The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Michael Barrett was arrested in January 1868, along with five others. The Crown’s case wasn’t merely poor: it barely existed. One of the accused turned informer; another admitted on the witness stand that he was being paid by the police; against one of the accused, the Crown offered no evidence; against another, there was only the word of the informer. A single witness, the police informer, said he had seen Barrett in London on the day of the explosion, while several disinterested witnesses placed him in Glasgow at the relevant time. In the end, the jury found five not guilty, and Barrett guilty.

  Fearing another Fenian rescue attempt at his execution, the police were armed with revolvers and cutlasses, rather than just truncheons, but, in the event, ‘They never had easier work.’ Surprisingly few turned out on 26 May 1868 to see what everyone knew would be the last public execution in Britain. Popular antipathy to such things was stronger than anti-Fenian outrage: one shopkeeper with premises overlooking the scaffold said ‘he had not [fallen] so low as to let his windows to see a fellow creature strangled’. Some claimed that only 2,000 people were waiting at Newgate at dawn, in a gathering that was ‘one of the smallest...that has for a long time assembled in front of the Old Bailey’. Most of the onlookers appeared to be respectable working men and tradesmen who had come because it was to be the last public execution, not for political reasons. So sparse was the assembly that some of the police, who had regularly done duty at Newgate and knew the ‘“hanging” crowds...as familiar acquaintances, were puzzled, and almost grieved’.

  Yet the memory of Newgate as a place of violent public death lingered. The year after Barrett’s execution, Dickens could still write that it was a setting of ‘fire and fagot, condemned Hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral landmarks’.

  15.

  THE RED-LIT STREETS TO DEATH

  What struck most people on seeing London for the first – or the thousandth – time was its vastness, its unknowability, not merely in terms of its streets and buildings, but in terms of its people. Dickens referred to one of his characters in Martin Chuzzlewit as belonging to ‘a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind’. Visitors from more sparsely populated nations felt this the most. Even if they lived in capital cities themselves, none was the size of London. One American wrote: ‘How utterly lost a stranger feels in London. In the midst of that great mass of human life and activity, a stranger is perfectly alone’, yet at the same time, ‘No matter...how far he walks, he cannot get beyond the crowd.’ In A Tale of Two Cities, the narrator, on entering ‘a great city by night’, considers how ‘every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret...[and] every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts...is...a secret to the heart nearest’. Moreover, each stranger on the street was a secret, and London was filled with millions of strangers. Many of these strangers were women, going about lives that seemed incomprehensible to their fellow men. These women aroused fears by their number, as well as by their unknowability.

  It cannot be stated too emphatically that we have no firm knowledge of the number of prostitutes on the streets of London for most of the nineteenth century. First, there is the question: what is a prostitute? Apart from a woman actively soliciting on the streets, does the term include a woman living with a man to whom she is not married, on a long-term, monogamous basis, who does not work and is supported by that man? Does it encompass a woman in employment, who intermittently or regularly is given additional cash by a long-term, or short-term, partner? Does it take into account a woman whose wages do not entirely support her, or who is temporarily out of work, who receives financial help from one or more men? The rigid separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women did not hold even according to Victorian morality. There were women who enjoyed a nightlife that was not acceptable to moralists, but who pursued it for pleasure rather than money; equally, there were women in long-term relationships living in communities that traditionally did not resort to the church for sanctification.151 Many in the nineteenth century regarded any and all of these women as prostitutes. In London Labour, the widespread nature of this term could not be plainer: ballet girls, it was said, were ‘in the habit of prostituting themselves when the occasion offers, either for money, or more frequently for their own gratification’ – that is, they had sex outside marriage, which is not our definition of prostitution at all.

  None of this stopped experts from attempting to enumerate the prostitutes of London as though they were a single, countable class. In 1791, the police magistrate Patrick Colquhoun had estimated (and it should be noted that he used the word ‘estimate’, as well as ‘conjecture’, although this element of doubt was later ignored) that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London. He then separated this figure into two groups, allowing that at least half were not what he called ‘common prostitutes’, by which he meant those who walked the streets soliciting. More than 25,000, he believed, were kept women, by which he meant those who fitted the commercial definition of this term, as well as those who lived with long-term partners outside wedlock. The remaining figure of 25,000 is still much higher than the police and court reports of the period indicate, yet by 1817, this was supposed to have soared to 80,000, although no source for it was ever given. It might be an extrapolation of Colquhoun’s figure of 50,000, taking into account the rising population.

  By 1851, William Acton, a surgeon specializing in genito-urinary disorders and one of the main contributors to the debate on prostitution, published statistics showing that there were 210,000 prostitutes in London, calculating this by taking as his starting point the 42,000 live births to unwed mothers recorded that year. These women had ‘taken the first step in prostitution’. From that, he went on to posit that each one would go on to work as a prostitute for an average of five years, giving a total, over the five years, of 210,000 women, or one in every twelve unmarried females in Britain.

  Similar claims were made by Michael Ryan, who wrote Prostitution in London (1839). Even with his background as the editor of the London Medical and Surgical Journal and a lecturer on midwifery and medical jurisprudence, he appeared even more credulous and every bit as innumerate. ‘Every [fallen] girl, or woman, has her fancy man, or bully,’ he wrote, ‘who lives upon her prostitution, and seldom confines himself to one female.’ Despite making their livings from these women, such men were ‘thieves, pickpockets, and often murderers...Bullies spend the day in public-houses, and the night in brothels, in which they always assist in robbing, and often in murdering their victims.’ He could make these assertions despite the fact that, a few pages earlier, he had discussed the police reports on brothels, in only one of which was anyone robbed and no one murdered.

  Ryan then moved on from what these women did to how many there were: ‘suppose that the number of prostitutes be 80,000, as already concluded, and that each has a bully [my italics: this despite writing a few lines earlier that a bully ‘seldom confines himself to one female’], then there would be this great number of thieves and vagabonds let loose on the community.’ As if that weren’t enough, ‘an enlightened medical gentleman’ had told him that, near the Fleet Ditch, ‘There is an aqueduct of large dimensions, into which murdered bodies are precipitated by bullies, and discharged at a considerable distance in to the Thames, without the slightest chance of discovery.’

  Acton was more realistic: incidents of ‘robbery and violence in brothels’ were ‘rare and scattered’, he wrote, and the murderous aqueducts ‘extraordinary inventions’. Mayhew’s London Labour repeated the aqueduct story in order to reject it, but that didn’t prevent the same volume citing Ryan as an authority elsewhere. On the streets, the police reported substantially lower numbers of streetwalkers and, what is more, Acton at least knew it. In 1838, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police believed that there were fewer than 7,000 prostitutes in London (excluding the City). On the page before
Acton came up with his figure of 210,000, he noted that in 1841 the police had estimated that there were 9,409 prostitutes throughout the city (although that does seem an implausibly precise figure).

  Preconceptions clouded the causes of prostitution, too. The Edinburgh surgeon William Tait, in his book Magdalenism: An inquiry into the extent, causes and consequence of prostitution in Edinburgh152 (1840), divided prostitutes into two groups: those ‘naturally’ inclined to a life of vice from ‘Licentious Inclination – Irritability of Temper – Pride and Love of Dress – Dishonesty and Desire of Property – Indolence’, and those who became prostitutes because of their personal circumstances, that is, poverty, lack of skills, abandonment by or the death of their parents. Yet once he had developed his theme, he concluded that all the middle-class women, such as governesses, were apparently led into prostitution by such life events – by being seduced and abandoned, for example – while all the workingclass women ended up as prostitutes because they had ‘a looseness in their characters’.

  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.