Footnotes on Friday

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Lies, spies, and unsung heroes

Colonel Edward Despard was arrested before he and his radical friends could seize the Tower of London as part of a revolutionary strike against the Crown.

We’ve loved our spy fiction for over 100 years. The early years of the twentieth century saw the start of the genre, with Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, several books by Joseph Conrad, The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orkzy, even some of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sexy heroes, thrilling encounters, mysterious beautiful women, and ghastly villains. Spy novels had it all. How things have changed.

Disreputable and dishonest

In the past, spying was a murky hidden business, and spies despised as liars who sold their honour. The British Secret Service was not founded until the twentieth century, and before that spies were seen as dishonest and disreputable. Yet without them, the history of England would be very different.

Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both had spymasters whose extensive spy networks helped keep their royal majesties on their throne.

John André was a British Army officer hanged as a spy by the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War for assisting Benedict Arnold’s attempted surrender of the fort at West Point, New York to the British.

Sir Anthony Standen—torn between loyalties

One of those spies was a Catholic refugee from Protestant England, whose reports on the Spanish Armada allowed the English to attack the Spanish Fleet at Cadiz. Drake fired ships and sunk galleys, putting the invasion off for years.

Poor Sir Anthony Standen. His love for England and his love for his faith conflicted, and — although he eventually returned to his home country — he was not welcomed by a grateful nation. Indeed, though he was sent on further spying missions, he was also imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London.

It is an interesting juxtaposition: his sterling work for the Crown did not (in the eyes of some) prove his patriotism, but rather his lack of moral fibre. He spied, therefore he could not be trusted.

Spying at home as well as abroad

Walsingham and his successors were as likely to spy on Englishmen as on enemies from abroad. William Pitt the Younger, in more than tripling the amount spent by the government on spying and infiltration of potentially rebellious organisations, was walking in well-trodden footsteps. The budget passed through the hands of a few civil servants at home, and ambassadors and military commanders abroad, with no more accounting than this oath.

I A.B. do swear, That the Money paid to me for Foreign Secret Service, or for Secret Service in detecting, preventing, or defeating, treasonable, or other dangerous Conspiracies against the State…, has been bona fide, applied to the said Purpose or Purposes, and to no other: and that it hath not appeared to me convenient to the State that the same should be paid Abroad. So help me GOD.

A secret part of the Post Office opened, read, and copied mail, especially mail from foreign governments. And both amateur and professional informers reported on their neighbours.

Systematic spying

Napoleon employed a network of spies, under the Minister of Police, Joseph Fouche, who had survived the two previous regimes and would survive the Empire to serve the restored monarchy.

The English system was much more ad hoc. Spies, yes, and many of them, but probably no central co-ordination, though William Savage makes a good argument for the central role of The Alien Office.

Overseas, diplomats and military commanders took the fore. We know the names of some of the diplomatic spymasters who plotted against Napoleon: William Wickham in Switzerland, Francis Drake in Munich and later Italy.

Noble spies

Colquhoun Grant was one of the Duke of Wellington’s most famous exploring officers.

Wellington had ‘exploring officers’, who would have challenged you to a duel had you dared to call them spies. They were officers and gentlemen, and if they did creep behind enemy lines to collect information, they wore their uniforms to do so. Wearing a disguise or other forms of deception would be beneath their code of civilised behaviour.

But Wellington (and other military leaders) also had other intelligence gatherers who were less particular. Did some of them include members of the great aristocratic families of England? If so, we would not expect to find out from the records. Such a secret would reflect badly on those families, and would never be disclosed.

Spies of romance

So we are free to imagine that the romantic heroes and heroines of our modern stories might represent some, at least, of the spies whose reports on Napoleon’s troops, movements, and intentions saved England from invasion. Or who uncovered plots at home.

I’ve written a spy or two, both for and against England. Prudence Virtue is one. She first appeared in The Prisoner of Wyvern Castle, then in Revealed in Mist, and currently in my latest work in progress, To Claim the Long-Lost Lover as the wife and business partner of David Wakefield, Aldridge’s half brother. Watch out for her adventures.

