London: The Biography

London wreaks transformations-the angry become docile, the querulous resigned-but in terms of women it was generally believed that there was a downward draught. London was not a suitable place for women. Those who made a pact, or compact, with it were regarded as fallen; the earliest actresses upon the stage, for example, were considered as “brazen and tarred.” Certainly this was true of Eleanor Gwynn whose “pert vivacity,” to use Macaulay’s phrase, recommended her to Charles II. She was a genuine London type, “frank, unsentimental,” according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Her behaviour was considered “unedifying,” while her remarks were often “sharp and indecent.” “I am the Protestant whore,” she once declared and there is a famous scene of her cursing upon the stage at the spectacle of an almost empty house. She was “indiscreet” and “wild,” and “her eyes when she laughed became almost invisible.” And she, a seller of perishable goods like other women, herself perished young.

Mary Frith, otherwise known as Moll Cutpurse, again became a figure symbolic of London itself; she was born in the Barbican in 1589, and quickly acquired a reputation for violent eccentricity. Her portrait became the frontispiece of Middleton’s and Dekker’s The Roaring Girle, a true story of city life, and depicts her in male clothes complete with pipe and sword. In fact she generally dressed as a man, and was well known for her stentorian voice. In the twenty-first century this might be seen as a token of sexual identity; in fact it was a token of urban identity, her behaviour manifesting one of the most complicated but significant aspects of female life in the city. By dressing in male clothes she understood where the power of London lay; that is why she became more ostensibly masculine than any male. Yet there may be anxiety, or misery, involved in that pursuit. Mary Frith declared that “when viewing the Manners and Customs of the Age, I see myself so wholly distempered, and so estranged from them, as if I had been born and bred in the Antipodes.” This strangely reflects the words of Aphra Behn, who died in a garret in 1689 not far from where Mary Frith was born, and who declared that “All my life is nothing but extremes.” She is now considered to be a harbinger of feminist consciousness in literature, having written novels, plays, pamphlets and poems on an heroic scale, but, as the Dictionary of National Biography suggests, “She attempted to write in a style that would be mistaken for that of a man.” Hence she was accused of “uncleanness,” “coarseness” and “indecency.” But there was no alternative; it was the style of the city. They had to become “unruly women,” in the phrase of the period, in order that their identities or gifts might survive.

The fate of ruly women in London did not materially alter during the eighteenth century. They were servants of the city in an almost literal sense, since it has been estimated that approximately one-quarter of all women in work were engaged in domestic service. Others were employed in clothing and in hawking, in shopkeeping or in laundry work. They were overworked and underpaid. There was also a certain pattern to their urban exploitation; as they grew older, they descended still lower into poverty and distress. The city hardened those whom it did not kill. Yet single women, among them widows and deserted wives, still flocked into the city as the only market for their unskilled labour. It is no coincidence that this was also the period of London’s great commercial unfolding; as business and industry grew, the male presence of the city was rendered more powerful. So women were commercial objects, wearing such-and-such an amount of material at such-and-such a price, or they were rendered “feminine” and “pretty.” The more straightforward and forlorn images of the late seventeenth century give way to idealised representations of the feminine by the middle of the succeeding century. There was a vogue for advice books, beginning in 1750 and reaching its peak in the 1780s, with titles such as An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters and An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, in which the virtues of humility and obedience are continually encouraged. The purpose was to restrain or curb the natural power or instincts of women, all the more overtly displayed in the city; a distinction was often drawn between the city wife and the country wife, for example, the latter manifesting all the characteristics of docility and faithfulness which the former notably lacks.