Often it was unnecessary for her to do any of these things; certain areas and streets in cities and towns were so powerfully associated with prostitution that any woman standing about there was immediately deemed to be soliciting. Particular venues – public houses, theatres and music halls, pleasure gardens and the streets around railway stations and docks – were the prostitute’s natural habitat. In the nineteenth century the capital’s sex trade became an inextricable part of the West End. Prostitutes colonised it area by area – Covent Garden, Haymarket and then Piccadilly.
By the 1850s there were so many prostitutes on the streets of London that competition was fierce and disputes over territory often vitriolic. Though modern commentators are inclined to sentimentalise the nature of prostitutes’ relationship with each other, sometimes suggesting a sisterhood bound together by shared suffering and the need for mutual support, the reality is far less edifying. Women were more often engaged in violent antagonism against those they saw as threatening their ‘pitch’ and thereby their livelihood, than in offering succour to fellow unfortunates. Many contemporaries explained these women’s violent behaviour towards each other as the inevitable result of their moral degeneracy and love of drink. Often, however, their battles were motivated by cold calculation of what was necessary to protect their interests; like all entrepreneurs they sought to deter rivals threatening their business.
A major threat to their trade was the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which made it an offence to procure a woman for immoral purposes, thus giving the police powers to prosecute brothel-keepers. In the wake of the legislation brothels and lodging houses used as houses of ill repute were closed in enormous numbers and parallel measures against street soliciting forced the women to adopt a far less blatant approach. To add to their problems, the new regime forced many women to rent a room from which to operate. Alone in a room or a house without the support of other prostitutes, women were vulnerable to attack. Only a minority of prostitutes operated from enclosed brothels and these women tended to be of the more exalted type. In London, for instance, the number of reported brothels declined from 933 to 410 in the 36 years after 1841.
During the same period licensing laws were also refined, with the result that the landlords of pubs faced far harsher penalties for renting rooms to prostitutes. The result was that increasingly the common prostitute who infested the slums of most urban areas lived in a lodging house.
Given the squalid and dangerous life of a prostitute, commentators were at a loss to explain why so many women were drawn to it. By the mid-eighteenth century it was common for popular writers to promote the fiction that prostitutes were generally naive country girls corrupted by cynical roués or calculating lodging house keepers. Prostitutes were known, in polite society, as ‘unfortunates’. Many blamed drink, just as today it is fashionable to attribute much crime to drug abuse. Current research, however, suggests that the modern malefactor is a criminal first and an addict second and that criminality is a far better predictor of addiction than addiction of criminality. Victorians assumed that drink was a major factor in the decline of women into prostitution, though it is equally possible that many women were prostitutes before they became drunkards.
Certainly, many prostitutes, especially those past their best, were alcoholics, often partial to White Satin, which was popular with those for whom gin was a favourite tipple. These women did not confine their drinking to public houses. Mary Higgs was clearly disgusted when she came across a group of such women drinking during the day in one of the women’s lodging houses she visited in 1901. Prostitution was so widespread in certain quarters that it was accepted as part of the natural order of things. One Victorian authority on prostitution, William Acton, expressed his surprise that in the East End of London prostitutes often plied their trade in public houses where respectable women were also to be found with their husbands.
Prostitutes solicited in most places where working men drank, particularly the gin palace. It is difficult for us to appreciate the appeal of the gin palace to the Victorians. The labouring man’s working conditions were always harsh and functional and living conditions invariably little better. With a cold stone floor and perhaps nothing more than a rag rug and a few ornaments to soften the grim practicality of his home, the gin palace had an alluring bright glow, its plate glass, polished mirrors, burnished mahogany bar and opulent chandeliers irresistible to those who craved some luxury in their lives. It was one of the few places the poor experienced which exuded opulence and helped them forget the scrimping that was at the centre of working class life.
It is also impossible to discuss prostitutes without discussing money. As one author put it, prostitution offered ‘rich rewards and considerable incentives compared with twelve hour days losing their eyesight sewing shirts in a sweatshop or scrubbing floors’. Presumably the author was thinking of the upmarket prostitute who drew her clients from the wealthy. The most fortunate of these was the ‘kept woman’, set up in a substantial house in the suburbs by a well-heeled lover. Among prostitutes, as among all those who live beyond the purview of respectability, there was a hierarchy of esteem. At the lower echelons were most of the prostitutes who appeared daily before the courts and those such as the victims of Jack the Ripper who lived a precarious existence on the periphery of destitution, their lives unrelieved by any hint of luxury.
On this matter, as on so many other aspects of the life of the Victorian poor, Mayhew offers invaluable insight. He divides prostitutes into six categories. At the bottom of the pile were what Mayhew describes as ‘thieves’ women’. These were women who were normally financially dependent on professional criminals with neither a history nor any intention of working. When the thief in their life was in prison they prostituted themselves.
Next came ‘park women’, prostitutes unable or unwilling to take clients indoors who instead offered their services in public spaces, not only in parks but in back alleys and doorways. The amount they earned was minuscule and their standard of living truly wretched. These were the base of the pyramid, ‘low prostitutes’ who infested the poorest neighbourhoods and, at the weekend, the city centre. They sold themselves to the first man they could entice and generally knew no other trade, lacking any experience of prolonged work.
