The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (59 page)

It is Mayhew’s encyclopaedic work that ultimately reveals the real problem in discussing nineteenth-century prostitution. Although Mayhew relied on collaborators to produce many of the reports on street workers that he crafted into the first three volumes of
London Labour and the London Poor
, he interviewed many himself and wrote those volumes on his own. The fourth volume, on ‘Those That Will Not Work, comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars’, was different. (It is surely telling, too, that in his view, as is clear from the title alone, prostitutes
did ‘Not Work’.) This volume was the work of several contributors, about whom little is known. John Binny, probably a journalist, wrote the ‘Thieves and Swindlers’ section and later produced another volume with Mayhew. The Revd William Tuckniss, who wrote the section the charitable rescue societies, was chaplain to the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children and editor of
The Magdalen’s Friend and Female Homes’ Intelligencer
. Andrew Halliday, the author of the section on ‘Beggars’, who became a minor novelist and theatrical farceur, was the son of a Scottish minister; at the time of publication he was a journalist of just twenty, two years out of an Aberdeen school. Bracebridge Hemyng, who had recently left Eton, was reading for the bar. He later practised as a barrister of the Middle Temple and had a second career as the author of the
Jack Harkaway
Boys of England series. It is not clear what qualified Hemyng, who must have been barely nineteen when he was writing, as an expert on prostitution, but whatever it was, he was entirely responsible for that section in Mayhew’s fourth volume.

While the subject was presented as magisterially as the style of the earlier volumes, only sixty of its 230-odd pages are actually about women on the London streets. The remainder contain either stories of prostitution as it was currently practised in Afghanistan, or Iceland, or other countries the contributors undoubtedly knew nothing about, or it was a historical retrospective of prostitution in Britain. In the London section, the information ‘for certain facts, statistics, &c.’ was derived from material published by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the police, the Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution and other formal bodies whose aim was to eradicate the trade. This was in direct contrast to the other three volumes, which drew on direct interviews with the participants, reproducing their life stories and experiences in their own words. One of the sources for this section was even
The Life and Adventures of Col. George Hanger
, an ‘autobiography’ of the 4th Baron Coleraine, who wrote his highly coloured memoir in order to stave off his return to debtors’ prison. He was satirically portrayed in caricatures of the day as pimping for the Prince of Wales, but, that apart, his only apparent experience of prostitution may have been in purchasing their services.
¹⁵³
The real problem for us today is that the writings of these self-styled experts are all that we have.

Women were regularly mistaken for prostitutes merely because they were out on the streets. There were, however, ways of identifying ‘unfortunates’. Location was one element, and here the Haymarket, the centre of the red-light district, is shown. Another marker was dress, and the illustrator has gone to town on hiked-up skirts; men, too, were not expected to smoke in front of ‘respectable’ women, so the inclusion of so many cigars sends a clear signal.

One of their standard methods of assessing the number of prostitutes was purely visual. Acton wrote that he and a friend had ‘counted 185 [prostitutes] in the course of a walk home from the Opera to Portland-place’. From Covent Garden, Acton most likely walked along to the top of the Haymarket, in the centre of the red-light district and London’s most famous cruising ground, then continued up Regent Street, also known for its prostitutes; Portland Place itself was the site of several accommodation houses (see pp. 411–2) and lodgings for prostitutes. So Acton may have passed many working women, possibly even 185 of them. But short of his accosting each one, it is hard to judge how he
knew
the 185 he counted were sex-workers.
Some, perhaps many, of the women may have spoken to him, offering their services. It is just as likely, though, that Acton made his assessments based on the women’s clothes and manner: women who dressed or behaved in a way that he and other men considered inappropriate were seen as whores. This was standard. Dickens, too, wrote as if prostitutes were immediately recognizable. In ‘The Pawnbroker’s Shop’ in
Sketches by Boz
, he describes the customers: first are a mother and daughter, respectable but fallen on hard times; then comes ‘a young female’, by whose dress the reader is to understand she is a prostitute: her clothing, ‘miserably poor, but extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold, but extravagantly fine, too plainly bespeaks her station. The rich satin gown with its faded trimmings, the worn-out thin shoes, and pink silk stockings, the summer bonnet in winter...a daub of rouge...cannot be mistaken.’

