Authors: Pamela Cox
In the 1820s, the Burlington had advertised for ‘professional beauties’ to work in its shops and add to their allure. Those hired almost certainly sold discreet sexual services from lodgings above the premises as well, while the beadles turned a blind eye. Trade was brisk. Located on a block bounded by Piccadilly, Regent Street and Bond Street, the Burlington was at the centre of London’s fashionable bachelor quarter, an area buzzing with gentlemen’s clubs, chambers, chop houses, coffee shops and rented rooms.
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West End prostitution had long been a part of this pleasure zone that took in Mayfair and Marylebone and served super-rich male clients including peers, politicians, professionals and dandies.
Young women became ‘professional beauties’ in the Burlington and elsewhere through a variety of routes. Some were doubtless attracted by the money and the lavish lifestyle and may even have seen it as their vocation. Others, however, had clearly been duped and even trafficked from the Continent, as court records reveal. In 1854, Frenchman Monsieur Germain Marmaysee appeared at the Court of Common Pleas in central London. The case against him had been brought by one of his employees, Miss Margaret Reginbal, who accused him of stealing her clothes and withholding £70 of her earnings from her – a high wage by any standard at the time but especially high for a young woman. She had been brought to London from France by Monsieur Marmaysee to work, or so she thought, as an assistant in a perfumier’s but then found there was another, darker side to the deal. She was expected to become a prostitute. Whether or not she knew what she had signed up for, after around six months of it, she escaped, but was unable to retrieve her clothes or any payment. This must have happened innumerable times to innumerable ‘shopgirls’. But this one, Miss Reginbal, took the unusual step of going to the police and shopping her pimp. Further investigation revealed that Miss Reginbal shared her lodgings with at least nine other young ‘servants’, eight of them from France, and that Monsieur Marmaysee himself made frequent trips back and forth across the Channel to procure fresh flesh. He was found guilty but avoided imprisonment and left the country.
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Court cases like these, and many others, show that prostitution was part and parcel of British urban life. But according to the official census reports, it didn’t exist. The only women whose occupation is recorded as ‘common prostitute’ were those who spent census night under arrest in police cells. A ‘professional beauty’ residing in the Burlington Arcade would have appeared as ‘milliner’ or ‘dressmaker’ or ‘shop assistant’ or, like Miss Reginbal perhaps, ‘perfumier’s assistant’. The true scale of prostitution in Britain was thus concealed by self-censoring census entries. But self-censoring was only part of the story because the majority of women involved in sex work were indeed also respectably, if not gainfully, employed in precisely these kinds of female trades; trades that employed young women to make the goods destined for the shops as well as to sell them in those shops.
These connections have been made by using crime records to unlock a more secret census. Official census reports were edited from pages and pages of raw notes made by census enumerators who went from house to house and street to street. When the original enumerators’ notes are read against local court records, however, the scale and true nature of Victorian sex work starts to slide into view. In 1841, another Frenchman, Timothe Cheval, was prosecuted for keeping a brothel. He lived at 15 Norton Street in the West End with his son and six young women, all French, all aged between fifteen and twenty years, and all listed in the census of that year as ‘dressmakers’. In another case, Thomas Dorval was prosecuted soon after for the same offence. He gave his address as 67 Newman Street in Marylebone – a well-known red-light area and also home to Germain Marmaysee. The census shows that a few houses along, four milliners shared a house with three live-in servants. Given that four milliners were unlikely to be able to afford to pay three staff, it is highly likely that all seven women were sex workers.
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But this ‘open secret’ sex trade was not just a feature of the capital’s consumer economy. In peaceful provincial Worcester, an anonymous whistleblower revealed the shocking truth behind the city’s famous glove trade. At the time, the city still produced most of the country’s gloves, famed for their quality and durability. The Glover’s Needle remains one of the city’s most well-known landmarks today. But in a letter in 1852 to
Reynolds’s Newspaper
signed only ‘Yours respectfully, Humanitas’, the dire position of the gloveress was exposed. ‘One of these poor girls informed me the other day that, after working all the week, at the average rate of sixteen hours per day … she received 4s, out of which she has to pay 1s 2d for silk, the remaining 2s 10d being left to pay lodgings, coal, candle, and to
subsist
upon!’ In these circumstances, many went out ‘by owl-light to prostitute themselves to make up for the robbery they have sustained from the unprincipled, fiend-like employers’. Across the city, it was ‘a common saying, “that gloving is only a cloak for something worse”’. Humanitas concluded that ‘to be a gloveress is enough to stamp them with no enviable fame’.