References:

Ioffe, Alexander: Espionage During the Napoleonic Wars. On The Dear Surprise: http://www.thedearsurprise.com/espionage-during-the-napoleonic-wars/

Rice, Patricia: Spies in Regency England. On Word Wenches http://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2010/03/spies-in-regency-england.html

Savage, William: The C18th British Secret Service under Pitt. on Pen and Pension: https://penandpension.com/2015/02/24/the-c18th-british-secret-service-under-pitt-1/

Secrets and Spies, National Archives Exhibition: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/spies/spies/default.htm

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Mad as a hatter

The fur trade goes back into the mists of time. Animal skins were a useful source of warm and durable clothing, and back before the human population swelled and fur animals were hunted to the scarcity and even extinction, the supply must have seemed inexhaustible. Even so, by the 17th Century most European populations were severely diminished, and the eyes of European traders turned to the United States. In particular, traders wanted beaver pelts, not for the pelt or even the leather, but for the fur. Beaver fur provided the highest quality felt for hat making. It is tight yet supple, and holds its shape.

Hats, like other forms of dress,  played a large role in reflecting one’s social  identity.  The shape and style of one’s hat indicated to a passerby one’s profession, wealth, and social rank and position.  Color, shape, and material all carried specific meaning.  In Ecclesiastical heraldry, for example, a red, wide-brimmed hat clearly  indicated that its wearer was a cardinal, and  interactions required a specific social protocol.  In  seventeenth century England, the shape and style of one’s hat reflected political and religious affiliation.  Due  to the expense of a beaver hat, being able to purchase one made a visual statement about one’s wealth and social status. [A brief history of the beaver trade: https://humwp.ucsc.edu/cwh/feinstein/]

Felt is made by applying heat and pressure to a collection of fibres, and beaver fur is particularly suited for felting because of the way the strands of fur stick together. The following video shows the way the process has worked for the past 100 years. It was much harder before the fancy machines.

Back then, the guard hairs were plucked from the pelt by hand, then mercury was brushed over the pelt to roughen the fibre and help each hair to stick to the next. The pelt was dried and then shaved.

The resulting fluff was mixed and then carded. Carding is a process of raking to get all the fibres running in the same direction. Next, the hatter weighed out the quantity of fluff he needed for a particular style of hat.

The fluff then went through a process called bowing to begin the process of sticking all the fibres together. The object was to create two large oval sheets about 4 feet long, 3 feet wide and 6 to 12 inches high, called batts. Now the hatter used heat, pressure (from his hands), and moisture to compress this batt. The process released mercury, which the hatter absorbed. Over time, hatters developed mercury poisoning, which is where we get the phrase, mad as a hatter. By the time this part of the process ends, the two batts have been put back together into a large cone, as you saw in the video.

Then comes planking–dipping the cone into a very hot solution of diluted sulfuric acid, beer-grounds and wine sediments, then working it by hand on planks around the kettle and doing it all over again until the felt was half its size.

After that came blocking, dying, stiffening, brushing, and lining, till at last the hat was ready for the market. The shape of hats changed according to fashion (some of which are explored in the following video). The process remains much the same, except without the mercury poisoning.

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Reporting Society gossip and scandal in the Regency era

When we first set up the Bluestocking Belles website, we had the idea to turn our blog into a gossip sheet, where we and other authors could spread gossip about characters from historical romances. The Teatime Tattler has now been going for six years, and this year it (or rather an unknown correspondent) plays a starring roll in our box set, Storm & Shelter.

In truth, as far as researchers can tell, newspapers totally devoted to scandal and gossip were a feature of 18th Century publishing, and reappeared in the 1820s. But in the Regency era, the antics of the upper classes were far more likely to be outed in cartoons posted in the windows of print shops, or in pamphlets devoted to a single story. Society news, and even scandal, does appear in the newspapers we have from those times, but in a column in amongst the war news, shipping news, reports on politics, weather reports, advertisements for everything under the sun, and all the rest.

That said, hundreds of papers came and went during the late Georgian period, from the end of the 18th Century to the ascension of Queen Victoria, so who knows?

Interested to know more?

