsel that the defendant had atoned for his sins by withdrawing the book from public sale, and that he had severed all ties with Aitkin and with their printer, Justice Ashurst was not moved. In a final bid for sympathy, Roach’s lawyer begged the court to consider the defendant’s wife and six children, as well as his poor state of health, worsened by the onset of asthma ‘since this prosecution has been commenced against him’. Unfortunately, none of these factors assisted in mitigating his punishment. According to Ashurst, James Roach, by publishing the
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
, was guilty of a grave lapse in judgement: ‘An offence of greater enormity could hardly have been committed’. Ashurst continued that, ‘A care of the growing morals of the present generation ought to be uppermost in every man’s heart’. He evidently felt that this was not the case with James Roach. As a result, Roach was sentenced to a year in Newgate Prison, but to ensure that upon his release he would not be tempted to publish scurrilous filth like the
Harris’s List
again, he was required ‘to give security for his good behaviour for three years’ through the payment of £100. The severity of Roach’s punishment for printing a little book that by the 1790s wasn’t even well written or entirely accurate sent a clear warning to those who lived by the proceeds of sex. On the eve of the new century, a more righteous society would have little sympathy for the purveyors of vice.

20

LADIES
OF THE
List

THE END OF
the production of the
Harris’s List
is by no means the end of our story, but rather a punctuation of it. The ancient profession of prostitution was far too well established to be hindered by the passing of a mere trade publication, irrespective of how useful the
Harris’s List
had proven to be during the course of its thirty-eight-year life span. In truth, eighteenth-century London’s Thaises, nymphs, votaries of Venus, or whatever title they might have been given, required little advertising beyond the flashing of a stocking-clad lower leg or a glimpse of a silk-apparelled figure in a theatre box. Demand for their services almost always outstripped supply. Year upon year, decade upon decade, the acclaimed beauties of their day grew old and were replaced by further fresh faces. Their experiences have been the subject of much fascination by modern authors and historians who have speculated upon their existences, seeking to answer the vexing questions of who these women were and how it was that they came to do what they did. There are so many yet untold histories of women from the labouring and middle classes who earned their livelihoods by sharing their bodies with men; Charlotte Hayes’s tale is only one of these. Of all of the
Harris’s Lists
published between 1757 and 1795, only volumes from nine years (1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789, 1790, 1793) have evaded the wear and the censure of time to be retained in public collections. Contained within this handful of editions, over 1,000 names and short biographies of women active in the trade of prostitution are recorded for posterity. What happened to them? What were their stories? The revelations are bittersweet; both hopeful and tragic, touching and horrifying.

For a number of women, a life of prostitution held many rewards and delivered to them an existence far more comfortable and exciting than anything they might have otherwise experienced. The thin strata of the most successful ladies of the town was made up largely of women pulled from poverty. Fanny Murray, Emily Warren, Betsy Cox and Nancy Dawson are only a few who came straight from the street into the company of some of the wealthiest men in the country, a feat difficult for other professions to perform at the best of times. A pretty face was enough to catapult a young girl to riches and to secure her future, if she played her cards correctly. The
Harris’s Lists
record numerous examples of this. Among the celebrated names that fill its pages are those of women who never quite attained the stellar heights of Kitty Fisher and Emma Hamilton, but whose lives were nevertheless prosperous and comfortable. The
Lists
also chart the fortunes of women such as Becky LeFevre (later known as Mrs Clapereau or Clappero), a lady who made a somewhat successful debut upon the stage after rising from the rank of a streetwalker. Becky’s notoriety landed her a wealthy keeper, who subsidised her accommodation on Frith Street. The savvy Miss LeFevre took advantage of her commodious lodgings to let unused rooms to ladies of the town and by the age of twenty-eight had established a profitable enterprise which she eventually moved to King’s Place. By 1789, a Mr Clapereau, described as ‘a remarkably handsome youth’ and a companion of the Prince of Wales, fell under her spell and insisted that she retire from procuring to live solely as his mistress in lodgings on Gerrard Street. So exclusive in her services that she only received payment in banknotes and never took ‘any messages or mandates from Bagnios’, ‘Mrs’ Clapereau, by the age of thirty-eight, had lifted herself from the status of common whore to woman of wealth. The same happy
fate
awaited Miss Marshall, mentioned in 1779 and 1793, and Miss Becky Child (1788, 1789 and 1793). Miss Marshall, who in later years became Mrs Marshall, is described as ‘a genteel person’ who was ‘prudent enough to be saving so as to enable herself to appear in an elegant manner and to be provided in case of an imergecy’. Unlike many of the sisterhood, prudence had allowed the now grand ‘Mrs Marshall’ to remain well provided for, fashionably dressed and still in high-keeping fourteen years later in 1793. Miss Becky Child, who also eventually changed her mode of address to that of ‘Mrs’, prospered for at least ten years under the protection of a wealthy ‘citizen’ of London (quite probably a member of the Child family of bankers). In 1789 she was comfortable enough to ‘never admit any one home with her’ after visits to the playhouses and assembly rooms. By 1793, her generous lover had feathered her nest so well that she was now described as ‘plump and fair’ and as the keeper of her own house on Newman Street.

