London: The Biography

During the eighteenth century the prejudice against actresses had faded; they were no longer considered “coarse” or “degraded” but, like Kitty Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, were allowed into the society of men such as Horace Walpole. There were many eminent women throughout the century-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Theresa Cornelys, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft among them-but although the pieties of Hannah More raised her above any disapprobation, and indeed she exercised an influence not unlike that of an abbess in early medieval London, the careers of other celebrated women were beset by scandal and obloquy. Walpole wrote of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, that “she is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze anyone … she wears a foul mop, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, and partly covered by white paint, which for cheapness she had brought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney.” Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ingenious and suggestive A Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in Store Street off the Tottenham Court Road, was disparaged as a blasphemer and a whore; her demands for female equality were dismissed as the tirade of an “amazon,” and her life was marked by isolation and unhappiness. As William St. Clair has written in The Godwins and the Shelleys, “At the end of the entry [in the Anti-Jacobin Review] for ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ the reader is cross-referred to ‘Prostitution,’ but the single entry under that heading is ‘see Mary Wollstonecraft.’”

It will perhaps come as little real surprise that the desire to control women occurred at times of panic and low financial confidence. It ought also to be recalled that there was a sense of impending change and disturbance in the air, and that the first intimations of revolution in France and America threatened the very existence of the state polity or “Old Corruption.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was itself an aspect of that fervour, which may explain why females were never more derided than in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. It was another method of urban control.

The women of nineteenth-century London were also marginalised and restricted. They were given roles, in other words, to which they were forced to adapt. The culture of the period is permeated by images of saint and sinner, angel and whore, pure and fallen, but this is only one aspect of a fixed network of expression. Fictional representations, for example, often concentrate upon the innocent fragility of milkmaids or flower-sellers treading the hard streets of the city; yet the obsessive interest in innocence, particularly in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was based upon the understanding that it would be destroyed. When the narrator of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock meets the prepubescent girl, Little Nell, wandering through the streets of London he is filled with anxieties “of all possible harm that might happen to the child.” No Londoner reading this, in 1841, would have the least possible doubt that the most likely harm was that of being literally forced “upon the streets.” The trade in child prostitution was thriving. The city of that period had nurtured, if not created, that trade; we might say that it prospered upon it. So all the tears at the death of Little Nell, and all the pity and sympathy at the spectacle of transient innocence, were instigated by a context and by a city which the Victorians themselves created. They wept over young women who were being betrayed by the great metropolis, so in this depiction of innocence there is also a kind of necessary cruelty or hardness. Innocence has to be destroyed if the city itself is to survive and prosper.