Contest: Identify the Teatime Tattler Reporter

Guess the identity of the reporter snooping on the people trapped in the Queen’s Barque and the good people of Fenwick on Sea. You’ll find clues in the eight charming novellas in the collection Storm & Shelter.

All correct answers will be entered for the prizes listed below. The winners will be selected at random. Open internationally.

  • Grand prize: $100 gift card
  • Second: a made-to-order story by Jude Knight and Caroline Warfield
  • Third: winner’s choice of an electronic copy of any of the earlier Bluestocking Belles’ collections.

The contest closes on 23rd April at midnight New York time, and prizes will be drawn on 24th April.

Go to the Belles’ website for more information.

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Spinsters, ape leaders, and old maids

We writers of historical romance are usually also writing about marriage. Marriage may not be the goal of our heroes and heroines when the story starts, but most books (mine included) expect love and marriage to go hand in hand, or at least to come together by the time the story is done.

Yet many women in real life were single.

For a start, out of a population of 16 million, more than 300,000 British men died in the Napoleonic wars between 1804 and 1815. That’s a huge number of men of marriageable age – probably close to 1 in 12. Men were also more likely to indulge in risk-taking behaviour in their leisure, and to belong to risky occupations, further increasing the gender imbalance.

And men were not subject to social stigma if they did not marry, and had easy access to many of the benefits of marriage (with one in five women in London, according to some researchers, earning their living from the sale of sex).

So even if our late Georgian miss wanted to marry, she may not have had the opportunity. Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra:

‘There is a great scarcity of Men in general, & a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much.’

Beyond that, though, our Miss may not have wished to marry. Married women had few rights. The principle of coverture — that a woman was ‘covered’ by her husband’s protection and authority — meant that women lived at the mercy of their husbands, physically, emotionally, and financially.

Yet what is remarkable, unmarried women were more legally independent than the married ones. Single women could own property, pay taxes to the state, and vote in the local parish, none of which married women were allowed to do. [Women in the middle class in the 19th Century]

And the health risks of pregnancy concerned many women. With a maternal death rate of one in 1000 live births, and an average of five children per mother, women had a two or three percent chance of dying in or shortly after childbirth.

Yet there was also pressure to marry. For a respectable woman to have her own home almost always meant marriage, unless she had particularly enlightened or indulgent male relations. For the rest, being single meant living in the home of a relative, and being subject to the authority of the male head of the house.  Besides that, being single carried a stigma, at least in the upper classes and in the growing middle classes who trumpeted their status by insisting on their own women being confined to the domestic sphere.

The stigma showed in the labels applied to single women whose age made them unlikely to wed. Spinster was originally a job title. By the early 19th century it was applied to unwed women who were past their first youth, and had begun to collect adjectives such as ‘withered’, ‘sour’, and ‘old maid’. The term ape leader comes from an English saying that women who fail to do their duty by marrying and procreating are doomed to lead apes in hell. The term ‘old maid’ is also derogatory. A maid was originally a term for a young girl, so an old maid hasn’t accepted the responsibilities of adulthood. (Note that the terms for a bachelor are not perjorative.) ‘On the shelf’ — that is, put into store because nobody wants it — comes a bit later, in the late 1830s, but the basic idea is the same: women who don’t marry are failures.

Indeed, I can’t help but feel that, since men held all the power in a marriage relationship, they needed such insulting attitudes to corral women who would otherwise refuse to be part of the marriage market. (Of course, any romance writer could have told them that a modicum of respect and affection would better serve their purposes.)

It’s hard to tell how many women were single. Marital status was not systematically collected in statistics until the middle of the century. But at that time, one in three women were not married. Florence Nightingale commented on the general belief that women had no more important role than to marry and have children.

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except “suckling their fools”; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world as others, but that they can throw it up at the first “claim of social life”. They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their “duty” to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

Women never have an half-hour in all their lives (except before and after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have “no time in the day to themselves”.

The family? It is too narrow a field for the development of an immortal spirit, be that spirit male or female. The family uses people, not for what they are, not for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants for – its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be. This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery.

