by Julia Baird
May it be a warning to many of those fast, wild young women who are really unsexed. And to the husbands, fathers and brothers too who allow their wives, daughters and sisters to expose themselves in such an unfeminine way. In other respects this poor young thing was very quiet and not very strong—but imagine her going down alone to hunt while her husband was walking about in London!
“Fast” women were blamed for many things in Victorian England: a loosening of moral codes, the masculinization of ladies, and an epidemic of venereal disease that had crippled the British defense forces in the Crimea, in India, and in England. By 1864, almost a third of all British troops were admitted to the hospital for syphilis or gonorrhea. Because it was not the soldiers who were blamed but the women they slept with, the solution decided upon was simple: the army and navy needed clean prostitutes. In 1864, the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts introduced official brothels for the military.
The laws also included extraordinary provisions for the monitoring of women walking in public: police could arrest any woman suspected to be a prostitute, without evidence. Women could be exposed to humiliating internal examinations for VD, either in a hospital or on the spot, and registered at the local police station for regular checkups (or imprisonment). If they protested, they were jammed into straitjackets and their legs pried open with clamps. If a woman was found to have VD, she could be detained in a hospital for three months. In what Ronald Pearsall called a “certain climate of hunting the whore,” sex workers—not their clients—were blasted from pulpits and Parliament alike. It was probably the most potent, public example of the Victorian double standard under which women were punished for sexual behavior while men escaped scrutiny and condemnation.
Still, many men regarded prostitutes as essential to the social fabric. Tolstoy, for example, could not imagine London without its “Magdalenes.” “What would become of families?” he wrote in 1870. “How many wives or daughters would remain chaste? What would become of the laws of morality which people so love to observe? It seems to me that this class of woman is essential to the family under the present complex forms of life.” Divorces were still rare, and men were supposed to delay marriage until they were financially solvent. Unemployment created a swath of single men.
Prostitution was the subject of much speculation but little rigorous research in England at the time. Estimates of the number of female sex workers in London at midcentury ranged between 80,000 and 120,000, out of a total population of 2.3 million men and women. A significant number were infected with venereal diseases, most commonly syphilis, which also ravaged children born to them. Before the discovery of penicillin, the treatments used were ineffective; the widespread use of mercury in tablets, baths, and creams only led to teeth falling out, kidney failure, poisoning, and mouth sores. (The preventive treatments—oil, vinegar, and alcohol—were similarly useless.) It was almost impossible to have safe sex then—condoms were available by midcentury, but still remained expensive—and for women to control their own reproduction.
In the last half of the century, a woman named Josephine Butler waged an impressive and effective campaign against the sexual exploitation and abuse of women—trying to expose what she saw as the hypocrisy that meant that the moral shame belonged only to the women, not the men who sought them out.*1 The 1871 Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts, for example, declared there was no comparison to be made between prostitutes and their clients: “With the one sex the offence is committed as a matter of gain, with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.” Yet, as one sex worker said after being imprisoned, “It did seem hard, ma’am, that the Magistrate on the bench who gave the casting vote for my imprisonment had paid me several shillings a day or two before, in the street, to go with him.”
Bracebridge Hemyng declared that sex workers were “poisoning the blood of the nation.” The country’s “Great Social Evil” became a magnet for the most energetic, fervent reformers of the age: evangelistic Christians who worked in earnest to reform and rehabilitate prostitutes. The most famous of them all was William Gladstone, who developed a nearly crippling obsession with “rescuing” the loveliest strumpets of Britain. He was the greatest friend to prostitutes the political world knew. And he was convinced that this was why the queen hated him.
—
Gladstone was an eccentric and upright man. Tall and lean, he spent up to four months at a stretch swinging an ax at trees at a country estate, thinking through the questions that consumed him. He was constantly self-reproving and intent on honing his character, fulfilling his godly mission, and doing the work of Christ on earth. His days were bookended by prayer. He went to church daily and delivered a weekly sermon to his servants. Lord Salisbury told Victoria that it was difficult to imagine Gladstone could listen to a sermon without “rising to reply.” Even mealtimes were a chance for virtue: he advocated chewing each mouthful of food thirty-two times—once for every tooth—before swallowing. He would live to the age of eighty-nine, no small achievement in the Victorian age.
It is not clear when Gladstone’s fetish for “fallen women” began, though it is clear that the period of greatest activity was around 1850, when he had been in Parliament for eighteen years. He started work for a charity called the Church Penitentiary Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women in 1848, before moving to a personal kind of vigilantism. He spent hours talking to sex workers he met in the streets, trying to persuade them to choose another life. He read them Tennyson and Thomas Malory, arranged for them to have their portraits painted, and grew deeply attached to them.
The tall, somber politician was particularly drawn to beautiful prostitutes, something that did not escape comment. In 1852, he described one of his great interests as “half a most lovely statue, beautiful beyond measure.” His colleague Henry Labouchere said, “Gladstone manages to combine his missionary meddling with a keen appreciation of a pretty face.” Concerned colleagues tried to warn Gladstone about possible ramifications of his behavior, but he refused to stop. Sex workers called him “Old Glad-eye.” He tried to rescue somewhere between eighty and ninety prostitutes over the five years following 1849, but he had little success. He admitted, “There is but one of whom I know that the miserable life has been abandoned and that I can fairly join that fact with influence of mine.”
