A History of Courtship by Tania O'Donnell

Author:Tania O'Donnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

A well-dressed client inspects the prostitutes at a brothel, 1884. (Wellcome Library, London)

He also openly advises labourers to rape any lower class woman who takes their fancy, since her ‘shyness’ needs to be overcome. ‘And if you should, by chance, fall in love with some of their women, be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force.’ Given that this advice is coming from a clergyman, one can see the open contempt that the nobility had for the peasantry. They were perceived as little more than animals to abuse and abandon.

In 1728, John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera, a satirical ballad opera, which in one verse presented the sanitised view of prostitutes: as young girls abandoned and forced to sell sex on the streets of Covent Garden:

Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre,

Which in the garden enamels the ground;

Near it the bees in play flutter and cluster,

And gaudy butterflies frolic around;

But, when once pluck’d, ’tis no longer alluring,

To Covent-garden ‘tis sent, (as yet sweet).

There fades and shrinks, and grows past all enduring,

Rots, stinks, and dies, and is trod under feet.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published between 1757 and 1795, seems to almost gleefully and titillatingly document the fall of women who were seduced and abandoned by men. For example a Miss Les-r of 23 Upper Newman Street has this entry:

‘This lady was a few years since, a servant in a gentleman’s family, near Holborn: in which capacity she used frequently to walk for the air, with her little ward, in Gray’s Inn Gardens. A certain gentleman of the law, perceiving a very fine girl, which she was at that time, often in the walks, took the opportunity of conversing with her, and soon after persuaded her to come and make some tea for him in his chambers. The sequel, it were needless to relate: she was debauched, and soon after deserted by her betrayer. The consequence of which was, having lost her place, and being destitute of character, she was obliged to have recourse to her beauty for a subsistence. She took lodgings near Red Lyon Square, and had a number of successive admirers. She was, at this time, not about twenty; tall and well made, with a fine open expressive countenance, large amorous eyes; her other features in due symmetry; her mouth very agreeable, and her teeth regular; in a word, she was at that time one of the finest women upon the town, and, accordingly, made one of the best figures from the emoluments of her employments. She was some time after taken into keeping by a man of fortune, with whom she made a summer excursion into the country; but, upon his demise, her finances being exhausted, she was compelled to have recourse to a more general commerce, in which she has not been so successful, as before; and chagrin added

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