Shopgirls Page 7
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.36
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’.37
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.38 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’.39 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’.40
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.41
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 hi
t the national news headlines, making her a cause célèbre.42
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’.43 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.’44
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.
A fashionably dressed shopgirl, reading while she walks, photographed by Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne.
CHAPTER 3
SCANDALOUS SHOPGIRLS
The violets were the last straw. Years later Harriet Whiteley recalled how her husband had come home one summer’s day carrying a small bunch of flowers. She had heard enough rumours about his predilection for his own shopgirls and had written him a pleading letter, asking him to avoid public scandal and think of their four children. In private Harriet and William were already leading rather separate lives and he often travelled to the coast for the weekend instead of joining his family in their country home, Manor Farm, in Finchley, then a rural parish to the north of London. But when he dared come home with violets and unashamedly explained that they were from one of his shopgirls – ‘plucked by her own dear little fingers’ – Harriet could take it no more: ‘I couldn’t have them in the place, and I threw them away.’1
From this point onwards, Harriet and William Whiteley’s marriage of fourteen years unravelled still further. They rowed and Harriet packed up the younger children with their governess, Miss Tollputt, and left for Folkestone, where the eldest child was at school. As the outspoken newspapers helpfully reported, this sparked ‘rumours with a thousand tongues’. The next month, in August 1881, Harriet filed for judicial separation, on the grounds of adultery and cruelty.2
‘The Great Whiteley Divorce’ screamed the headlines, and over the coming months the intensive coverage of the ‘Whiteley vs. Whiteley’ scandal sold thousands of extra newspapers. When Harriet appeared in court in order to retain custody of the children, she was veiled, with a blanched face and tearful eyes. What Harriet stated in her divorce petition was the stuff of clichéd romance. Shopgirl Alice Allen, known as Daisy, had caught Whiteley’s roving eye. He had wooed her in the store, with Whiteley and Daisy often alone together in his private room – where Harriet claimed that adultery had taken place. With his family safe in the capital, Whiteley had whisked Daisy off for weekends in Tunbridge Wells and in Hastings – it was all rather blatant.
The ensuing collapse of the Whiteley marriage and the characters caught up in the saga fed the Bayswater rumour-mill. A year later the Whiteleys settled just before their divorce was to be heard in court, with Harriet receiving an alimony of £2,000 annually. A young woman – presumably Daisy – who had worked at Whiteley’s for nine years and who had been subpoenaed to give evidence for Harriet, was sacked the moment she returned to work with a note saying she should apply to the cashier for her remaining wages.
Daisy’s story chimed perfectly with the perspective of the times. The public image of the girl behind the counter was not of a demure and callow innocent. In the musical comedy The Girl from Kay’s, staged a few years later, Nancy, Mary, Cora, Mabel and Hilda made up the shopgirl chorus. They sang of being ‘goody, goody little girls’ who nonetheless were going to be ‘naughty, till we’re getting on for forty … we like a bit of Life!’. Flirtatious and mischievous, yet wanting to become good wives – this was a difficult balancing act within the strictures of late Victorian society. Women were depicted on the one hand as virtuous and tender ministering saints, chaste before and even within marriage, where sex was for procreation only and not an activity to be enjoyed. On the other hand was the feared, notorious figure of the prostitute and her imitators, described as oversexed, luxurious and diseased. Angels or the devil’s temptresses: the middle ground was difficult and dangerous to negotiate.
And it was onto these shifting sands that the newly independent, earning, attractively dressed young women serving behind the counter were set to tread.
As the real-life Nancys, Mabels and Hildas flooded into stores and behind the counters, they swelled the ranks of shopgirls to hundreds of thousands and formed a whole new category of working women. In the ever-growing Victorian cities, crowded and bustling, shopgirls were a highly visible new workforce. They were agents of change, both because there were so many of them and because they had working lives and leisure time unlike any who had come before.
Shopping itself was changing and the foundations of how we shop today were being laid. A monumental shift was occurring in the way retailers thought about shopping. Female customers had always been important; when shopping for their families, wives were usually the decision-makers in terms
of provisioning the household and clothing their kin, even if it was the husband or at least the husband’s wage packet that was ultimately used to pay off the credit weeks or months later. But now the shopping entrepreneurs decided to elevate the female customer to new heights: she should take centre stage, for the key to commercial success lay with her.
In 1892 a large fire destroyed Jenners in Edinburgh, the oldest department store in Scotland. Founder Charles Jenner was by now an old man, but his entrepreneurial zeal remained undiminished. He chose the architect for the redesign and oversaw the project, fireproofing the building with an iron and steel frame and introducing modern electric lights, hydraulic lifts and even air-conditioning. Britain’s leading architectural photographer, Henry Bedford Lemere, took a stunning series of photos of the still-empty new interior, capturing this masterpiece of Victorian Art Nouveau.3 Diffuse sunlight from the central lightwell softly lit up ornate balustrades, Corinthian columns and swirling milk-glass electric chandeliers. The delicate high chairs in the haberdashery department were waiting for the first customers, standing tall at counters displaying lace, handkerchiefs and shawls.
The redesign was an unmitigated success. On the day of the store’s reopening, 25,000 visitors flocked to the Princes Street and South St David’s Street entrances. The façade that confronted them featured carved figures propping up columns and standing on balconies. Female figures. They were caryatids representing the countries Jenners serviced: Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Germany and America. The message was clear: women were at the core of his business. Without them, the edifice of Jenner’s store, his enterprise employing hundreds of people and the high-quality service offered to shoppers across the world would crumble.
Jenner was absolutely correct. As the middle classes had become richer over the course of the century, shopping for them had developed into a female-orientated activity, even a leisure pursuit, a status symbol of wealth as well as a functional necessity. Writer Anthony Trollope observed this in his articles on London tradesmen, describing the great firms of his day, the Marshalls and Snellgroves, the Meekings and the Whiteleys, with their largely female clientele. ‘Send a man alone out into the world to buy a pair of gloves,’ wrote Trollope, ‘and he will go to some discreet and modest glove shop from which when he has paid his 3s 6d over the counter he can walk away.’ His wife, Trollope countered, preferred one of the big stores where, as well as buying gloves, she can ‘lounge there, and talk, and be surrounded by pretty things’.4 Jeanette Marshall was one such wife from a professional family and her diaries in the 1870s and 1880s show that her weekday walk combined both exercise and shopping, visiting Lewis’s, one of the co-operatives or Liberty’s most days. It was rare that she exclaimed, ‘For a wonder, did not buy anything at Lewis’s or elsewhere!’5