The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (11 page)

The knowledge that Harris’s Covent Garden ladies were, for the most part, exposed to any whim their pimp might impose upon them might very well have been the impetus behind the creation of the Whore’s Club. Whether or not this was a tongue-in-cheek invention of the brains behind Fanny Murray’s
Memoirs
, it seems likely that listed prostitutes would under the circumstances band together for companionship and protection, just as their streetwalking counterparts were known to do. Not surprisingly, the roll of club rules appears to indicate that the society’s immediate function was the intoxication of its members, but its more enduring design was to raise support for the sisterhood.

By definition, the only women who qualified for membership were those who were ‘upon the negociator Harris’s list; and never have incurred the penalty of being erased therefrom; either on account of not paying poundage, making proper returns of her health, or any other cause whatever’. It further stipulated that: ‘No member of this society must have been in Bridewell above once’ and that ‘Any member of this society that may have been tried at the Old Bailey, for any crime except picking of pockets shall not be objected re-instating, if acquitted, upon condition that she did not plead her belly’.

One can imagine the Shakespear’s Head on a Sunday evening, perhaps the only slow night of the week. It was a time where Harris’s ladies might be able to enjoy something resembling a night off from their normal travails. Some arrived by chair, lowered to the ground with grace. Others arrived half-inebriated, leaving a trail of gin behind them. As they greeted one another, gossiping excitedly, expostulating, embracing, the handful of drinkers raised their eyes to watch a flutter of cheap silk and lace caps disappear above stairs. Before the hard drinking began in earnest, any serious business would be addressed. Principally, this would relate to raising financial support for those who found themselves in prison or who suffered with the pox. This fund was amassed through club dues, and also through nominal donations made by members who became ‘modest’ women ‘by going into keeping’. The Whore’s Club anticipated generosity in this case, insisting that the money given be ‘in proportion to her settlement allowance’. Once the business was dispatched, the fun could begin.

In spite of being foul-mouthed, tipple-loving prostitutes, the club rules recognised that a certain degree of civility and decorum should prevail. Evidently the meetings (not unlike those held by men’s clubs) degenerated somewhat by the end of the evening. There were, however, rules in place to deal with any unfortunate alcohol-related mishaps. It was established that if ‘any member by an overcharge of liquor, should in clearing her stomach, spoil any other member’s cloaths, she shall be obliged to take the same off her hands, and furnish her with new ones, or in some other manner compensate the damages’. Penalties were also exacted from those who broke ‘glasses, bottles, etc. or behave[d] in a riotous manner’ and for others ‘not able to walk’ at the end of the meeting. Throughout, Jack Harris would have kept an eye on the proceedings, periodically tugging at the sleeves of those whose names had been called from down below.

In the rise and rise of his fame, Jack Harris may have lost sight of the fact that while he had come to know a vast number of names and faces, so a vast number of names and faces would also come to know him. The more people who had Jack Harris’s name on their lips, the more exposed his position became. As his dominion expanded, so would the volume of gossip among patrons of the Garden. Second-hand stories about his past
and
present exploits would have been swapped by a cross section of society, from the lowest bunter to the aristocratic heir. Like all names that attract notoriety, legend also would have accompanied him like a shadow.

For the most part, Harris believed that he had nothing to fear. In spite of the Shakespear’s proximity to the headquarters of the local magistrate on Bow Street, hardly a shout’s distance away, neither Packington Tomkins nor his head-waiter ever experienced any trouble from the law. The Shakespear and its activities were well known in the area, yet remarkably no concerted effort had been made to quash its illicit business. The law was explicit in the eighteenth century; the open solicitation of sex and the keeping of bawdy houses were both illegal after 1752, but the enforcement of these two edicts was entirely haphazard. The night watch, the closest London came to a police force before the advent of the Bow Street Runners, were more interested in maintaining calm on the volatile London streets than proactively enforcing the law. While grubby streetwalkers might make a nuisance of themselves, calling out lewdly from doorways and grabbing at men, those who conducted their business quietly indoors ensured that they were inconspicuous enough to be almost impossible to prosecute. This was particularly the case for those who occupied the upper tiers of the sex trade: waiter-pimps, more expensive prostitutes and brothel-keepers. These individuals, due primarily to their discretion, to the high rank of their clientele and to their
faux
appearance of gentility, were rarely fingered by the long arm of the law. Their illusory immunity from prosecution provided them with a sense of security upon which they might build their fortunes.