It appears from the scant information we have that the majority of women who earned their living from selling sex were for the most part working-class women, many of whom had been servants or street sellers. Many more of them than the average population – perhaps as many as 70 per cent – had lost one or both parents. The average age for becoming sexually active was probably about sixteen, and most of the girls first took up with men of their own class, going out on the streets a couple of years later.

Despite many reports at the time and after, child prostitution may have been relatively rare. To stress that it was endemic, Ryan reproduced fourteen case studies from the London Society for the Protection of Young Females and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution. Of those, one girl was twelve, one thirteen, another five were fifteen years old, and the remaining seven were older, including one woman whose age was not given but who had been married for six years. These girls may have been inveigled into prostitution, or become prostitutes for other reasons, and they had applied to the society for help – their suffering is undoubted – but none was at the time legally considered to be a child.
¹⁵⁴
Judicial statistics collected by modern scholars
suggest that, between 1849 and 1865, 6.5 per cent of female admissions to a venereal hospital were girls under sixteen.

Much more typical was the story a sixteen-year-old girl who had worked as a servant from the age of ten; when she was eleven or twelve, she moved to a post where her mistress beat her, and she ran away. She had nowhere to go, her mother being dead (she doesn’t mention a father: perhaps he had died, disappeared or remarried, and she was no longer wanted). She met a fifteen-year-old boy, with whom she lived in a lodging house until he was arrested for pickpocketing. He had infected her with venereal disease, and so she broke a window in order to be sent to prison where a doctor would treat her. When she was released, having no possibility of returning to service because of her prison record, she became a streetwalker, living in a lodging house with others her age, up to fifty a room. ‘Many a girl – nearly all of them – goes out into the streets...to get money for their favourite boys...I f the girl cannot get money she must steal something, or will be beaten by her “chap” when she comes home.’

The older, more fortunate women, usually in the West End and the prosperous suburbs, worked as prostitutes for a few years, saving their money and then getting married – much the way the servant market operated, where service for many girls was a stage rather than a lifetime career. One day in Regent Street, Arthur Munby encountered a woman he had known when she was in service in a house in Oxford Street. Now she was ‘arrayed in gorgeous apparel. How is this? said I. Why, she had got tired of service, wanted to see life and be independent; & so she had become a prostitute, of her own accord & without being seduced. She...enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her & perhaps be profitable. She had taken it up as a profession...she had read books, and was taking lessons in writing and other accomplishments, in order to fit herself to be a companion of gentlemen.’ After this, he saw her a few times on the street, finding that ‘she continued to like it – she had some good friends, & was getting on nicely’. A few years later, when he encountered her again, she was dressed ‘quietly &
well, like a respectable upper servant’. She told him that after three years as a prostitute she had saved up – ‘I told you I should get on, you know’ – and was the landlady of a coffee house on the south side of Waterloo Bridge.

Now here is a handsome young woman of twentysix, who, having begun life as a servant of all work, and then spent three years in
voluntary
prostitution...invests the earnings of her infamous trade in a respectable coffeehouse, where she settles down in homely usefulness and virtuous comfort! That the coffeehouse
is
respectable, is clear I think from her manner: that she
did
invest her earnings...I believe, because she was not fashionable enough to be pensioned, & if she were, men do not pension off their whores in that way.

Munby noticed the changes in this woman’s dress, from servant, to prostitute, to landlady of a respectable coffee house, and clothing played a great part in how prostitutes were recognized. Many walked the streets without a bonnet or shawl, a great breach of the dress code in displaying their hair and their figures as well as giving off indoor signals out of doors. The only description I have found of prostitutes overtly attempting to attract men in the street comes from 1870, in the notorious Boulton and Park case, when two men were arrested for dressing as women (see below, pp. 416–18). At their trial, the superintendent of the Alhambra theatre testified that they had been ejected from the theatre because they had been ‘walking about as women looking over their shoulders as if enticing men’ and had made ‘noises with their lips, the same that I have heard made by females when passing gentlemen on the street’. The street keeper at the Burlington Arcade had also seen Boulton ‘turn his head to two gentlemen who passed them, smile at them, and make a noise with his lips, the same as a woman would for inducement’. But apart from this one piece of evidence, and in unusual circumstances, it appears that streetwalkers rarely did even this, being content, as the Alhambra manager said, with looking over their shoulders.

