The Sexual History of London (21 page)

In the first,
The Infidelity Discovered
, a well-dressed wife lies headlong on the drawing-room floor. She is sobbing desperately at her husband's feet, as he crumples in his fist a letter he has intercepted from her lover. Their two young daughters look on with horror, and the scene drips with symbolism: the house of cards the little girls have been building has collapsed; a novel by Balzac (who frequently wrote about adultery) lies nearby; and on the table is an apple with a knife through its heart, representing Original Sin. The position of the woman's body is ambiguous: is she lying down because she is begging for forgiveness, or because her husband has knocked her to the floor?

In the second painting,
The Abandoned Daughters
, the action has moved on by five years. The daughters are in mourning for their father, who has just died, leaving them orphaned, and, because of their mother's adultery, unlikely to find appropriate suitors. There is a little cloud under the moon, which the daughters can see from their bedroom window, as they pray for their father and their mother. In the third painting,
Past and Present
, their mother can see the same little cloud, from her refuge behind a boat under a bridge on the banks of the river. Cast out by her lover, she cradles her illegitimate child beneath her cloak. Their fate is clear: if mother and child do not succumb to malnutrition and hypothermia, they may well consign themselves to the waters of the Thames.

The paintings caused predictable outrage, with publications such as the
Athenaeum
condemning the subject matter as ‘an impure thing that seems out of place in a gallery of laughing brightness, where young happy faces come to chat and trifle' and observing that there ‘must be a line drawn as to where the horrors that should be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line'. In sorrow rather than in anger the anonymous critic for
The Art-Journal
found the subject matter ‘too poignant for a series of paintings', while Holman Hunt concluded that the paintings would not be popular with the public and assumed that Egg was drawn to the theme on moral grounds. Egg himself remained silent. But given the poignancy and impending tragedy of the last scene, one cannot help wondering whether his triptych was actually designed as a comment on the cruelty of Victorian marriage and the double standards which dictated that a cheating husband was entitled to his pleasure, but that a fallen ‘angel of the house' was destined to be a social outcast, condemned to die destitute on the streets of London.

Pragmatic commentators such as Parent-Duchâtelet argued that ‘prostitution exists, and will ever exist, in all great towns, because, like mendicancy and gambling, it is an industry and an expedient against hunger',
¹⁵
and that it should be legalized. His views were echoed by the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew (1812–87) in his masterpiece
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851–62), one of the classic works of social investigation. Mayhew recognized prostitution as a social phenomenon going all the way back to ancient Rome. It was not merely an object for repulsion or false sentiment but a fact of life which had to be addressed and dealt with.

A product of his age, Mayhew was not without his own prejudices, but as the subsequent anecdotes reveal, he was fascinated by prostitution and relatively tolerant towards the women who had chosen ‘the life'. While Acton's approach was bombastic and opinionated, Mayhew presented his evidence to readers in the form of dozens of interviews with the prostitutes themselves, and it is these eyewitness accounts which provide an intriguing insight into the underworld of Victorian sexuality.

Mayhew cast his net wide with his working definition of a prostitute as ‘literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue'. He then proceeded to classify London's working girls into six categories:

1. Kept mistresses
   Prima donnas
   
2. Convives
   

Although he recognized that ‘the shades of London prostitution…are as numberless as those of society at large', Mayhew's taxonomy reflected Victorian society: upper-class ‘kept women', middle-class ‘prima donnas' and working-class streetwalkers.

The premier division of whores consisted of kept women or mistresses. These ‘seclusives', as Mayhew referred to them, lived in elegant suburban villas identical to the type represented in
The Awakening Conscience
; they drove their carriages through Hyde Park, took a box at the opera and even attended the most exclusive balls, moving through the upper echelons of society unchallenged, thanks to the machinations of their lovers. These girls serviced ‘the upper ten thousand' or ruling class, and were supported by their men of opulence and rank in the privacy of their own homes.
¹⁷
Mayhew does not name these women outright but instead, in journalistic tradition, bestows
noms de guerre
derived from the whores of classical antiquity, so we hear about ‘Laïs', who was ‘under the protection of a prince of the blood royal'; ‘Aspasia', whose ‘friend' was ‘one of the most influential noblemen', and ‘Phryne', the ‘
chère amie
' of a well-known Guards officer, or a banker, or a broker. Far from being ostracized or lonely, these ladies enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, calling on one another and leaving their cards at the fashionable hour, in a parody of conventional society women. In many cases, their relationships with their lovers proved as enduring and satisfactory as conventional marriages.

