The sexual life of the city continued regardless, in any case, with visitors remarking on the casual intimacy of the relations between the sexes. A Venetian of the sixteenth century commented that “Many of the young women gather outside Moorgate to play with the young lads, even though they do not know them … They kiss each other a lot.” Married females seem to have taken part in the same pursuit, and in the early seventeenth century a tall flagpole was set up on the shore of the Thames, just past Deptford, “to which horns of all kinds and descriptions are fixed, in honour of all the English cuckolds or horn carriers … and the English have much fun and amusement with each other, as they pass by and doff their hats to each other and to all around.” It was well known, as the title of one early seventeenth-century London broadside put it, to be A Marry’d Woman’s Case.
The ubiquity of whores meant that they had a hundred different nicknames-punks, madams, fireships, jilts, doxies, wagtails, drabs, smuts, cracks, mawkes, trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns, molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns, squirrels, mackerels, cats, ladybirds, blowzabellas, and others. Madame Cresswell of Clerkenwell was a notorious procuress, who was painted and engraved on several occasions; in her house she kept “Beauties of all Complexions, from the cole-black clyng-fast to the golden lock’d insatiate, from the sleepy ey’d Slug to the lewd Fricatrix” and she corresponded with agents all over England to discover the young and the attractive. She was one of many famous London bawds. In the first of his series A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth pictured Mother Needham who owned a notorious brothel in Park Place. But she was pelted to death in the pillory, and Hogarth had to substitute for her Mother Bentley who was equally famous in the streets of London. These “Mothers” were indeed the mothers of a city of lust.
Some of its daughters, and its sons, were young indeed. “Every ten yards,” a German traveller wrote, “one is beset, even by children of twelve years old, who by the manner of their address save one the trouble of asking whether they know what they want. They attach themselves to you like limpets … Often they seize hold of you after a fashion of which I can give you the best notion by the fact that I say nothing about it.”
Boswell’s diary of street life in 1762 provides an account of sexual favours currently on offer. On the evening of Thursday 25 November, he picked up a girl in the Strand, and “went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [i.e. wearing a condom]. But she had none … she wondered at my size, and said if ever I took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.” On the night of 31 March, in the following year, “I strolled into the Park and took the first whore I met, whom I without many words copulated with free from danger, being safely sheathed. She was ugly and lean and her breath smelled of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done, she slunk off.” On 13 April, “I took a little girl into a court; but wanted vigour.” Boswell, often a moralist after the event, does not regard the fact that it was a “little girl” as of any significance; this suggests that there were many such thrown upon the streets of London.
When Thomas De Quincey met one of them, Ann, he spent many nights with her walking “up and down Oxford Street” but “she was timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart.” He left her for a while, naming a spot at the corner of Titchfield Street where they should wait for each other. But he never saw her again. He looked for Ann in vain among the thousand faces of young girls in the London crowd and called Oxford Street “stony hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children.” This compassionate attitude to the suffering of young female prostitutes rarely, if ever, emerges in eighteenth-century records, including that of Boswell. The month after taking the “little girl into a court,” for example, Boswell picked up a woman and “conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice.” This, in the slang of the time, was probably “a threepenny upright.” “The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us aroused me much.”
To Boswell she was only a “low wretch” and by definition unclean; therefore, after the event, she became an object of suspicion and threat. Boswell was always terrified of catching venereal disease, like most of his contemporaries. John Gay in a purview of London warned against the pursuit of
the tawdry band
That romp from lamp to lamp-for health expect
Disease, for fleeting pleasure foul remorse
And daily, nightly, agonising pains
Such were the pains suffered by Casanova who, after visiting a prostitute in the Canon Tavern, was infected with gonorrhoea.
Casanova described how on an earlier occasion he entered another brothel, the Star Tavern, where he ordered a private room. He engaged in conversation with “the grave and reverend landlord”-a good aside, touching the assumed character of many London brothel-keepers-before turning away all the women who came to his room. “Give a shilling for the porters and send her away,” said his host after the first refusal. “We don’t trouble ourselves about ceremonies in London.”
There was no ceremony when Samuel Johnson was accosted by a prostitute in the Strand-“No, no, my girl,” he murmured, “it won’t do.” Richard Steele was approached by another such girl, “newly come upon the Town,” near the Piazza in Covent Garden. She asked “if I was for a Pint of Wine” but, under the arches of the Market at twilight, he noticed in her countenance “Hunger and Cold; Her Eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and tawdry, her Mien genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart, and to avoid being seen with her I went away.”
The Strand and Covent Garden, as well as all the lanes which crossed them, were known places of sexual resort. There were public houses in the vicinity where “posture dancers” performed an eighteenth-century version of striptease; there were “houses of pleasure” which specialised in flagellation, and there were “Mollie houses” which were frequented by homosexuals. The London Journal of May 1726 discovered twenty “Sodomitical Clubs”-including, it would seem, the “Bog-Houses” of Lincoln’s Inn-“where they make their execrable Bargains, and then withdraw into some dark Corners to perpetrate their odious Wickedness.” Mother Clap’s in Holborn, and the Talbot Inn in the Strand, were favourite meeting-places for homosexual men, and there was a male brothel by the Old Bailey “where it was customary for the men to address each other as ‘Madam’ or ‘Ladyship.’” The Horseshoe in Beech Lane, and the Fountain in the Strand, were the eighteenth-century equivalent of “gay pubs” while the area around the Royal Exchange was known for its “cruising” when, as a contemporary verse put it, “Sodomites were so impudent to ply on th’Exchange.” Pope’s Head Alley and Sweetings Alley were all streets with a similar reputation; the male owner of a tavern or brothel in Camomile Street was known as “the Countess of camomile.” At Mother Clap’s itself there were beds in every room with “commonly thirty to forty Chaps every Night-and even more-especially on Sunday Nights,” while in a Beech Street brothel were found “a company of men fiddling dancing and singing bawdy songs.” There was a darker side to these festivities, however. When a certain “Club of Buggerantoes” was raided, several of those arrested committed suicide, among them a mercer, a draper and a chaplain. There were also many cases of blackmail so that there was danger, as well as excitement, in the city. Nevertheless London remained the centre of homosexuality where, under conditions of privacy and anonymity, the elect could pursue their calling. City juries were in any case notoriously reluctant to pronounce the capital sentence for the crime of sodomy; the usual verdict was “attempted” sodomy, for which a fine, short imprisonment, or spell in the pillory, was sufficient. Londoners are characteristically lenient in matters of sexual impropriety. How can they be otherwise in a city where every form of vice and extravagance is continually available?