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Most of the women in Storm & Shelter are past the Regency concept of the marital use-by date, and at least two are certain they will never marry.  The book is on presale and to be published next Tuesday. Grab it while it is only 99c, and read about the two fleeing heiresses, one of them ‘ruined’, the widow, the pirate, the teacher, and the lady’s maid. And more. Eight great novellas.

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Before the assembly line

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the numbers of horses that post inns in the Regency needed to have to provide the fresh horses needed by travellers. Another point that seemed startling to me the first time I heard it pointed out, and that is nonetheless blinding obvious is that carriages were mostly made to order, and each was individually crafted. No assembly line back in those days. No ordering a Kia Nero or a Toyota Hi Ace, and having nothing to pick but the colour.

Just think about the implications of that. Your furniture would probably be made by the local carpenter (unless you were handy, in which case you might do it yourself, or wealthy, so could afford to buy from one of the elite furniture makers). Perhaps the man in the next village had a name for his chairs, and you might save up and take a trip there next time your brother-in-law could loan you his cart. Which, by the way, would itself have been probably been purchased from the maker.

I find it somewhat mind boggling. In New Zealand, and I am assuming in other parts of the world, if we buy a house that hasn’t been built yet, we assume we’ll be able to move a door here or there, upgrade the tapware, change the size of the kitchen island, shell out a bit more for a conservatory instead of a deck.

As I noted several years back in a post about carriages.

Carriages, even more than custom-made cars today, varied according to the needs and tastes of the owner around certain defined features. Number of wheels. Number of passengers. Seat for a driver-groom or not. Type of axle, wheel, and spring. Height from the ground. Open or closed. Rain cover or no cover. One horse, two, or up to six. And lots more.

Imagine that being the case with your carriage, your saddle, your furnishings, your clothing, even. Very little ready to walk out the door of the shop with the purchaser; most of it custom made, though increasingly factory production was being used to turn out cheaper and more uniform goods for what was called at the time ‘the middle sort’ — those who occupied the economic territory between the poor, who made do with second hand or cast offs or went without, and the gentlefolk, who at least tried to maintain the appearance of wealth, even if the substance wasn’t there.

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Research in the background

River Alde near Aldeburgh Suffolk, one of the sources for Storm & Shelter’s fictional village of Fenwick on Sea

Research helps me to keep my fictional world contract with my readers. All fiction requires readers to suspend disbelief—to accept the reality of the story while they are reading. The writer’s part of the contract is not to jar the reader out of that disbelief.

Since I write historical fiction, that means creating historical worlds that are a recognisable simulacrum of the setting I’ve used and people of the type I’ve use in that particular place and time. And that means research.

In my Children of the Mountain King series, research took me to Iran in the (European) eighteenth century. The fall of one dynasty and the rise of another became part of the plot. So did the Kopet Dag Mountains north of Iran, and the Silk Road, some arms of which pass through those mountains.

I watched movies, documentaries and YouTube clips to get the feel for those places, and read contempary and more recent books about them.

For the first novel, I also read up on Akhal Teke horses, the modern day descendants of the Turkmen horses that were famous for their endurance, faithfulness, and intelligence. The second took me into medical training in the Middle East and Central Asia, and required a close examination of smallpox symptoms, historical treatment and likely progress.

That second novel comes out in less than a fortnight.

Storm & Shelter, the anthology that comes out next month represented a different kind of challenge. Because all eight of us were writing stories set in the same village, using common characters and settings and the same storm, we needed a common body of research.

The story resource we came up with included:

  • a list of historical events in the time period of the stories
  • accounts of historical floods in the area chosen for our fictional village
  • images and descriptions of buildings typical of the area at the time of our setting
  • maps and floor plans adapted from real world originals
  • and more.

All of that needed research. Here, from our story resource, is the fictional setting that resulted.

The village of Fenwick on Sea lies scattered along a road that sprawls along the peninsula between a coastal beach and the river that was once its reason for being. An inlet still remains where the river was, a harbour for the fishing fleet and the occasional ship, blown of course by the irascable North Sea winds. The river itself is long gone, moving like a disgruntled lover to a more favoured town much further north.