However, there was a perennial disadvantage in being the sole mistress of an older man; younger women hankered for the diverting company of a fit, young lover, the consequences of which could be disastrous. Mayhew tells of ‘Lady Blank', who took the fancy of the great ‘Lord X', when they met at a brothel in Bolton Row. Lord X set her up in a splendid house overlooking Regent's Park, with an allowance of £4000 a year. Soon Lady Blank was living the life, with a carriage and stud, a box at the opera, fashionable clothes and jewels. Lord X became possessive, however, and when she introduced an attractive young man as her cousin, he began to watch her more closely. Soon, Lady Blank was surrounded by spies; she was too naive to realize that everyone around her had been bribed. Eventually, she was ‘surprised with her paramour in a position that placed doubt out of the question', and the next day, with a few sarcastic remarks, Lord X gave her £500 and her marching orders.
¹⁸

Across the Channel, during the Second Empire, the top-drawer whores were regarded as national treasures. These women were the supermodels of their day, a manifestation of imperial wealth, and every detail of their lives – from their investments in property, the carriages they kept, the clothes they wore and the succession of opulent lovers they entertained – was the subject of eager discussion and national pride.
¹⁹
The Goncourt brothers, a pair of French novelists, bribed the maid of a famous courtesan to show them the magnificent Valenciennes lace lingerie, designed at considerable expense, which her mistress planned to wear while receiving specially favoured visitors. There were no discreet pseudonyms in their writing. The names of Hortense Schneider (1833–1920), esteemed opera star and mistress of Edward VIII, and ‘La Païva', the Russian Jewess Esther Lachman, who became one of the most famous courtesans of the 1870s, in one generation, and of Liane de Pougy and Cléo de Mérode in the next, were repeated not only in Paris but in every European capital. Beyond praise or blame, these women drew crowds of admiring onlookers when they appeared in their carriages in the Bois de Boulogne.

English
cocottes
, as a rule, did not achieve quite the same high status, but there was a brief interval when the London
demi-monde
produced a number of celebrated characters. Harriette Wilson (1786–1832) was an early example. Born Harriette Doubechet in Shepherd Market, she was one of fifteen children of a Swiss watch-maker. The family were poor and had to shift for themselves, but they were also enterprising, with the girls quick to see the advantages of entering ‘the life'. Harriette and two of her sisters, Amy and Fanny, became renowned courtesans, known as ‘The Three Graces', while the most successful member of the family was their sister Sophia, who married into the aristocracy. Harriette was not beautiful but made up for it in terms of vivacity and sex appeal. Her first lover was the Earl of Craven, and as the courtesan of the Marquess of Argyll, she had a considerable amount of power and could move in the highest social circles, able to take a box at the opera and appear in her trademark white muslin. Harriette showed a touching readiness to compensate for her lack of education by reading up on the great thinkers of the day, such as Rousseau, Racine and Boswell, the better to entertain her intellectual lovers, but she was also something of an entrepreneur. Once she had officially ‘retired' at the age of thirty-two and was safely married to ‘Colonel' William Rochfort (his title appears to have been bogus), Harriette wrote her memoirs and sent copies of the manuscript to all her exes with a demand for £200 in return for silence. Given that Harriette's exes had included two past prime ministers, two future ones, numerous aristocrats and Members of Parliament, she had no shortage of scandalous material. Cabinet ministers and diplomats went rushing across Europe to silence her, while the King, George IV, moaned that the ‘Wilson business' had nearly destroyed him. Harriette had not, however, foreseen the robust response of one of her most famous lovers, the Duke of Wellington, to her attempts at blackmail: four words scrawled across the title page of her manuscript, ‘Publish and be Damned!' So Harriette did. And she was. Harriette's portrait of the Iron Duke was not flattering: she described him as ‘most unentertaining', commented that when he came round to see her in the evenings he dressed ‘like a ratcatcher' and was bad in bed.
²⁰

On publication day, Harriette's publisher, Stockdale, had to erect barriers outside his shop in the Haymarket to hold back the crowds. This original ‘kiss 'n' tell' memoir earned publisher and author £10,000 each, but they both paid a high price. Stockdale was overwhelmed with lawsuits and Harriette was ostracized. When Harriette later appeared in the papers charged with beating her French maid, the press went to town on her ruined looks and her scoundrel of a husband. She is thought to have died around 1832. Wellington, and the rest of the establishment, had their revenge.
²¹

Then there was Cora Pearl, the ‘undisputed Queen of Beauty', who nevertheless had to move to Paris to become the toast of the town, and, most famous of all, the redoubtable ‘Skittles', Catherine Walters, a courtesan in the grand tradition, companion as well as concubine, friend to poets, artists and musicians and one of the last great courtesans.

These were the girls Mayhew referred to as the ‘prima donnas', or leading ladies. These were the stars of the
demi-monde
; they reigned supreme in the West End.
²²
With their distinctive ‘yellow chignons' (bleached blonde hair) they were to be seen in the parks in ravishing hats, drawing up their elegant carriages or horses close to the rails and chatting with the gentlemen. It was not difficult, according to one writer in the
Pall Mall Gazette
, to guess the occupation of the dashing equestrienne who saluted half a dozen men at a time with her whip or with a wink, or who varied the monotony of a safe seat by holding her hands behind her back, while gracefully swerving over to listen to the compliments of a walking admirer.
²³

The Victorian courtesan Catherine Walters or ‘Skittles', a celebrated ‘horsebreaker', in her riding habit
c.
1870.

Skittles in particular was an excellent horsewoman and her exploits in Hyde Park drew crowds of admirers, eagerly wondering whether her skills in the bedroom were commensurate with her technique in the saddle. In 1862, Skittles' antics proved such a draw that she effectively stopped the traffic in Hyde Park, jeopardizing access to the Great Exhibition in nearby South Kensington.
²⁴
Prima donnas such as Skittles went on display everywhere: in boxes at the theatre, at concerts, wherever fashionable people congregated. Theoretically barred from events where royalty was present, these women were visible anywhere which was open to paying customers and where one did not have to rely on breeding or family connections to get in.