Walter – who should have known a prostitute when he saw one, having, according to his own account at least, slept with eleven volumes’-worth of them (see note on p. 55 for my attitude to his evidence) – made it clear that identification was not straightforward. Walking one day down a muddy
Regent Street, he watched a woman ‘holding her petticoats well up out of the dirt, the common habit of even respectable women...With gay ladies the habit was to hold them up just a little higher.’ (‘Gay’ at the time meant a prostitute, probably from the connection with their wearing brightly – gaily – coloured clothes; it did not gain our current meaning until the 1920s, and then originally in the USA.) But how high was ‘a little higher’? Walter was not sure. He walked ahead of her and ‘turned round, and met her eye. She looked at me, but the look was so steady, indifferent, and with so little of the gay woman in her expression, that I could not make up my mind as to whether she was accessible or not.’ He continued to follow her, and when she held up her skirts again, knowing he was behind her, he moved in, ‘saying as I came close, “Will you come with me?”’ It was only then, when she agreed, that he could be certain. The quality of women’s clothes, too, was no indicator. ‘Dress prostitutes’ were lent clothes that they could otherwise not afford, usually by brothel madams. The
Yokel’s Preceptor
, presented as a guidebook to young men fresh from the country, separated ‘blowens’ (prostitutes) from ‘private blowens’: respectably married women who ‘are in the habit of walking out, neatly and modestly attired’. According to the author, ‘should they be accosted by a gentleman’, the private blowens might agree to go with him to an accommodation house to make a little spare cash. It is clear that those writers who thought they saw streets full of prostitutes really just saw streets full of women.

If prostitutes could be identified only when they were approached, then it becomes clear that women were indiscriminately importuned in the streets. That this was indeed the case emerged in a debate that played out in the pages of
The Times
in 1862. A gentleman calling himself ‘Paterfamilias’ wrote to the editor (letters from members of the public were often signed with a sobriquet, frequently in Latin, such as ‘Pro Bono Publico’) to complain that on a trip to London his daughters had been followed down Oxford Street by ‘scoundrels’ who stared at them and made remarks. ‘Puella’ (‘Girl’) replied two days later, saying that she frequented the same street and was never accosted; perhaps it was the girls’ fault – had their country dress or outgoing rural manners encouraged these men? ‘Paterfamilias’, by return, was indignant: his daughters were wearing mourning following the death
of Prince Albert. He was backed up by ‘M’, a day-governess (one who went from one pupil’s house to another), who said she too had been accosted by ‘middle-aged and older men’. Readers joined in, on both sides of the question. The following month the
Saturday Review
finally suggested that if women dressed attractively, they must expect to be looked at, but added this rider: ‘the remedy is in their own hands...I f they will be seen in the well-preserved coverts, it is for them to be careful that they do not look like game...Let them dress thoroughly unbecomingly. Let them procure poke bonnets, stint their skirts to a moderate circumference, and cultivate sad-looking underclothing. Any woman thus armed, and walking on without sauntering or looking about her, is perfectly safe even from amorous glances.’ (Note that even badly dressed women still needed to keep their eyes down and walk briskly.) This was partly a satirical response, but the controversy made it clear that no one could tell a respectable woman from a prostitute by appearance alone, and barely by behaviour. The supposed signals that indicated a gay woman – slow walking, looking around, fashionable dress – were also natural behaviour on a shopping street. A lithograph of 1865, ‘Scene in Regent Street’, concurred: in it a ‘Philanthropic Divine’ attempts to hand an improving tract to a fashionably dressed woman. Perhaps she had been approached before, for in this parody she sounds remarkably tolerant as she replies, ‘Bless me, Sir...I am not a social evil, I’m only waiting for a bus.’