Slightly above were the women who regarded prostitution as a stopgap measure, a means of feeding themselves when times were bad. When there was an upturn in trade they went back to making a living by honest labour. The mill girls who thronged Manchester city centre in times of slack trade fell into this category.
Next came ‘sailors’ and soldiers’ women’. Sailors were a major source of income for prostitutes, who were always to be found in large numbers around docks. Sailors’ women – nicknamed ‘leggers’ motts’ – were a feature of all ports. Mayhew observed that many sailors, instead of availing themselves of several prostitutes, took up with a particular one who, while he was ashore, acted as his wife. Many of these women, he noticed, were foreigners. The appeal of sailors, once renowned for their extravagance, declined sharply towards the end of the nineteenth century when measures were implemented to encourage them to save a share of their wages, thereby putting it beyond the grasping whores and scheming landlords for whom every ship that docked held out the promise of rich pickings.
Only after these groups do we reach the women of the ‘low lodging houses’. There is some evidence that former prostitutes frequently set themselves up as madams running brothels or as keepers of low lodging houses. Mayhew’s research in the 1850s led him to conclude that it was common for boys and men to pick up women in the street and take them back to a lodging house. Many of these houses were to all intents and purposes brothels, with women coming and going throughout the night. The majority of houses described as brothels in police returns were lodging houses where prostitutes took their clients. Most catered for casual prostitutes who picked up men in pubs, music halls and pleasure gardens. The police attitude to these establishments was
generally tolerant, provided they gave rise to few complaints of violence and robbery.
Investigations into lodging houses in Cardiff just before the First World War found that many of their keepers were living with – if not on the earnings of – women to whom they were not married. At the same time Mary Higgs was convinced that women who left their homes to become lodgers – often young girls in search of work or accommodation – frequently resorted to prostitution when they fell on hard times. This, Higgs believed, was a major reason why so few respectable women resorted to lodging houses as they believed that to do so risked being drawn into prostitution. The figures for 15 January 1909 for London suggest that women did generally avoid lodging houses: on that night there were 1,483 women and 161 children in common lodging houses, compared with 20,059 men. In casual wards there were 184 women, 3 children and 1,903 men.
As late as 1909 Mary Higgs maintained that many girls who originally came to work in lodging houses were drawn into prostitution. These prostitutes’ lodging houses were commonly regarded as just as pernicious and corrupting as prostitution itself. The prostitutes slopped about during the day, squatting in front of the kitchen fire, gossiping and generally, in the opinion of one observer, ‘eroding all decency, modesty, propriety and conscience’.
Areas such as Spitalfields, with numerous common lodging houses, were also full of tenements where rooms were let by the week and frequently occupied by one or more families. These, even more than the common lodging houses, were favoured by prostitutes as both a base and a place to take clients. But they continued to use lodging houses because, as the East London Observer bemoaned in 1888, ‘a woman is at perfect liberty to bring any companion she likes to share her accommodation’.
In mid-nineteenth century London prostitutes, including those based in lodging houses, were generally controlled by women. Many of the keepers of lodging houses used by prostitutes were themselves former prostitutes. They took a share of their charges’ earnings, in return for which they provided security against those clients who might seek to beat them up. Male pimps – other than those who were in a long-term sexual relationship with prostitutes – were virtually unheard of at this time. One of the effects of the Ripper murders of 1888 was that prostitutes sought the protection of male pimps, many of whom were career criminals well practised in extreme violence. Prior to this prostitution was run and controlled by women.
Even women who took a bully protector were sometimes victims of violence. However, prostitutes were not always the blameless victims: when violence occurred, it was often in the course of a prostitute trying to rob her client. By their nature the areas prostitutes worked were the most violent parts of the city.
The area around Dorset Street is a case in point. It was attractive to prostitutes not simply because of the number of rooms let by the week. The market offered many workers and traders who were away from home; the docks provided a constant supply of sailors; the West End was nearby and Spitalfields was irresistible to gentlemen who craved the frisson of ‘slumming it’. The women who operated in such areas made up the great bulk of the city’s prostitutes and attracted the attention of police and commentators.
Even among these, however, the ones who ended up in court were the dregs – drunkards who assaulted and robbed their clients, loudmouthed, dirty harridans who harassed pedestrians and gave the police no choice but to arrest them. In other ways these were the most vulnerable. Often semi-professional whores who had neither pimp nor protector and living in lodging houses without a husband, they were at the mercy of the sadist and the sexual murderer. It was from this group that Jack the Ripper chose his victims.
The Ripper, however, was only the most infamous murderer of prostitutes. Thomas Neil Cream, having been convicted of murder in Canada, arrived in Britain in 1891 and immediately targeted prostitutes. Within a year he poisoned four of them before Lou Harvey, an intended victim, recognised him and alerted the police.