By 1758, Harris was feeling invincible in his dominion of the Covent Garden sex trade. At the height of his influence, he boasted that from pimping alone he had acquired a fortune of ‘four or five thousand pounds in about a half dozen years’, a sum comparable to the salary earned by the first Lord of the Treasury. His list was rumoured to have stretched to 400 names, including women from all parts of London, from Southwark to Shoreditch, to Bloomsbury and Chelsea. In addition, he had in his employ a staff of ‘under-pimps’, young apprentices recruited to learn the trade and to manage the outposts of his empire.
Unfortunately,
Jack Harris’s sense of pride was growing alongside the boundaries of his kingdom. Where once John Harrison had acted with calculated discretion, now Jack Harris swaggered in defiance, unconcerned about the extent of his exposure. Pride would be his weakness. As the self-proclaimed ‘Pimp General of All England’ stepped out into the Piazza attired in his ill-gotten finery, it was not just his neighbours and patrons who noticed the glint of his shoe buckles and bright buttons. The gaze of Bow Street had also affixed itself to him, and much more closely than he had imagined.

6

Slave
TO
GRUB STREET

SAM DERRICK’S ESCAPE
from linen-draping had been years in the planning. In all the care he took to dupe Mrs Creagh, in all the relationships he had nurtured across the Irish Sea, in all of the letters he had written to those he had hoped to impress, not once did he contemplate the possibility of failure. His convictions drove him headlong towards Fleet Street, London’s ‘Street of Ink’, where he believed his laurel wreaths awaited. It was only a matter of time before he was crowned by the kings of patronage and publishing as a reigning genius, another Dryden or Pope. When Sam scrutinised his work he saw only excellence, but when those patrons and publishers read his verses and examined the small eccentric man who produced them, they saw something far less auspicious.

Sam was drunk on the promise that London, and Covent Garden in particular, had offered him. Bursting with enthusiasm for his new liberated lifestyle, and with money enough in his pocket to sustain him, Sam threw himself into the capital’s manifold pleasures. He loitered in the watering holes of the literati and attended the theatrical performances of the friends he had made at these places. In the hours between and afterwards he drank, gambled, spent his money like an heir and
occasionally
found time to write. Sam canvassed his acquaintances for roles in their plays and when they had none to offer him, he thrust his dramatic works into their hands. These were usually returned to him with the curt response of ‘not calculated to succeed’. One theatrical manager with whom Derrick had cultivated an acquaintance told him that although he had managed to lose the unmemorable tragedy Sam had written, he was welcome to put his hand into his bureau ‘and take two comedies and a farce instead of it’. When not buzzing around backstage at the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, Sam was continuing his campaign of subscription-raising for his collection of poetry. Although no one seemed especially interested in reading an entire book of Derrick’s verses, his cautious supporters were intrigued enough to endow him for the printing of one poem:
Fortune, a Rhapsody
. It may have helped matters that the work was dedicated to David Garrick, who had stumped up part of the money necessary for its publication. Although the poem expressed some cogent sentiments about the fickleness of success and the difficulties of being an artistic genius whose talents no one recognised, in the words of Sam’s previous critics,
Fortune, a Rhapsody
‘was not calculated to succeed’. In fact, at some points the calibre of his writing borders on the atrocious:

For he who can the purse command,

Must ev’ry science understand;

