London: The Biography

Of course such treatment was the prerogative of rich or well-connected families; the notions of liberty, on the streets, meant different things. So the same foreign observer suggested that “many witches are found in London, who frequently do much mischief by means of hail and tempest”; he seems here to be invoking an irrational fear of women, a disturbance which the experience of the city itself appears to engender. Records of the seventeenth century suggest that the troubling spirit was not curbed. One stranger to London wrote that he had sometimes met in the streets “a woman carrying a figure of straw representing a man, crowned with very ample horns, preceded by a drum and followed by a mob, making a most grating noise with tongs, grid-irons, frying pans and saucepans. I asked what was the meaning of all this: they told me, that a woman had given her husband a sound beating, for accusing her of making him a cuckold.” That example of violence can be followed by another, when “some of our party saw a wicked woman in a rage with an individual supposed to belong to the Spanish embassy. She urged the crowd to mob him, setting the example by belabouring him herself with a cabbage stalk.” And, again in another report, “the English seem to fear the company of women.” The women of London “are the most dangerous women in the world.” This may or may not be accurate, but for all the harshness there was also gaiety. Another traveller noted “what is particularly curious is that the women as well as the men, in fact more often than they, will frequent the taverns or ale-houses for enjoyment. They count it a great honour to be taken there and given wine with sugar to drink: and if one woman only is invited, then she will bring three or four other women along and they gaily toast each other.”

There were less happy circumstances. For every engraving of a matron, or merchant’s wife, there are pictures of women who are almost literally slaves of the city.

It was the tradition that women sold perishable goods, such as fruit and milk, whereas men customarily sold durable or solid articles; perhaps it was an obscured representation of the fact that, in the city, the women themselves were more perishable. The street-sellers depicted by Marcellus Laroon in the 1680s form a remarkable collection of urban types. A seller of strawberries, wearing a loose hood, looks curiously pensive. A crippled woman selling fish has an unutterably weary face, although Laroon’s editor and commentator, Sean Shesgreen, remarks that she is “dressed in an eccentrically stylish way … careful and even fastidious about her appearance”; it is a curiously London mixture of theatricality and pathos. The seller of “great Eeles” is lively and more alert, with an expression so quizzical and yet so wary that she might be ready to see, or hear, anything as she made her way through the streets. Single women were certainly vulnerable to every kind of attention and even molestation. The female seller of wax is “a study in melancholy, she wears an impassive almost stupid look and walks with a wooden gait.” Her clothes are “tattered and run-down, patched in various places and eaten away at the sleeves.” Here is a woman brutalised by the city into a state of indifference and neglect. The seller of apples has a peculiar sneer upon her face, as if demonstrating her contempt either for her customers or for her calling. The “merry Milk Maid” is anything but merry. The female mackerel-seller, an ancient creature with palsied face and puckered eye, is a definite urban type, the image of London marked upon her visage. So too is the seller of cherries whose intelligent expression suggests that she manoeuvres successfully through the streets and markets of London.

Another urban type, endlessly displayed in chapbooks and upon the stage, was the female innkeeper immortalised by Mistress Quickly but endlessly renewed ever since. “At every review in Hyde Park these trollops are certainly in a hackney, will stop the coach to drink pint glasses with ‘em at Phillips, yet wonder at the liberties some women take, and tho’ they are ready to eat every fellow they see, can’t believe any of their sex virtuous but themselves.” This is entirely characteristic, and in the writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there seems to be a consensus that the city tends to harden, or sharpen, female perceptions.