The top two categories of prostitutes occupied a totally different realm from their unfortunate sisters and lived an altogether better life. The larger group was what Mayhew called ‘the convives’, known today as ‘escorts’. Some were independent, working out of their own accommodation, finding their own clients and occasionally managing to snare a wealthy husband. Others were subject to a mistress or madam who provided board and often clothes for her charges. In addition the mistress provided clients. In other cases the women sallied forth, returning with their own clients.
Either way the dangers and discomforts of their situation were beyond anything experienced by the ‘kept mistress’ who occupied the pinnacle of the fallen woman’s aspirations. She was the prima donna of whoredom, the acme of the profession. To all impressions she lived like a woman of independent means and lacked nothing that an indulgent and affluent lover might provide. Very often such women succeeded by wise marriage to wheedle their way into respectable society where, as paragons of propriety, they lived in dread of their colourful past coming to light. A woman of this type is the subject of William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscious.
The kept woman was by no means typical and it was the prevalence of hordes of low prostitutes in certain prominent areas of Britain’s cities and towns that prompted attempts to eradicate what many regarded as a national scandal. In London, the Metropolitan Police Act of 1850 made ‘loitering’ an offence, while from 1858 any premises harbouring more than a single prostitute was deemed a brothel, rendering the landlord liable to prosecution. It also became an offence for publicans to allow their premises to become places where prostitutes gathered.
In particular, the threat to the health of soldiers and sailors posed by their use of prostitutes led to the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864. This meant that any woman accused of prostitution by the police could be forcibly medically examined. Should she refuse, she could be consigned to a Lock Hospital, which specialised in the treatment of venereal disease, where she might be detained indefinitely.
Prostitution was not confined to women. Male prostitutes – known as ‘sods’, ‘margeries’ and ‘poofs’ – were conspicuous in Fleet Street and the Strand in the 1850s and there were streets and bars in most large cities and towns where they were to be found. Like prostitution, the ‘abominable crime of buggery’ was a criminal offence carrying a penalty of two years’ imprisonment. Many of the boys with whom Oscar Wilde and his coterie consorted were children who lived in common lodging houses and had neither regular employment nor settled abode.
Immigrants and the Lodging House
Britain, it is said, has always provided a welcome for those who leave home in search of a better life. It is nearer the truth, however, to say that the rookeries and the slums have provided the welcome: only affluent immigrants settle in the leafy suburbs and most immigrants are far from affluent. Newly arrived immigrants were one of the largest groups drawn to the lodging houses. Throughout the nineteenth century there was an unbroken flow of newcomers to these shores and they had a significant impact on the life of the lodging houses.
As early as 1500, there were 3,000 foreigners in London, then about 6 per cent of the population. A couple of centuries later the coronation of the first German king, George I – George Louis, Elector of Hanover – in 1714, planted his entourage at the centre of British public life but it was only in the early years of Victoria’s reign that Britain became particularly attractive to the poor and the persecuted. The emancipation of first Catholics and then Jews made the country a haven of liberty at a time when industry’s demand for cheap labour was insatiable.
By 1871 Germans comprised one of Britain’s largest foreign-born minorities. Many were in the food trade – especially butchery – and popularised the traditional British breakfast of bacon and sausage. A significant percentage of these German immigrants were Jews and, despite their penetration of the apex of society, the East End of London was still home to most Jews, even as the affluent were moving to the suburbs of Ilford, Redbridge and Finchley. Most, ho
wever, remained poor, eking out a living in the second-hand clothes trade or tramping the country as peddlers. Soon there were significant Jewish communities in Manchester and Leeds.
Just as the Jews were associated with street trading, the Italians were often street entertainers. Most members of the nineteenth century Italian community remained in London – so many lived in the area around Hatton Garden and Little Saffron Hill in Clerkenwell that it was known as ‘Little Italy’. By 1901 the number of Italian-born in Britain topped 25,000 and there were sizeable communities in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, Bradford, Leeds and Hull. Most were involved in the retail food business – as chefs, bakers and cafe owners or selling chestnuts and, of course, ice cream. The Scots in particular were great fans and by 1911 Glasgow boasted 300 ice-cream parlours.
As late as 1892, Thomas Wright, writing of the area around the port of London, describes a lodging house for foreign organ grinders with a storage area for their organs and another for all variety of street musicians, including the lowly ballad singer who was at the bottom of this particular hierarchy. ‘Musician’ was an occupation commonly found on census returns for those living in lodging houses. Adding to the diversions were the Punch and Judy men, the walking dogs and tamed bears, the mobile peep shows, the pipers, fiddlers, squeeze-box players, flautists, harpers – often with accompanying dancers – and the ubiquitous organ grinders, with their deep and penetrating music an irresistible magnet for children and street Arabs of all hues.
By the 1850s Italian organ grinders were part of the furniture of the streets. In Manchester Germans and other foreigners tended to gather in a few lodgings where they could spend time with their countrymen. By all accounts their houses, and the ones favoured by Italian organ grinders, were far cleaner and altogether better than the norm. When Joseph Johnson, a local journalist, described the horrors of Manchester’s lodging houses in the mid-nineteenth century, he excepted the one used by Germans, describing it as clean, homely and ‘full of good-natured foreigners’. The Italian house in Edge Street was also excellent.
The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House Page 15