Bath was almost as licentious. There, Walcot Street, Avon Street and the Holloway district were notorious for prostitution. Many young girls came from the country to Bath, in search of excitement and employment. Once they discovered that jobs were not always so easy to come by, they were easy prey to the ‘fat women’ who ran brothels. Only those resident in the city for five years were eligible for Poor Law relief from the parish, and so these girls were forced into prostitution to survive. They plied their trade in the places of public amusement – the theatre, outside the Assembly Rooms, and in the vicinity of local inns. Once a customer had been found, he could be taken to any number of local houses where, for the cost of about one shilling, he could buy her services.
In her novel Persuasion Jane Austen chose the White Hart Inn as the setting for Captain Wentworth’s romantic proposal by letter to Anne Elliot. The White Hart was a well-known Bath inn and the stables at the rear were a particularly popular stamping ground for local prostitutes. One especially notorious harlot who plied her trade there when Jane Austen was resident in Bath was Maria Price, who came to a bad end in 1823, when she was caught stealing. Mary Musgrove enjoys looking out the window when she stays at the White Hart, and on one occasion spies Mrs Clay and William Elliot having an assignation. As Mrs Clay is about to elope with this man, and he is trying to ‘buy’ her services so that she won’t marry Sir Walter Elliot, this seems a symbolically fitting place for them to be meeting. Contemporary Bath readers would have picked up the subtle hint! It is also intriguing to note that Mrs Clay uses Gowlands Lotion to clear away her freckles. This lotion contained mercury, the usual prescription for syphilis. Was Mrs Clay a sufferer? Freckles too were regarded at that time as a sign of a sexual disease. Jane Austen wants her readers to look doubtfully on Mrs Clay’s past history before she even runs off with William Walter Elliot and is established as his mistress in London.
The large number of prostitutes in Bath was a matter for concern amongst local authorities. In the time of Beau Nash, these women were forced to wear white aprons in public, so that respectable citizens could easily identify them. John Skinner, rector of Camberton near Bath, was author of Journal of a Somerset Rector 1772-1839 and he commented on the huge number of Bath prostitutes: ‘I was not a little astonished, as I walked through Bath, to observe the streets so crowded with prostitutes, some of them apparently not above 14 or 15 years of age’10. Such was the local concern that in 1805, when Jane Austen was a resident in Bath, the Female Penitentiary and Lock Hospital was founded. Situated in Walcot Street, the purpose of this institution was to rescue fallen women and restore them to useful employment. In 1802 the Society for the Suppression of Vice was formed. One of its objects was ‘the Protection of Female Innocence, by the Punishment of Procurers and Seducers’. It sounds like a society expressly designed to deal with men like John Willoughby.
Taken from jasa.net.au
Emma Hamilton as the Goddess of Health