The village sprawls across the boundaries that once could barely contain a bustling town, dreaming of past glories. The network of causeways that once criss-crossed the salt marshes has dwindled to a single road from more inland regions. The coastal road turns where once a bridge crossed the faithless river, to skirt the inlet and continue north until it eventually reaches Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

Many of the public buildings recall more populous times, not least the Norman church and the Tudor inn, The Queen’s Barque. Most of the cottages of the former town have tumbled to ruin, many now obliterated by the thrift of the surviving villagers, past and present, who have pressed their materials into use. The nucleus of the town comprises the church and its vicarage, the inn and two rows of cottages, one half-timbered with a slate/tile roof and one plastered with a thatched roof. One of the cottages has a general store on the ground floor.

A mere twenty families still eke out an existence fishing, farming, providing goods and services to one another, or all three. Most of the young men have gone to war in the navy or the army. Of those who remain, more than a couple support the local smuggling enterprises alongside their parents and grandparents.  The inn also serves as a brewery and a bakery. The village has a farrier and a general store.

The village also serves an even more scattered population of farms that combine crops and livestock, grazing cattle in the marshes and sheep on the sandy heaths. They grow grain, and particularly barley and wheat, but even the high demand for grain caused by the war has not helped to make them prosperous, as the landholdings are small, and distances to market across rough roads make selling their produce hard.

There is a local manor; a minor house of a peer who has many. Neither he nor his family have visited in many years. The house is half a mile from the village, on a knoll between the vanished river and the coast, and is kept in order by a staff comprising a housekeeper and half a dozen servants. The housekeeper regards herself as the highest ranked lady in the district, and the keeper of public morals, and has a cadre of supporters. The innkeeper’s wife forms the nucleus of those who oppose her pretensions. If the vicar had a wife, she would outrank them both, but even so, both ladies are more than willing to help him find one.

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Horses for hire

Land travel in Regency England required negotiating rough roads and weather on foot, or on an animal or a vehicle pulled by an animal. Anyone with the money could purchase a seat on a stage coach, or even the mail coach if speed was more important than comfort.

More money would get you a post chaise – a hired carriage that took you from the inn where you hired it as far as the owning company agreed to go. With your post chaise, you also got one or more post riders who worked for the owning company, who rode the horses or maybe alongside the horses, and took the post chaise back when you’d finished it.

Wealthy travelers preferred the convenience of their own carriage. Not only were private carriages likely to be better sprung and better fitted out with every convenience, but on a long trip the travelers wouldn’t have to change carriages when reaching the boundaries of a hire company’s territory.

With all three types of traveler on the road, a staggering number of horses were needed to keep them moving. Each team could manage perhaps 10 or 15 miles before tiring, depending on terrain and conditions, and then the carriage would need to stop and have the team replaced with a fresh one.

At the height of the period, an inn on a popular route might have up to 2,000 horses available for hire, or being boarded on behalf of wealthy travell\ers who preferred their own horses and could afford to send them on ahead for a planned journey.

In Storm & Shelter, floods and slips force many travelers to interrupt their travel at the coaching inn in Fenwick on Sea.  Storm & Shelter is the latest anthology of novellas from the Bluestocking Belles, this time with novellas from friends Grace Burrowes, Mary Lancaster, Alina K. Field. It is 99c until publication on 13 April.

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Ring vaccination and the eradication of smallpox

Lines snaked around New York streets when a 1947 outbreak of smallpox led to vaccination of 6 million people in less than a month.

The eradication of smallpox is the one undisputed success story in the long history of humankind’s fight against disease.

Undisputed, did I say? That smallpox is gone is beyond a doubt. No-one has seen it outside of a laboratory since 1977,  which makes the last case almost old enough to be historical, if one of us were to write a book about it. (Fifty years or more before the present day is usually suggested as the timespan for ‘Historical’, though we might want to review that in the light of how different the ’70s and ’80s are from the present.)

Yet some argue that vaccination was not the reason for the disappearance of the disease; that it was getting milder as the population grew healthier; that even at its height, the vaccination campaign only reached 10% of the populations of the countries were vigorous vaccination campaigns took place.