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This whistleblower was unusual in linking sex work with women’s low wages. While prostitution was certainly seen as the greatest vice of the Victorian age, it tended to be cast as a problem caused by immoral prostitutes themselves and the sexual temptations they posed. Men who succumbed were castigated by social commentators but their moral lapse was seen to be rooted in, and justified by, their natural physical urges. Only a small handful of reformers suggested women might be driven to prostitution because of ‘cruel, biting poverty’ and that the fault lay with mankind, not womankind.
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Among these were a few doctors like William Acton and early feminists like Harriet Martineau. Others, like Scottish surgeon William Tait, made a similar link but took a harder line: some women might be pushed into prostitution to make ends meet but others actively chose it as an indulgence, to pay for the fineries in life. In the 1840s, Tait authored
An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes and Consequences of Prostitution in Edinburgh.
He acknowledged that working-class women faced sharp unemployment and extremely low wages with ‘sewers, dressmakers, milliners, bonnet-makers, stay-makers, colourers, book-stitchers, shoe-binders and hat-binders’ earning an average of just six shillings per week. He was even moved to ask, ‘How can a woman maintain herself if she is paid so little for her work?’, citing the particularly reprehensible example of ‘one shopkeeper in the Lawnmarket’ who ‘paid only 3d for a man’s shirt’.
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And yet, Tait still maintained that the ‘natural causes’ of prostitution were a young woman’s licentious desires, pride, covetousness and love of dress. Some he labelled ‘
femmes galantes
’, a reference to the sumptuously attired, feted and admired courtesans that he believed some young women tried to imitate.
Men like Tait saw a clear connection between consumerism, shopping and sex. Court cases like those involving the West End brothels had seemingly proved this connection beyond doubt. Now, newspapers like
The Morning Post
found further evidence. In January 1859, it calculated that one small network of the capital’s streets had ‘no less than 149 notorious houses of ill fame containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of prostitution was swelled by a large number of young women lodging in the districts who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by working for shops, but principally by the wages of night prostitution’.
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In the decades that followed, reformers made huge efforts to tackle prostitution. Some campaigned for its total eradication through moral restraint. Others, however, started to take a more pragmatic line. They believed that prostitution could never be eradicated but that it could be contained and cleaned up. The year 1864 saw Parliament pass one of the most hotly debated pieces of legislation of the times: the first Contagious Diseases Act. It did not outlaw prostitution. Instead it effectively set up zones around key military towns and naval ports where women would be allowed to practise prostitution provided that they were registered and submitted to regular gynaecological checks. The checks included vaginal examination with a speculum and were intended to curb the spread of venereal diseases, then rife across the country and rampant in the armed forces. If found to be infected, the woman had to agree to be admitted to a lock hospital where she would stay until cured, if a cure was indeed possible. Even if they could see the logic, most people were appalled at the prospect of what was effectively licensed prostitution, despite the fact that this was common on the Continent. To feminists like Harriet Martineau, it seemed to give men licence to treat women however they liked – to pay them low wages, to push them into prostitution and then to curtail their liberty in a lock ward. Like thousands of others, she was further appalled by another implication of the Act: that
any
woman going about her business in these zones, maybe returning home from visiting friends or from a late-night trip to town, and merely
suspected
of being a prostitute, could also be subjected to the speculum. In 1869, together with Josephine Butler, she set up the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. It quickly became one of the biggest lobby groups in a generation. Over the next decade and a half it would submit over seventeen thousand petitions to Parliament, bearing over two million signatures. In 1886, over twenty years later, Parliament listened and repealed the hated legislation.
