The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (43 page)

As might be imagined, there is much to be said in defence of Harris’s ladies. The women featured in the publication were regularly maligned for the most understandable of minor offences, from apathy in bed to the display of mercenary tendencies. Dissatisfied customers were certainly not coy about coming forward with negative reports. Miss Dean, featured in the 1773 supplement, received a complaint for demonstrating ‘great indifference’ during the sexual act. According to her cull, she had the audacity to ‘crack nuts’ behind his back ‘whilst he was acting his joys’. Similarly, women who didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves as a whore should were described as ‘lazy bedfellows’ or, like Charlotte Gainsborough, scorned for being ‘motionless in the very height of the sport, preferring rather a pinch of snuff to all the joys of venery.’ Others failed to endear themselves by displaying qualities that their patrons found unappealing; this included the use of ‘an immoderate quantity of paint’ and, ironically, any honesty surrounding their true motives for prostituting themselves. Miss O’Dell was criticised for this in 1764, and was decried as being ‘of a disposition a little too mercenary’. After all, who wanted to believe that prostitutes were just in it for the money? Miss O’Dell’s problem was that she ‘shews too plainly that the love of money is more predominant in her than the soft passion which bears the chief sway over most female breasts’. According to the beliefs of the era, prostitutes were lascivious, hot-blooded women who loved a good tumble and sold their sexual favours because they enjoyed copulation with a variety of partners. By nature, they were as lewd as
any
drunken libertine in Covent Garden, and any woman who betrayed evidence to the contrary was liable to be forcibly corrected. Consequently, Miss O’Dell was granted her comeuppance: ‘an arch wag once put a trick upon her … This was no other than paying her with money of which he had picked of her pocket’, a lesson which ‘provoked her highly when she came to discover it’. The men who used the
Harris’s List
didn’t want to be reminded that the women who looked so tempting and promised such a feast of delights were nothing more than accomplished mistresses of deception. They didn’t want to know what happened to their little ‘choice piece’ once they had buttoned their breeches and that she, like Kitty Atchison after being left alone in 1761, might have cried out, ‘what a disagreeable situation is this to a generous mind! What an unhappy circle to move in, for a thinking person! – To be the sink of mankind! – To court alike the beastly drunkard and the nauseating rake – dissimulating distaste for enjoyment!’ A prostitute’s client wasn’t especially interested in knowing the sad details of her life or being reminded that, unlike him, she had little choice about with whom she would share the intimacies of her body. For those like Lenora Norton who had suffered rape as a child and like many of Charlotte Hayes’s recruits who were ‘induct[ed] into the mysteries of Venus’ even before the age of puberty, it is likely that sex was never anything other than a distressing experience. All things considered, who could blame these women for their sexual indifference, for accusations of frigidity, or for betraying their desire simply to earn money?

For those who enjoyed the comforts of a kept mistress, complaints of infidelity and ingratitude were rife. Gentlemen were constantly the dupes of these jades, who were fickle in their affections, or so driven by their libidinous and material desires that they flitted thoughtlessly from the embrace of one protector to another. According to
The Connoisseur
, a kept mistress was an artful and scheming harlot who stopped at nothing to secure her own pleasure and exact precisely what she desired from her keeper. The author of an article entitled ‘On Kept Mistresses and Keepers’ recounted how his friend had been used by his lady:

… what pains she took to bring him to the most abject compliance with all her wishes and to tame him to the patient thing he is now. A frown on his part
would
frequently cost him a brocade, and a tear from her was sure to extort a new handkerchief or an apron. Upon any quarrel—O! She would leave him at that moment … she would work upon his jealousy by continually twitting him with – she knew a gentleman, who would scorn to use her so barbarously and she would go to him, if she could be sure that she was not with child …

Invariably, the author concluded, men who kept whores were sure to find themselves ‘deserted by their mistress, once she has effectually ruined their constitution and estate’. No one ever questioned why a lady in keeping might behave so, or why she was so keen to make the most of her situation. Men like William Hickey scoffed at the pledges of kept ladies who claimed that they ‘could never be unfaithful to any man with whom they lived’. Hickey knew these promises to be false ones and had experienced at first hand how easily such women changed their tune when better prospects appeared.

Most keepers were short-sighted enough to believe that such behaviour went hand-in-hand with a wanton character and chose, in the interests of their own pleasure, not to recognise the motivations of a prostitute. A kept mistress’s livelihood depended upon her keeper’s indulgence as well as her ability to maintain his interest. Spoilt, wealthy young men were liable to boredom and acquiring the latest celebrated beauty contained all the transient joy of acquiring a new watch or fashionable coat. Inevitably, their interest waned; the coat was handed down to a manservant and the mistress was booted from her Queen Ann Street lodgings. With no promise of anything, no future, no security, no income, never knowing when the axe might fall and when she might find herself on the street or back in the deplorable brothel from which she came, any savvy mistress had one eye constantly towards new opportunities, scanning the horizon for anyone who might promise her something more than she had currently.

And what of love in all of this business? Where did love, if at all, figure into these dealings? Harris’s ladies would not be human if they didn’t dream of it or fall prey to its enticements. In a profession where the word ‘love’ was bandied about to describe (most of the time quite falsely) the activities that comprised their existence, did any real love exist between at least some keepers and mistresses, and a handful of
certain
culls and their whores? Of course it did. Love manifested itself in complicated ways, just as it does today. Simply because Harris’s ladies were warned against forming romantic attachments did not mean they didn’t, although it frequently made situations a bit more uncomfortable. An ability to shut these emotions off at will was a tool necessary for one’s survival, while a harlot’s greatest gift was her ability to make a man believe that she adored him. In some cases she may have done, or if he proved to be generous, kind and affectionate, she may have grown to do so. When a genuine admirer presented himself, a certain degree of self-delusion would have also paved the way for an easier life, one that opened the door at least temporarily to happiness. Without the possibility of this, a life led in such darkness would have remained intolerable.

1 Samuel Derrick. One of the only known portraits of Derrick, this image appeared as a frontispiece to his
Letters Written from Leverpool, Chester and Cork
in 1767. It also features in a 1773 engraving,
Macaronies Drawn After the Life
, where it hangs above a bookshelf on which a copy of the
Harris’s List
sits prominently.

 

2 Charlotte Hayes (engraving after Joshua Reynolds), painted shortly after Charlotte and Dennis established their ‘grand serail’ on Great Marlborough Street; Charlotte would have been in her thirties.

 

3
The Times of the Day
, ‘Morning.’ Although Covent Garden was predominantly a night-time venue for pleasure-seekers, much merrymaking continued into the morning hours. As revellers in this Hogarth engraving carouse with the whores from Tom King’s Coffee House (seen pitched in front of the portico of St Paul’s Covent Garden), the Piazza begins to fill up with market traders and churchgoers (centre left) starting their day.

 

4
The Distrest Poet
. Not unlike the subject of Hogarth’s engraving, Sam Derrick led a penurious existence as a Grub Street hack. Without a devoted patron, many found themselves beholden to the ceaseless demands of unscrupulous publishers.

 

5
Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn
. During the eighteenth century, actors and actresses bore a shameful reputation for flouting the conventions of society. Backstage, men and women mixed freely in various states of undress (as pictured here), while the term ‘actress’ was considered synonymous with that of ‘whore’. The presence of children in this engraving alludes to the fact that actresses were noted for fostering broods of illegitimates by fellow performers and adoring patrons alike.