Or tell him so – and it agrees,

As well, as with a Welchman’s cheese …

Regardless of what the general public must have made of his first foray into literature, the subject and date of Derrick’s work is quite telling.
Fortune, a Rhapsody
appeared in 1752, a year after Sam’s move to the capital. Disillusionment had already begun to settle in and, one year on, the accolades that he had anticipated receiving were nowhere to be seen. The reservoir of linen-draping money on which he was surviving would have been running thin, and while he would have received a small sum for the publication of his poem, it would not have been enough upon which to successfully subsist for long. Nevertheless, the difficulties he faced did not seem to deter him entirely. Sam had numerous irons in the
fire
and he felt that temporary setbacks would only slow his path to glory, not impede it altogether. As he reminisced in conversation with his friend and fellow aspiring thespian, Francis Cooke, he had seen many like himself ‘abandon their parents or forsake their masters to starve …’, but in spite of the occasional disappointment, London and ‘the diversion we met, answer’d for all the trouble’.

As the wolf neared the door, Sam began to gain some perspective on his situation and turned to Grub Street for assistance, taking what few opportunities came to him to earn his bread by his pen. In the eighteenth century, Grub Street was not so much a location as a type of existence. Today, the mythical street that gave a lifestyle of literary misery its name lies stifled below an office block near the Barbican Centre, but in Sam Derrick’s era the presence of Grub Street stretched far beyond its geographical borders. Up the main thoroughfare of Fleet Street and down Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s Cathedral, shoved into the narrow alleys snaking off it, and pitched against church walls, stood row upon row of booksellers’ outlets. Some were merely stands containing pamphlets and a few titles; others were prominent shops with bowed windows that displayed their wares to passers-by. Behind the shop front and shelves, in the back room, the cellar or the floors above, came the incessant thump of a printing press, rattling out pages that would shortly find their way into the public domain. Somewhere else in this creative factory (most likely in the garret) would sit, diligently working, a writer, or two or three in threadbare coats, with holes in their shoes and fingers black with ink. Here lived and toiled the sub-class of petty authors that Dr Johnson defined as ‘writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems’. They shared the same colloquial name as the well-ridden horse, the tired beast that would do anyone’s bidding: the
hackney writer
, or simply the hack.

The hack wrote to eat. It was not from any great artistic urge that catch-penny pamphlets and puff reviews were born onto the booksellers’ stalls but rather out of necessity. The bookseller, who also doubled as the publisher, would hire a hack to write to specification anything that would sell. There were no bounds; total falsehood masqueraded as true confession, odes, sermons, scandal, reviews, opinions and hearsay were set in typeface and run off indiscriminately. The author Richard Savage,
through
the pen of Iscariot Hackney, confesses: ‘… I wrote Obscenity and Profaneness, under the names of Pope and Swift. Sometimes I was Mr. John Gay and at others … Burnet or Addison. I abridged histories and travels, translated from the French what they never wrote, and was an expert at finding out new titles for old books.’ While some hacks worked independently of booksellers, choosing to peddle their manuscripts after completion, labouring under the umbrella of a bookseller who could provide a steady stream of commissions appeared to be the more secure of the two options. Those who chose this route often found themselves living in a state of indenture to their publishing masters. Booksellers paid for the hack’s basic board and lodgings in return for a constant turn-out of material. The notorious publisher Edmund Curll had his ‘translators’ laying ‘three in a bed in the Pewter Platter Inn at Holborn’, where ‘they were for ever at work to deceive the public’. In exchange for his services, the hack received a demeaning rate of pay. At mid-century, eighty pages of reviews poured out by one of his writers on tap might have cost a bookseller no more than two guineas. Such work might have taken weeks, if not months, to produce, toiling around the clock, leading James Ralph to comment in 1758 that ‘There is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret and the Slave in his Mines … Both must drudge
and
Starve; neither can hope for Deliverance’. Grub Street could be a graveyard for ambition, a pit of quicksand that swallowed authors whole, pulling names and the works attached to them into a well of anonymity. While a handful, such as Henry Fielding and Oliver Goldsmith, managed an escape into literary fame, many more languished there, forgotten.