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But the very next year, the case of a Lincolnshire seamstress would reignite the debate about women’s freedom of movement. Elizabeth Cass, twenty-four years old, was a mantle cutter from Stockton. In the spring of 1887 she moved to London and had just started a new job with a Mrs Bowman in her dressmaking business on Southampton Row. All went smoothly until one evening in June when she went window shopping on Regent Street and was roughly arrested on suspicion of common prostitution. The arresting officer, PC Endacott, claimed he had seen her ‘soliciting gentlemen’ both that evening and on previous occasions. Miss Cass strongly denied the charges and was backed by an outraged Mrs Bowman, who put up bail and later lodged an official complaint. She was let off and discharged with a warning but she wasn’t satisfied as she felt her reputation had been destroyed. Her attempt to prosecute PC Endacott for perjury failed but hit the national news headlines, making her a cause célèbre.
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Many Regent Street tradesmen supported her. After all, her reputation was tied to theirs. In July 1887, over forty of them held a meeting in the banqueting hall of the St James’s Restaurant to vent their anger at Robert Newton, the stipendiary magistrate at Marlborough Street police court who had presided over the case. Mr Newton had dismissed Miss Cass with a warning but the traders believed that this in itself sent out a woeful message to other women: that they browsed the capital’s brightly lit shop windows after dark at their peril. That could only be bad for business. The traders complained that Newton had sent a similar message when he had previously fined a group of ‘well-dressed females’ and issued them a stern rebuke: ‘You were in Regent Street after ten, and you should not be.’ From the traders’ perspective, such magisterial decrees meant that, in effect, ‘at ten o’clock every night a Black Flag were hoisted at either end of one of the most magnificent thoroughfares in London’, setting it apart ‘as a happy hunting ground for the debauchees of the town’. As they saw it, ‘if the police may arrest and a magistrate imprison every woman in Regent Street after ten – then,
a fortiori
, every woman, especially if she be young and pretty, is fair game for the fast man about town’.
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In other words, Mr Newton’s efforts to curb prostitution by enforcing his own personal female curfew would endanger perfectly respectable women – and shopkeepers’ profits.
Yet no one could deny that prostitution
was
endemic around Regent Street. It may have been one of London’s premier shopping parades, but it was also one of its premier pick-up joints. A few months before the Cass case, another former shopgirl who had started off in an Edinburgh store had written a startling letter to the Duke of Westminster, an influential member of the Vigilance Committee of London, an organisation dedicated to the suppression of prostitution. Her story countered that of Miss Cass: she
had
found herself headed towards prostitution:
Before I was married I had to get my own living. I had some experience at a large house in Edinburgh; left there and came to London in order to be near my parents, and about two years ago applied for a situation at a fashionable milliner’s in Regent Street. I saw the master, who examined my reference, found it satisfactory, and offered to engage me at so small a salary that I said, ‘It is impossible, it would not buy my clothes.’ To which he replied, ‘Oh, a girl with a figure like yours can easily pick up a good deal more than that in London. All our young ladies have latch-keys, and we ask no questions.’
She had a question of her own, however, for the Duke: ‘Don’t you think if men like this can be dealt with it would do more good than trying to convert girls who have been forced on to the streets?’ She ended the letter: ‘I have often longed to make this, my own experience, public, but dared not so long as my living depended upon the shopkeepers.’
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Soon after this and the Cass case, the nation would be gripped by the gruesome murders of ‘common prostitutes’ by Jack the Ripper in the capital’s destitute East End. At the same time, a high-class sex trade was thriving in its decadent West End, operating under the cover of ‘respectable’ feminine trades. It was a pattern that was likely repeated in other cities. The true scale of Victorian shopgirls’ involvement in prostitution will remain a mystery. They themselves, as well as the shopkeepers and their suppliers, had a clear interest in covering their tracks. As a result, the small amount of documentary evidence that exists linking shops and the sex trade provides but a hint of the true scale of the issue. The relentless rumours on this topic raised continual questions about shopgirls’ respectability and fuelled endless fantasies about what some might be prepared to sell.