Some smallpox was always milder

Point 1: as I discovered when I researched smallpox for To Mend the Broken-Hearted, smallpox always came in two varieties. Variola minor had a death rate of 1%; variola major, on the other hand, killed 30% on average. It’s true that, by the mid-20th century, variola minor was the predominant strain in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, variola major continued to scythe its way through communities in the rest of the world, killing 300 million people and occasionally making a visit to the supposedly safer countries, courtesy of international travel. Here are just two examples. An overseas visitor to New York started a massive vaccination campaign in 1947, after he infected 12 people. Two, including the visitor, died.  In 1962, a traveller from Pakistan started a smallpox outbreak in Wales.

Twenty-five people contracted smallpox, and six of them died, including a nine-month-old baby. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml]

In the late 1950s, the World Health Organisation decided the only way to protect the world from such events was to eradicate the disease. Smallpox was ideal for the attempt. [https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/disease-eradication]

  1. It was easy to recognise. Patients develop a distinctive rash. Time from exposure to rash is short, so the disease usually can’t spread very far before someone notices it.
  2. Only humans can transmit and catch smallpox. Many illnesses have an animal species they can also infect, so the disease can hide there and jump back to humans under the right conditions.
  3. After surviving smallpox or being immunised, people are protected for a lifetime.

Ring vaccination

Which brings us to point 2. Carefully managed, 10% was enough.

The WHO strategy was to track down every contact of every smallpox case they found, and vaccinate them, thus putting a ring of immune people around the live disease. It’s as simple as that. With a disease that meets the three criteria above, you don’t need herd immunity across the entire population. You simply need to get rid of any case you find by ring-fencing it with people who can’t get smallpox, and therefore can’t pass it on.

Quarantine is essentially the same strategy: you take away any chance smallpox has to jump to a new human host, and the disease dies (at least in that vicinity) when those being treated either recover or die. Except that quarantine tends to  be expensive, time consuming, and leaky. Vaccines work better.

In 1977, the last patient in the world to catch smallpox outside of the lab was diagnosed in Somalia.

Ali Maow Maalin, a 23-year-old hospital cook in Merca, had never been successfully vaccinated. After his diagnosis, an intensive tracing and vaccination campaign led to 54,777 people being vaccinated in the next two weeks. The disease was cornered, with no vulnerable hosts nearby to spread to.

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The sex workers of Regency England

In Georgian England, according to Dan Cruickshank’s The Secret History of Georgian London, one in five women in London earned income from the sale of sex. He called London:

‘a vast, hostile, soulless, wicked all-devouring but also fatally attractive place that makes and breaks, that tempts, inflames, satisfies, yet corrupts and ultimately kills’.

A ban on keeping a brothel was passed into law as early as 1751, but prostitution was not made an imprisoning offence until the 1820s. (Not that the new law stopped the trade, of course, but it did largely drive it off the streets, at least in the more gentile parts of town.)

With no regulation, there are no reliable statistics. Estimates made at the time defined unmarried women living with their partners as prostitutes, and also assumptions about a woman might be based on as little as how high she held her skirts to avoid the fetid rubbish in the streets. While 50,000 (one late 18th century estimate by a judge) is probably well over the top, 20,000 might well be true. Guides to the whores and brothels of London, newssheet accounts and cartoons of the fashionable courtesans at the peak of the trade, their own narratives, and other contemporary records assure us that the sex trade was a thriving part of the economy at the time, and continued to be so in the first decades of the 19th century.

Who worked in the sex trade?

Sex workers—defined as those who made some or part of their living by selling sex—ranged from those offering a quick bang up against a wall in a slum alley to those  accepting gifts from hopeful admirers while mixing on the fringes of Society. And everything in between.

Most prostitutes seem to have been working class girls who, having surrendered their virtue to a man of their own class, sought some profit from their lapse. One woman said:

‘she had got tired of service, wanted to see life and be independent; & so she had become a prostitute… She… enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her & perhaps be profitable’

Which it was, giving her enough savings to purchase a coffee house and set up in business. For others, prostitution was seasonal, or a temporary reaction to a financial crisis. Many worked for a year or two, then took their savings home, and married or set up in business. Prostitution might also be a way to supplement income from another job; seamstresses and milliners, in particular, were so poorly paid that many of them sold their bodies as well. So much so, that many took it for granted that all seamstresses and milliners offered sexual services on request, which must have made walking home after work a fraught exercise for those who didn’t.