Most biographers have assumed these encounters were chaste, driven by sexual titillation, not consummation. When a Scottish man tried to blackmail Gladstone in 1853 after spying him in conversation with a prostitute, Gladstone alerted the police and courts himself without compunction—not usually the conduct of a guilty man. But when his diaries were published in 1968, a more ambiguous light was cast. Racked with shame, he would sometimes flagellate himself after meeting with prostitutes, drawing a tiny symbol of a whip in his diary (which appeared for the last time in 1859). Roy Jenkins, his biographer, says his “religio-sexual emotional crises” were “exceptional more for the abjectness of the guilt which they produced than for the strength of the temptation.” While it is extremely unlikely that he had full sexual relationships with these women, Gladstone himself guiltily acknowledged the “carnal” nature of his forays, that they were a kind of sexual temptation that lured him onto dangerous rocks. They were the “chief burden” of his soul. And if they were not carnal, he wrote, “they would not leave such a void.” (In mysterious diary entries, Gladstone describes two hours he spent with the beautiful and statuesque Elizabeth Collins as “strange, questionable, or more,” followed by a symbol of a whip. His thoughts of the courtesan Marion Summerhayes “required to be limited and purged.”)
Toward the end of his life, Gladstone told his sons that he believed that stories about him, “whether true or false,” must have made their way to Victoria, causing her coldness. (He later assured his son Stephen, a priest, that he had never “been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed.”)*2 It was improbable that Victoria’s hostility was due to t
he stories she heard about Gladstone and sex workers; she frequently said he was a good man, but a weak statesman and a “madman.” Her dislike was not moral, but visceral; she spent years trying to unseat William Gladstone. It had nothing to do with his own infatuations, and everything to do with the fact that he did not know how to treat the queen.
—
In 1886 the Contagious Diseases Acts were finally repealed. They had been ludicrously ineffective: the rate of VD in the army was exactly the same it had been in 1865, unchanged by twenty years of the law. Women were now no longer blamed as sole carriers of disease, and public attention had slid to men. There was even some suggestion that women were being exploited. Some, like George Bernard Shaw, even dared to suggest it was time to critically examine it. In 1893, Shaw wrote in the preface to his play about sex workers, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, that prostitution is caused not by “female depravity” or “male licentiousness,” but the “underpaying, undervaluing and overworking” of women. Prostitutes continued to be the object of contempt as well as pity and desire, but the fight over double standards had energized a generation of women to whom Victoria was an unwitting, prickly muse. The slow march toward women’s suffrage had begun. Victoria would inspire but not support it; she sat like a prickly muse, the most powerful woman in the world, who spent her days trying to control men.
And men continued to shoot at her. Brown was with the queen when another madman fired bullets at her as she alighted from the train at Windsor on March 2, 1882. It was the seventh attempt on her life; a train conductor stopped the man—Frederick McLean—and two local Eton boys attacked him with umbrellas. Britain was furious. But the queen lapped up the sympathy the attack invoked, as she had always done. “It is worth being shot at,” Victoria said with satisfaction, “to see how much one is loved.”
—
Florence Dixie was an unconventional woman. A writer, traveler, feminist, and war correspondent, Lady Florence Dixie hunted game in Patagonia, wrote travel books, corrected Charles Darwin on factual errors, and played a key role in establishing women’s soccer in Britain. In 1880, she went to South Africa as the foreign correspondent for the Morning Post during the First Boer War, following the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, when Disraeli was prime minister. Lady Florence Dixie held some controversial views—that firstborn daughters of the king or queen should be able to inherit the throne, that boys and girls should be educated together, that women should be able to wear trousers, and that marriages should be equal. She also, fatefully, later moved to a house near Windsor Castle (she was forced to place her pet jaguar in a zoo because he kept killing all the deer in the park surrounding the castle).
In the afternoon of March 1883, Lady Florence Dixie, then twenty-six, was out walking when, she said, two men clad in long gowns and veils pushed her to the ground and tried to stab her. Eventually her Saint Bernard dog, Hubert, scared them away. Initially the attack was blamed on the Irish republican Fenians, who were provoked by Lady Florence Dixie’s support for Home Rule for Ireland, though doubt was cast on the veracity of her claims.
Troubled by such an assault occurring only two and a half miles from the castle, the queen sent a kind note to Lady Florence Dixie and tried to establish what had happened. John Brown combed the area for hours in the wintry air, looking for answers on Victoria’s behalf. He then spent a week carrying around the queen, whose knee was badly swollen from a sprain. All the while, Brown was battling a fierce cold. The next weekend, Brown came down with erysipelas, a painful syndrome wherein the entire face swells, including ears and eyelids. He had not taken a single day off in eighteen and a half years at Windsor Castle, and Victoria was “vexed” that he could not attend her.
Two days later, he was dead.