A large number of the names that appear in the
Harris’s Lists
are also mentioned by that inveterate womaniser, William Hickey. One of these is that of Fanny Temple (also known as Fanny Hartford), who is featured in the 1764 edition. Like so many, Fanny began her career as an actress at Drury Lane and came to supplement her income through honouring the attentions of her admirers. At the time her entry was written, she was living in Spring Gardens and was described as having a fair complexion and ‘black eyes’ from which ‘love shoots his golden darts’. When Hickey had made her acquaintance roughly two years later, her prospects were on the rise. She had moved to ‘an excellent house in Queen Ann Street and had … neat lodgings in the country, pleasantly situated near the waterside just above Hammersmith, and kept her own chariot, with suitable establishment of servants’. The bill for this lavish lifestyle was not footed by Hickey, but rather by ‘a gentleman of rank and fashion, possessed of a splendid fortune’. Although Hickey further supplemented her income, his relationship with Fanny was more than a simple business arrangement. He and Fanny shared a genuine affection, which caused Hickey in later years to make attempts at re-establishing contact. Unluckily for him but quite happily for her, it appeared that Fanny by the 1780s ‘had married a gentleman of fortune’ and now ‘resided entirely in the country’.

Popular convention has led us to believe the adage that ‘men never marry their mistresses’, but many successful prostitutes did enjoy an existence that ended in a marriage to their keepers. Numerous women on the
Lists
, as well as others who shared their profession, entered into wedded unions, not only with men of aristocratic birth (who, with some leverage, could marry whomever they might be inclined to) but to those of the gentry and the wealthy middle classes. Harriet Powell, one of Charlotte Hayes’s recruits, married the Earl of Seaforth; Elizabeth Armistead became the wife of the politician Charles James Fox; Kitty Fisher married John Norris, a wealthy landowner; Emma Hart became the wife of Sir William Hamilton, the envoy to Naples; Elizabeth Farren married the Earl of Derby; and Ann Day, after acting as the mistress to the 2nd Baron Edgcumbe, married Sir Peter Fenhoulet. In terms of fashion, where the aristocracy went, the rest of society followed. In an article that appeared in the January 1755 edition of
The Connoisseur
, a concerned critic claimed that keeping a mistress was becoming so much the practice that even clerks and apprentices were maintaining women in private lodgings. Worse still, many ‘grow so doatingly fond of their whore that by marriage they make her an honest woman and perhaps a lady of quality’.

The reality of the situation was that not every lady of the town was rescued by a well-heeled lover, and for each penniless waif snatched from the grasp of starvation were many more who suffered brutal existences. Prostitution, as a career, made no promises to any of its recruits, and in this respect it differed little from any other course of life that a woman of the lower orders of society might follow. A girl born to poor parents within the confines of the rapidly expanding metropolis could expect to receive scant few of life’s favours. Every day would present another hardship or struggle, whether this was the burden of harsh physical labour, the never-ending quest for food and a means of keeping oneself warm, or fighting off the ravages of disease and violence which were rampant in London’s poorest corridors. For those of the lower middle classes, or what Saunders Welch termed ‘the labouring classes’ and the ‘industrious poor’, whether girls worked as laundresses, seamstresses and street sellers or managed to enter into apprenticeships or domestic service, their futures looked equally dim. Perhaps if they were
lucky
they might marry a man like them, a tradesman who eked out a living of twenty shillings a week as a weaver or carpenter. If they were very lucky, they might marry a slightly more prosperous shop-keeper and assist in running the family trade. Pregnancies and children would come regularly, breeding money worries with each new arrival. Life was precarious and unstable. No one could guarantee that their husband would be faithful, sober, or non-violent. No one could promise that a bad turn of luck wouldn’t land them all on the street or in prison. Women of this class, whose voices were unheard and who were virtually sidelined by society and the law, had little recourse in the tragedies that befell them. It is easy to comprehend in this light how prostitution might have led the hopeful to believe that the loss of virtue was a small price to pay for the opportunity of living a life of luxury and the potential of making a match well above their station. As long as the gilded carriages of Kitty Fisher and Fanny Murray continued to clatter over the cobblestones of Covent Garden, and actresses like Sophia Baddeley appeared dressed in her admirer’s gifts of jewels and silks, a girl might reconcile herself to a life of sin.

While leading a necessitous but virtuous life offered little more guarantee of happiness than a career of prostitution, the latter of these two options held the potential for a variety of additional misfortunes. Venereal disease was primary among them, and one pitfall that a wife with a faithful husband might never have cause to experience. Both the pox and the clap were cured with tinctures of mercury, which if used too frequently might diminish in potency and become ineffective. If used incorrectly such treatments might also result in a slow, agonising death. Pregnancy, the natural by-product of a life spent indulging in sex, threw up an entire host of problems. Prostitutes often had to get rid of their offspring in order to preserve themselves. Frequent abortions and the emotional repercussions of depositing unwanted babies on doorsteps, at the Foundling Hospital or in other more lethal locations, must have been harrowing. These fears, when combined with finding oneself a prisoner to a pimp or a bawd, bound in debt to these sometimes vicious ‘protectors’ and in some situations locked in a room or a house and forced to service customers, would have been nothing short of a hellish existence. Even those who had been granted some degree of
success
in their professional endeavours and ‘traded as independent’ could easily succumb to the snares of drink, especially gin, the notorious gut-churning tipple of the desperate, and later to usquebaugh (or whisky), which dulled the pain of life with equal measure. For someone who was constantly in taverns and plied with drink by intoxicated patrons, alcoholism became a job-related illness. In any event, performing the sexual act with a physically unappealing partner seemed less troubling when one was barely lucid. Psychologically, how women in these situations contended with the hazards and tragedies that life served to them so liberally can only be imagined. Not surprisingly, their patchy histories reveal that many lived only for the moment and gave virtually no thought to the management of their futures: after all, what was the point when one had been the victim of circumstance and the schemes of others since the day of one’s birth?