Where could you find them?

Prostitutes were scattered throughout London. Those who worked in wealthier areas, such as the West End, were more likely to find wealthy clients, and those with bit parts in the theatre, who then—as now—might be turned off in a moment if the performance did not please the audience, were well positioned to find a wealthy admirer to keep them in the style to which they would like to become accustomed.

They tended to gather in areas with looser police control; when the police became stricter in the City of London in the eighteenth century, the prostitutes gravitated toward the west and east ends of the city; when police control loosened in the early nineteenth century, they returned to the City. Prostitutes also tended to congregate in areas with cheap lodging houses and lots of men. St. Giles and St. James, home to many cheap boardinghouses, were popular with prostitutes in Westminster; the Docks, where many sailors disembarked, was popular on the east side of the city. – Prostitutes in 18th-Century London

Sir John Fielding, the magistrate, called Covent Garden ‘the great square of Venus’. He said, ‘One would imagine that all the prostitutes in the kingdom had picked upon the rendezvous’. – Prostitution in Maritime London

Rewards—and risks

A clever, pretty, talented girl could hope to attract a generous protector, perhaps even an admirer so besotted he would marry her. It happened, though rarely. More commonly, a man would set his mistress up in a house or apartment, and visit her when he was at leisure until he tired of her or she of him.

Many sex workers, if not most, were in less fortunate circumstances. Those running the brothels sought constantly for fresh girls to please the appetites of their customers. A girl who accepted a job, or even a bed for the night, might find herself put to work whether she wished or not, her virginity auctioned to the highest bidder, and her share of the income withheld to pay for her food, board, clothing, and whatever else the brothel-keeper could imagine.

(I say ‘her’, but of course the same applies to male sex workers, though—homosexuality being illegal—we have little information about their lives, and that little from court records.)

The risks were great. Contraception was very hit and miss, if used at all. Pregnancy must have been a constant worry. ‘Pulling out’ was the most common method for avoiding unwanted children, and was as effective then as it is now (which is to say, not very). Protective ‘Machines’—condoms made from oiled cloth or the intestines of various animals—were available, though men were more likely to use them to avoid disease than to prevent pregnancy. And they were probably better at the second, since water could go right through them and they tended to tear.

Various methods were used to abort unwanted pregnancies, many of them just as likely to kill the mother. A baby could be born alive but then killed, or put out to a baby farmer so that the mother could return to work. A mistress of a single protector might be in a slightly stronger position if the child’s father was willing to keep the mother on. Some men—and not just royal princes—had quite large families by their mistresses.

Disease was the other big fear, for both the sex workers and their clients. Gonorrhea and syphilis were treated with ointments containing mercury, the toxic effects of which could be as dangerous as the diseases. Side effects included kidney failure, severe mouth ulcers, nerve damage, and loss of teeth. On the other hand, untreated syphilis ends in abcesses, ulcers, severe debility, and madness or death. And gonorrhea can spread to the blood and eventually kill. So not good choices.

Not usually a ticket to a better life

And if a sex worker survived these scourges, age was just around the corner. Cosmetics could be used to keep the appearance of beauty, but they had their own dangers. The white pigment used to colour face foundation was very toxic, being lead-based. Rouge might be made of tin. But slow poisoning being better than fast starvation, women painted anyway.

Even those with wildly successful careers seldom came to good ends. Many—probably most—died young. Some married. Some set up in business for themselves and retired rich. And some, like Harriet Wilson, became penniless as their appeal faded. Harriet famously responded by publishing her memoirs, having first warned all her former lovers, and taken out those who refused to pay.

Sadly, the fortune she earned was squandered by the scoundrel she subsequently married, and she died in poverty in France.

Sources

  1. Daniel Cruikshank London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London
  2. Judith Flanders
  3. Vic
  4. Heather Carroll
  5. John Frith