—
Victoria was distraught. “He was the best, the truest heart that ever beat,” she wrote to Brown’s sister-in-law Jessie McHardy Brown. Her grief, she said, was “unbounded, dreadful & I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible.” She had fallen downstairs on March 17, 1883, ten days before Brown’s death, and had been unable to walk unaided since then. From this time on, she would be, to her embarrassment, clutching the backs of chairs to make her way around rooms, and hobbling with two sticks. She needed to be carried upstairs, and moved from carriage to train in a special chair. Some of her subjects suggested various remedies—including a Mrs. Cash, who thought the queen’s legs might be improved if she rode a tricycle. Ponsonby, who had a keen eye for the absurd, wrote to his wife: “Fancy the Queen on a tricycle.”
The similarity to 1861 and the death of Albert was stark. Her heart was smashed open again, the old wound seeping a new grief. The queen told the Earl of Cranbrook on March 30 that she had not just lost her “truest and dearest” companion, but an unprecedented friendship, writing about herself in the third person: “The Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear depriving of all she so needs.” A few days after Brown died, she told Ponsonby:
The Queen is trying hard to occupy herself but she is utterly crushed & her life has again sustained one of those shocks like in 61 when every link has been shaken & torn & at every turn & every moment the loss of the strong arm & wise advice, warm heart & cheery original way of saying things & the sympathy in any large & small circumstances—is most cruelly missed.
It is often assumed that Tennyson told Victoria she was “all alone on a terrible height” after Albert’s death; it was actually after John Brown’s that he said those words. It was then that she was finally alone. Victoria was so touched when Tennyson wrote to comfort her about Brown’s death that she asked him to come and see her. Though he was shaky on his legs and half-blind, he told her that he could see how isolated she was and vowed to do whatever he could to comfort her, with the little time he had left to live. The old poet told his son afterward that he had cried leaving the queen, for she was “so womanly, and so lonely.”
Victoria wrote to Tennyson to thank him for his kindness, saying of Brown:
He had no thought but for me, my welfare, my comfort, my safety, my happiness. Courageous, unselfish, totally disinterested, discreet to the highest degree, speaking the truth fearlessly and telling me what he thought and considered to be “just and right,” without flattery and without saying what would be pleasing if he did not think it right….The comfort of my daily life is gone—the void is terrible—the loss is irreparable!
The Court Circular contained twenty-five lines about Brown, and the queen’s “grievous shock”—it had only five for Disraeli when he died. Bells tolled, pipers were forbidden to play near the castle, and Victoria ordered that the tartan plaid she and Brown had taken on their Highland treks be used as a pall on his coffin. She devoted herself to ensuring Brown would be remembered as more than a common servant—or as a “domestic,” as Gladstone clumsily wrote to her, failing to recognize the obvious and outsized affection his queen had for the man. Gladstone hoped she would “select a good and efficient successor.” Victoria did not want and could not imagine a successor; people, to her, were irreplaceable. Albert was irreplaceable and so was John Brown. Her heart may have been pocked with holes, but she would not attempt to plug them.
Instead, Victoria commissioned tie pins, busts, monuments, and statues of Brown, commissioned lines from Tennyson to place on his tombstone, dedicated cairns and seats to him. Then, still buoyed by the recent success of the publication of her Highland journals, she announced she would write a memoir of John Brown, intended, she said, only for private publication. Here her advisers took an uncharacteristically robust stand. Henry Ponsonby wrote nervously, asking Her Majesty’s forgiveness “if he expresses a doubt whether this record of Your Majesty’s innermost and most sacred feelings should be made public to the world.” He worried that strangers would misunderstand her words, attracting the wrong kind of attention, which would be “painful for the Queen.” Victoria replied, “I certainly cannot agree,” and told him she had to correct
the impression that Brown was just a servant, when he was “a great deal more than that.” That is what she wanted the world to understand.
A draft of the memoir was then passed to Randall Davidson, the young new Dean of Windsor, who was the spiritual head of the priests at Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel and had quickly earned Victoria’s respect. They spoke for hours after Brown died, in a conversation he described as “most touching, solemn and interesting, but terribly difficult.” Davidson panicked when he discovered Victoria had written a memoir about Brown, and found that Victoria had quoted heavily from Brown’s diary. Victoria had already dedicated More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands to Brown, to her family’s disgust. It was full of more sentimental tales of a tame life in the wild Highlands. (In 1884, a satirical version of Leaves and More Leaves lampooned Victoria’s relationship with Brown: “We make it a point to have breakfast every morning of our lives….Brown pushed me (in a hand-carriage) up quite a hill and then ran me down again. He did this several times and we enjoyed it very much….He then put me in a boat on the lake and rocked me for about half an hour. It was very exhilarating.”)
The Dean told Victoria she should not publish a memoir of Brown, making the unusual argument that some among the “humbler classes” would not be “worthy of such confidences.” When Victoria insisted she would publish it, he offered to resign. She froze him out for two weeks, then resumed relations. The book was never published. It is little wonder that Ponsonby relished the chance to burn Brown’s diaries, although the loss of these—and Victoria’s Life of Brown—is a great one. Bertie further destroyed remnants of Brown when he became king, and even had Brown’s rooms at Windsor Castle—which Victoria had sealed off after his death—made into a billiard room.